Preliminary thoughts for a prolegomena to a future analysis of Marxism and ethics

Michael Harrington

pp. 73-111

in: Arthur Caplan, Bruce Jennings (eds), Darwin, Marx and Freud, Berlin, Springer, 1984

Abstract

I am a democratic Marxist. I believe that Marxism is inherently democratic—indeed, that it is the quintessential democratic point of view for a collectivist age.¹ If its genuinely democratic character and implications are properly understood, I think that Marxism can make a contribution to the resolution of our society's current spiritual and ethical crisis. Today there is, as Jürgen Habermas has rightly observed, a de facto mass atheism in the West; and, like Habermas, we must wonder what, if any, secular system of ideas and values can serve, as religion traditionally has, to represent "the totality of a complex social system and to integrate its members in a unified, normative consciousness."² However, it would be absurd to think—as some early Marxists did—that Marxism will neatly and simply perform that function. When Marxism is degraded to such a pseudoreligion, it not only fails to perform that so-cial-normative role but almost always rationalizes totalitarian practices.

Cited authors

Marx Karl

Habermas Jürgen