> Of course my argument, essentially, was that ethical principles did not exist; hence an ethical ARGUMENT had nothing to 'stand' on. I (contra Ted; with Ollman) assume Marx felt the same. Everyone, including Marx & Engels, uses/used ethical language in agitation.
Marx's ethical principles are entirely positive; they constitute the ethical content - true friendship - of a fully free existence, i.e. of an existence that actualizes the "good" in all its aspects - ethical, aesthetic and intellectual.
Human history understood as a developmental process having this as its end is a process that develops in individuals the powers this actualization requires. It's for this reason that "the true realm of freedom" can be identified with "the development of human powers as an end in itself" and with the creation of the time free from instrumental activity required for the full development and actualization in fully free end in itself activity of these powers.
The process is dialectical in the sense of Hegel's "dialectic of negativity" treated as working through self-estrangement within the labour process. It's this underpinning that's the basis of Marx's positive evaluation of very negative processes such as the process of "primitive accumulation" in England that substituted the capitalist/wage labour relation for "petty industry ... where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in action by himself: the peasant of the land which he cultivates, the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso."
The impact of this on the "integral development" of labourers was initially very negative. Private ownership of the labourer's own means of labour was, Marx claims, "an essential condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the labourer himself." Thus, in contrast to the positive developmental consequences of transforming a serf or slave into a free wage labourer (a transformation that make this "a step up the social scale"):
"It is the opposite when an independent peasant or craftsman is transformed into a wage labourer. What a difference there is between the proud yeomanry of England, of whom Shakespeare speaks,[73] and the English agricultural day labourers!" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm
The latter transformation "was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious."
In spite of the initially negative developmental consequences for labourers, however, Marx claims these were "passions" in Hegel's sense, a sense embodying the "dialectic of negativity." Without conscious intention on the part of those motivated by them, "passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious" were "the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large." http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm
Petty industry "presupposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes cooperation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, 'to decree universal mediocrity'. At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
This is "reason" (in the sense of Hegel's dialectic the makes it is the"business of science is simply to bring the specific work of the reason, which is in the thing, to consciousness") as "the rose in the cross" of primitive accumulation.
Ultimately, however, self-estrangement within the capitalist labour process works, according to Marx, to give "the greatest impulse … to the integral development of every individual producer." This is one of the essential ways capitalist production "begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature."
"the historic tendency of [capitalist] production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer …". http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
It's implicit in these claims that to know whether "socialism" in Marx's sense can emerge from some given social context it's necessary to know if the relations constitutive of the context have produced the degree of individual "integral development" initiation of such a transformative process would require.
This is what Marx attempts to discover in his examination of conditions in the Russian peasant commune in his 1881 draft letter to Vera Zasulich. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm
Marx turns out to have been badly mistaken about the consistency of those conditions with the required degree of individual "integral development." More generally, he turns out to have been badly mistaken about the consistency of the capital/wage labour relation with such development.
In the absence of such development, "socialism" in Marx's sense cannot emerge.
Ted