[lbo-talk] religion and marxism

[Eubulides]

James Heartfield wrote:
> Carrol
> 'between Marx & xtianity,the sharpest contrast: there are no "ethical precepts" in Marx. He doesn't even condemn capitalism morally:
> it is not evil, it's history.'
> 
> Yes, broadly I would agree with that, though there is a moral goal, just not one that takes the form of an abstract imperative. The moral goal in Marxism is human development. He thinks that social organisation ought to promote the widest possible human development. The case against capitalism is, as Carrol says, that it has outlived its usefulness, it has become a barrier to human development. The difference between Marx's morality and the moral imperative is that it is relative to the possibilities of the given stage of development. It is well captured by Engels, when he says that even (ancient) slavery was an advance over what went before (killing of prisoners), though at a higher stage of development, of course, persisting in slavery is depraved.

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Of course, one could gerrymander through KM's corpus and make the 
argument that the collective habituation to varieties of vocabularies 
called "moral" were themselves overcomeable fetters on human 
development; that aesthetics would displace the desire to speak moralese 
with all the attendant coercions involved....Moral discourse misanalyzes 
and misprescribes social behavior and creates ever more constraints on 
the "free development of each..." when what is desirable is all that 
stuff Ted writes about when he's lucid.