> another thing i forgot to mention was that postone, in his lead up
> to his discussion of critical theory, elaborates on two different
> kinds of ethical criticism -- utopian and critical theory. in this
> sense, i think he's driving at what carrol is when he's criticized
> those who emphasize the importance of moral outrage at the
> unjustness of capitalism. i think. i have to think about it a lot
> more, and in a more attentive frame of mind. :)
>
> at any rate, i will write more on this later, but i think postone
> raises some provacative points about critical theory versus utopian
> criticism -- where he'd say that the moral outrage enthusiasts on
> the list are actually advancing utopian criticism, and not
> elucidating the aims of a truly critical theory. which involves this
> concept of totality somehow... :)
There's a difference between ethical judgement and "moral outrage", i.e. between the judgement that particualr social relations, e.g. master/slave relations or capital/wage-labour relations, aren't fully "good" relations (in the case of the "universal" ethical principles underpinning Marx's ethical judgments, the judgement that they aren't relations of "mutual recognition") and "moralistic" judgements of such relations involving "moral outrage".
Marx makes relations he judges "unethical" in this sense means to the eventual actualization of "ethical" relations, i.e. he makes them an essential aspect of "scientific" as opposed to "utopian" socialism, an essential aspect of a "scientific" analysis of "unethical" social relations that shows how they work to create the "grave diggers" and other "elements" that will make "socialism" practicable (such an analysis constituting the difference, according to Marx and Engels, between "scientific" and "utopian socalism").
"Socialism" in turn is a process that makes possible "the full development of the individual" and the ultimate realization of the "end" of history - "the true realm of freedom" - where the meaning of "freedom" derives from an appropriation of Hegel's idea of it as "the idea of humanity" and the human "destiny", the idea endorsed by Engels in his 1877 Anti-Duhring elabaoration of the relation between "freedom" and "necessity". (Engels having failed to see and Marx having neglected to point out to him that, at least according to Althusser's "reading", Marx had by then rejected these ideas.)
Unethical relations express motives understood as "passions" in the sense of Hegel (another of Hegel's ideas explicitly endorsed by Engels in the 1886 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy). Understood in this way they are, unintentionally on the part of those whose motives they express, constitutive of a process that, in the case of capitalist/wage-labour relations, gives "the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer".
Apart from the postive role Marx, like Hegel, assigns to these 'passions", Invidiuals motivated by them are, as both the early and mature Marx explicitly claim, "self-estranged". "Self-estranged" individuals aren't living fully "good" lives.
For all these reasons, "moral outrage" involves mistaken judgement.
Ted