Carrol Cox wrote:
> You can't escape history, which precludes appealing to a morality
> outside history.
This may be so on your understanding of "history". I don't think it's so on Marx's.
His understanding sublates a tradition running from the Greeks through to Hegel that treats values, including ethical values, as objective and knowable.
Thus Aristotle defines "man" in terms that make this assumption.
“What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance are in desire; so that since moral virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, and choice is deliberate desire, therefore both the reasoning must be true and the desire right, if the choice is to be good, and the latter must pursue just what the former asserts, Now this kind of intellect and of truth is practical; of the intellect which is contemplative, not practical nor productive, the good and the bad state are truth and falsity respectively (for this is the work of everything intellectual); while of the part which is practical and intellectual the good state is truth in agreement with right desire.
“The origin of action—its efficient, not its final cause—is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. This is why choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or without a moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist without a combination of intellect and character. Intellect itself, however, moves nothing, but only the intellect which aims at an end and is practical; for this rules the productive intellect, as well, since every one who makes makes for an end, and that which is made is not an end in the unqualified sense (but only an end in a particular relation, and the end of a particular operation)—only that which is done is that; for good action is an end, and desire aims at this, Hence choice is either desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire, and such an origin of action is a man.” Nicomachean Ethics Book VI <http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/mirror/classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.6.vi.html
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Hegel's idea of "freedom" sublates this.
"To the Ideal of Freedom, Law and Morality are indispensably requisite; and they are in and for themselves, universal existences, objects and aims; which are discovered only by the activity of thought, separating itself from the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition thereto; and which must on the other hand, be introduced into and incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to its natural inclination.” <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/introduction-lectures.htm
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“In caprice it is involved that the content is not formed by the nature of my will, but by contingency. I am dependent upon this content. This is the contradiction contained in caprice. Ordinary man believes that he is free, when he is allowed to act capriciously, but precisely in caprice is it inherent that he is not free. When I will the rational, I do not act as a particular individual but according to the conception of ethical life in general. In an ethical act I establish not myself but the thing. A man, who acts perversely, exhibits particularity. The rational is the highway on which every one travels, and no one is specially marked. When a great artist finishes a work we say: ‘It must be so.’ The particularity of the artist has wholly disappeared and the work shows no mannerism. Phidias has no mannerism; the statue itself lives and moves. But the poorer is the artist, the more easily we discern himself, his particularity all caprice. If we adhere to the consideration that in caprice a man can will what he pleases, we have certainly freedom of a kind; but again, if we hold to the view that the content is given, then man must be determined by it, and in this light is no longer free.” <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm>
Engels explicitly endorses this idea of the relation of "freedom" to "necessity".
"Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man's judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development. The first men who separated themselves from the animal kingdom were in all essentials as unfree as the animals themselves, but each step forward in the field of culture was a step towards freedom." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htm>
So the "freedom" that defines Marx's "true realm of freedom" is essentially ethical; it actualizes objectively ideal relations of mutual recognition.
For the reasons set out in the above passages, this actualization requires the full development of mind.
"History", as Marx understands it, is a set of internally related (hence "necessary") "stages in the development of the human mind."
Capitalism contributes to this development in two ways.
First, by developing, "as in a hothouse", "productive forces" understood as expressions of this development, e.g. in the case of produced physical means of production, understood as "the power of knowledge, objectified."
Second, by developing a "subject" with the degree of developed powers and will required to "appropriate" these forces and use them to build the penultimate social form from which all barriers to full human development have been eliminated.
The end is the "the positive supersession of private property – i.e., the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life, of objective man and of human works by and for man" where "appropriation" is elaborated as follows:
“Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes an alien and inhuman object for himself, that his expression of life [Lebensausserung] is his alienation of life [Lebensentausserung], and that his realization is a loss of reality, an alien reality, so the positive supersession of private property – i.e., the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life, of objective man and of human works by and for man – should not be understood only in the sense of direct, one-sided consumption, of possession, of having. Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man. All his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form, are in their objective approach or in their approach to the object the appropriation of that object. This appropriation of human reality, their approach to the object, is the confirmation of human reality. [Marx's note: It is therefore just as varied as the determinations of the human essence and activities.]” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/3rd.htm
This idea of "appropriation" as the appropriation of the human "integral essence in an integral way" underpins the idea of capitalism as "giving the greatest impulse ... to the integral development of every producer", such a development being a necessary precondition for the transformation of capitalism into the penultimate social form, i.e. into “the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man”.
“the historic tendency of [capitalist] production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer.” Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky 1877 <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
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Marx allowed for the possibility that the degree of "integral development" required to "appropriate" the "productive forces of social labour" developed within capitalism might develop in contexts outside capitalism, e.g, in 1881 he imagined Russian peasant commune conditions might have been conducive to such individual development.
Like the development of "the productive forces of social labour", such development was, however, a necessary precondition for a successful revolution.
Ted