No.
The latter should be seen as merely a gloss on the earlier passage from 18th Brumaire.
There is no contradiction, nor does this offer any support for seeing Marx as offering ethical judgments (i.e., judgments of human conduct from a basis prior to practice.
Wherever and whenever we find ourselves we are always already enmeshed in an ensemble of social relations; we _never_ start from scratch or from a 'foundation' ouside of and independent of those relations. There exists no platfrom from which the ethicist can make his/her pronouncements.
That we find ourselves in a position (ensemble of relations; history) resisting capitalism is a fact, not a deduction from any independent moral principle or "value." Our condemnation of murder is an historical fact, not a universal principle that we can appeal to in abstraction from history. That historical fact gives a far firmer basis for the condemnation than would any abstract moral principle.
Carrol
^^^ CB: I agree with your main argument.
I wonder if prohibition against murder (of some form) is universal to social systems or cultures, but not abstractly universal, rather concretely and independently derived by every historical system. Might be termed convergent cultural evolution, that is all the social systems converged on the same principle but starting from different places, so to speak.
By the way, another social universal ( but not an abstract one either) is incest taboo famously designated so by anthropology, with debates , of course.
This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com