I don't know Husami, and I just about get that Carrol is arguing that Marx is not a moralist, but from this I get the sense that the debate about whether Marx was a moralist went differently in the US than it did in the UK.
Here, it was the International Marxist Group's man on the New Left Review editorial board who argued that Marx was indeed a moralist in his essay 'refutation of a legend'. Geras, whose Trotskyism and New Leftism was all subordinate to his commitment to analytical philosophy picked out all the same passages in Marx where he seems to use moral denunciations of exploitation and capitalism and so on. All of this, he said, debunks the claims in Utopian and Scientific Socialism that Marxism is not a moral argument but a scientific one; and puts Marx on a par with those Ricardian Socialists who thought that the labourer *should* get back the full value of the goods he produces. Geras grabbed some attention, primarily among those Labour Party reformists who were glad that they could dispense with all of the rhetoric about revolution and go back to demanding a bigger share of capitalist output.
Loud as Geras was, his noise did not stop Sean Sayers from patiently taking apart Geras' nonsense. He had misunderstood (not surprisingly, since Geras was incapable of understanding that things change, and moral positions are quickly outmoded), Marx's moral goals were not reducible to abstract ethics. When he said that abstract moral laws like justice and equality were only the reflex of the laws of exchange, he meant it. The moral content of Marx is the goal of enlarging the development of men, reducing the realm of necessity, increasing the realm of freedom, which could only come through enlarging the means of production. All questions of distribution were secondary. The legal title to the worker's total product, exchanged against a wage did indeed *become* an outrage, at that point at which its historical justification was exhausted. Capitalists who persist in defending the outmoded claims to surplus value are, as Marx says, like those barbarians who will not drink but from the skulls of the slain.
The last act of in Geras' development rather confirmed the limitations of his moralism. He abandoned all of his Troskyist Vietnam Solidarity anti-imperialism to embrace the 'humanitarian foreign policy' of Tony Blair, becoming a cheerleader for the war against the Serbs - splitting away from the NLR editorial board in a hissy fit when they would not rubber stamp his new gun boat diplomacy. His book Compact of Mutual Indifference a grouchy old man's irritation at the uncouth young (it really does begin with a story on the Omnibus) overthrows any Kantian ethical standpoint to complain morosely that free market morals have led us to abandon each other. Boo hoo. Now he writes an equally crabby blog, Norm's blog, which briefly was the rallying point of the Euston Manifesto group, a clique of newspaper columnists who were fed up with the anti-war movement's claim to the moral high ground.