> I was always skeptical of Marx's refusal to argue morally,
> preferring "science" instead, but watching Leigh in action, I'm
> seeing the Old Man's point a lot better.
"Science" in Marx's sense includes the ethical, but in a way different from that found in "moralistic" judgments.
To begin with, Marx is part of a long tradition identifying ethical behaviour with rational behaviour. This identification is inconsistent with holding individuals responsible for unethical behaviour, i.e. it's inconsistent with moralistic judgments.
Second, Marx's "dialectical" conception of human development, appropriated from Hegel, gives unethical behaviour (i.e. behaviour motivated by irrational "passions") a necessary and positive role in that development, a development that includes ethical development as an essential aspect. Though the positive consequences aren't consciously intended by those so motivated, such motives provide "the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large.” (Hegel, Philosophy of History, §26 http:// mia.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm)
I recently quoted a passage from the Philosophy of Right in which Hegel makes this an essential feature of his idea of "dialectics": "the higher dialectic of the conception does not merely apprehend any phase as a limit and opposite, but produces out of this negative a positive content and result."
For this reason, "lamentation" about the "historical mission", the "historical function", the "historical necessity" of the capitalist "passions" is of no avail.
"Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! 'Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.' Therefore, save, save, i.e, reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into capital! Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. But what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital. Political Economy takes the historical function of the capitalist in bitter earnest." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm
Marx makes the capitalist "passions" in general and the particular primitive version of these that dominate "primitive accumulation" at "the historical dawn of capitalist production" - "passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious" - a "negative" productive of such a "positive content and result". Thus the passions that dominate primitive accumulation annihilate the "petty mode of production", a mode that, because it
"excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labor within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, 'to decree universal mediocrity'." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm#n1
Marx also associates the "petty mode of production" with "loafing (indulgence and idleness)", with "malicious glee and indolence". It can, he claims, "never create general industriousness". http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm
The unintended positive consequences of annihilating this mode and of capitalism in general are spelled out in many places. For instance, the "centralization" of capital brought about by "passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious" has the following unintended positive consequences.
"Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co- operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm#n1
The capitalist passions also work to substitute "general industriousness" for "the most slothful indolence" produced by feudal relations. This is a necessary prerequisite for "the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one."
"The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm
The Manifesto provides a detailed account of these unintended positive consequences, of how "the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ ch01.htm
Ted