Introduction

Lawrence Wilde

pp. 1-14

in: Lawrence Wilde (ed), Marxism's ethical thinkers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001

Abstract

For more than a century "orthodox" Marxism was in denial about ethics. Taking its lead from Marx's own hostility to moral discourse, the validity of questions such as why socialism was preferable to capitalism, or how people ought to live in socialist society, was flatly denied. Most of the thinkers whose work is considered in this collection defied orthodoxy, in various ways, and many suffered political persecution and exile as a result. Despite the flowering of interest in the ethical status of Marx's social theory in the 1980s, little attention has been paid to the efforts of those theorists working within the Marxist intellectual tradition who adopted an openly normative approach to analysing oppression in modern society and outlining principles of how we ought to live in a free society. It is surprising that many notable texts addressing the relationship between ethics and Marxism have ignored those thinkers who defied orthodoxy and tried to put the "ought" back into emancipatory theory. Eugene Kamenka, for example, who did much to generate scholarly interest in the field with his books The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (1962) and Marxism and Ethics (1969), gives no consideration at all to the thinkers featured in this book. More recently, Rodney Peffer's Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice provides a comprehensive discussion of the nature of Marx's ethics and an original contribution to the development of a moral theory consonant with the principal tenets of Marxism, but has next to nothing to say about the significant normative approaches within the Marxist tradition in the twentieth century.

Cited authors

Marx Karl

Kamenka Eugene