> Actually, three. It's also that classical Marxist
> insistence on being "scientific," which is one of
> Marxism's less fortunate aspects. I'm as hostile
> to the moralizing, Amy Goodman style of left
> politics as the next guy, but to deny any appeal
> to morality comes off as ludicrous.
There is no necessary antinomy between science and morality.
If you are undertaking a practical task -- e.g., building a deliberate type of human society -- what is wrong with trying to approach the task in a disciplined, systematic fashion that, to the extent possible, relies on logic and facts, rather than on faith and fantasy?
But, who says science is the only human, valid, helpful, delightful manner of appropriating the world mentally? There's art, which appeals to emotion rather than logic, that seeks to singularize rather than generalize, etc. In general, the active, practical, subjective appropriation of the world is what we call production and reproduction: of things, ourselves, and our social relations.
In spite of Luckacs -- and others, who continue to believe that the essential nature of Marxism lies in its codified "method" or can be encapsulated in some specific theoretical statement: the theory of this or the theory of that (not that those theories are useless!) -- Marx always insisted (and Engels most of the time) that they were not creating nor did they intend to inherit to their followers some system or doctrine of socialism. Their intellectual work was, simply said, a critical appropriation of existing tools and that the product only made sense when/if playing an instrumental role at the service of socialism as a movement of actual people working, living, and struggling in concrete circumstances.
They stated clearly that their starting point wasn't a philosophical stance. They said it with all the words that their starting point were the concrete, historical, "actually existing" struggles of working people against the existing conditions, against all the shit.
Marx made this very clear in his famous letter to Arnold Ruge. It is in the German Ideology. It is in the 1848 Manuscripts and in Grundrisse and in Capital. And if Marxism is to remain vital in this 21st century, that recurrent starting point is the main, if not the only reason why it would be so.
The idea that morality is alien or contrary to Marxism is preposterous. Marx's and Engels' evisceration of the Young Hegelians (German Ideology) or Marx's demolition of the Proudhonian doctrines or Engels' mockery of Duhring's "system," works where one finds M&E's most blistering attacks on moralism (not on morality) do not amount to or imply a rejection of morality or ethics in general. On the contrary, it is -- if I'm allowed to use the term -- a dialectical negation/sublation of their idealist, superficial, philistine moralism.
IIRC, Engels' work on the conditions of workers in England, which had a tremendous influence on Marx's own intellectual and political evolution, did not reject morality in general when judging the conditions in which English workers worked and lived. The work itself was driven by righteous moral outrage against the conditions that oppressed those workers, conditions with which Engels was well acquainted as a result of his own background. Entire portions of his book refuted and mocked the finger wagging of bourgeois philistines, philanthropists, and demagogues who -- adding insult to injury -- tried to sermonize the workers about their habits and attitudes.
Engels' reply was that poverty, dispossession, exploitation, the broader social conditions that oppressed them, were the true demoralizing factors. So it was through the workers' collective fight against those conditions that they retained and enhanced their humanity. Their collective struggles -- as they were, blemishes and all -- contained the embryo of a new society, including the embryo of a new social morality.