> Trotsky on Their Morals and Ours:
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm
>
> Dewey's comments on Trotsky's essay, also published in the SWP journal,
> the New International in 1938:
> http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/comments/dewey01.htm
Marv, thank you for posting this, Dewey's essay is invaluable. I commend it to everyone.
His conclusion (after a very thorough analysis of Trotsky's argument):
> One more consideration may be added about class struggle as a means.
> There are presumably several, perhaps many, different ways by means of
> which the class struggle may be carried on. How can a choice be made
> among these different ways except by examining their consequences in
> relation to the goal of liberation of mankind? [Trotsky's] belief that
> a law of history determines the particular way in which the struggle
> is to be carried on certainly seems to tend toward a fanatical and
> even mystical devotion to use of certain ways of conducting the class
> struggle to the exclusion of all other ways of conducting it. I have
> no wish to go outside the theoretical question of the interdependence
> of means and ends. but it is conceivable that the course actually
> taken by the revolution in the U.S.S.R. becomes more explicable when
> it is noted that means were deduced from a supposed scientific law
> instead of being searched for and adopted on the ground of their
> relation to the moral end of the liberation of mankind.
>
> The only conclusion I am able to reach is that in avoiding one kind of
> absolutism Mr. Trotsky has plunged into another kind of absolutism.
> There appears to be a curious transfer among orthodox Marxists of
> allegiance from the ideals of socialism and scientific methods of
> attaining them (scientific in the sense of being based on the
> objective relations of means and consequences) to the class struggle
> as the law of historical change. Deduction of ends set up, of means
> and attitudes, from this law as the primary thing makes all moral
> questions, that is, all questions of the end to be finally attained,
> meaningless. To be scientific about ends does not mean to read them
> out of laws, whether the laws are natural or social. Orthodox Marxism
> shares with orthodox religionism and with traditional idealism the
> belief that human ends are interwoven into the very texture and
> structure of existence – a conception inherited presumably from its
> Hegelian origin.