----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages at gmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2007 2:15 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Master Morality
Marx said in The German Ideology: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance." In short, it is the right of masters to create values, and in fact they do.
But Engels in the very good chapter on morality in Socialism Scientific and Utopian said that there was also the morality of the oppressed, of the working-class. It is not the ruling morality, which indeed it claims is immoral; it denies the ruling class the right to rule. It pitches not just might against might -- mastery against mastery. It confronts might with right.
We are up against the ambiguity of is and ought. The bourgeoisie mostly gets to enforce its morality, but there is resistance, claiming other values. Such relativity in practice does not justify relativism in the theoretical sense.
The ruling class rules in fact, and claims the right to, in the terms of the structures which it has set up. But it ought not to have these structures, to be ruling at all, because its rule is domination and oppression, which are wrong. In natural justice everyone is (and ought to be) free and equal. We ought to treat others as we would be treated by them.
Proletarian morality recognizes this, and aspires to create social structures which recognize it. That is why Marx stressed that the proletariat's aim was not the wielding but the abolition of power.
James Daly