I found myself in a discussion about historical materialism where I ended up saying something along the lines of “scientific progress helps us to build more ethical societies because it enables us to see through the injustices of race, religion, and capitalism.” I was kind of firing from the hip, but I couldn’t think of anything better to say. My conversation partner asked me if I thought you could do a scientific experiment or analysis on a moral problem, and I was frankly stumped.
I know we aren’t supposed to think in moral categories, but I sense every one of us thinks, and correct me if I’m wrong, that capitalism is wrong and communism is right morally speaking. With that in mind, as contradictions are resolved per historical materialism and as different peoples have socialist revolutions within their societies, do these societies become more moral in any sense?
Its not about morality, but the conflict between classes and them being exploited by the more powerful one. If the proletariat wins and creates a communist world then to the bourgeoisie, we are the morally evil ones, as their lives will be ruined.
Everything done in communism is for ending our exploitation by the bourgeoisie which happens to include goals that end up benefitting us, the majority people.
I stray away from moral arguments. They’re generally weak arguments and tend to engage more emotion, which makes it harder for people to think clearly. There is nothing moral about saying that you are a wage slave. You can say morality means you shouldn’t be a slave, but many people don’t even care as long as their lives don’t change much. It can even be a slippery slope.
If you say “your life would benefit because you’d never have to worry about the right to a job or a home or healthcare, no matter how much or little money you make,” that’s more important to people. “Yes, your sick mom will have access to medicine for free, and your boss is your employee and your labor matters.” I think that’s the kind of stuff that perks up the ears.
Try not to get caught up in morality for your own sake. It’s simple, why would you use a stone axe to cut down a giant tree if you have access to a chainsaw or computer from the 90s? For no practical reason. tradition? It’s the same with economics. We have access to better ideological and economic technologies than capitalism. Let’s use them to our well-being.
One final thing is to not think in linear terms of progress. All societies have had moral “advances” and “regressions.” There is no more federal requirement for abortion as of a month ago, for example. I wouldn’t say América is any more moral today than it was in 2003, or 1823. It was a horrible experiment on genocide and slavery that entire time. Thus, societies shift from, monarchy, to capitalism to fascism, to liberal democracy, to dictatorship, back to feudalism, maybe to socialism, maybe back to liberal democracy. Things play out in cycles and defy our ideas of progress and the linearity of such. So, what is progress today was normal yesterday. That’s also why keeping the revolutionary spirit alive is so important. So we can better safeguard the future from reactionary forces and preserve the successes of the proletariat.
Try to let go of ideas ab should or shouldn’t, think about how and who would benefit from the success of communism.
Moral reasoning has nothing to do with Marxist theory. But many Marxists use moral arguments in their propaganda in the hope that liberals will be taught dialectics once they sympathise with our cause. But these days, these classes are rarely done. Mostly because you can’t monitor their learning progress online.
Today, there are many liberals online masquerading as MLs who use moral arguments to reach the same conclusions as MLs. Therefore, as soon as the subject of analysis becomes a little more complicated (such as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict), they start blabbing nonsense.
edit: paraphrased for clarity
Societies do not become more or less moral because morals are subjective. As with most other things, morals are heavily influenced by the ideology of the ruling class.
In my personal life, morals performs the role of a compass because in most day to day situations it is difficult to take into consideration every fine detail to make a decision. Being guided by morals is simpler and in most cases not a bad choice.
scientific progress helps us to build more ethical societies
This is not entirely correct. Scientific progress can be a vehicle of catastrophic destruction too. Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the napalming of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the carpet bombing of Libya are exponentially more destructive in comparison to any atrocity that has occurred in the preceding millennia. On the other hand, there have always been people, even if they are a minority which is also the case today, to speak up about injustices and sometimes take radical action as well.
The reason I am a communist is pretty simple. I am someone from the working class and it is in my benefit if the working class is emancipated. I could profit from being a reactionary too. But seeing how we are headed into tumultuous times with the risks of climate catastrophe and nuclear warfare, it does not seem like a wise thing to do since we could be seeing the end of the world in our lifetimes.
This does not mean I do not have morals or don’t rely on them. My morals tell me to not be discriminatory for example. This does not mean it is wrong to not be discriminatory based on a moral standpoint. But upon deeper analysis, we usually see that discriminating against fellow workers and allies is something that benefits the ruling class. So there is a materialist basis to it.
Simply put I think it’s the smart thing to be a communist all things considered. It’s not that science cannot be subject to biases but because morals are inherently subjective they are good guiding cornerstones. Morals can be pretty whacky especially if you look at things like manifest destiny and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Yeah morality is a tricky subject.
One the one hand, I’ve never seen any convincing argument that morality is in any way objective when seen from a purely areligious material viewpoint. You can always argue things like murder and rape are morally wrong, but someone can easily just say “no it’s not” and you have no real argument besides invoking some religious or idealist postulates.
On the other hand, any one of us seeing some atrocity such as a child being abused or a mass attack on civilians will certainly trigger something inside of you that registers the event as morally wrong. The vast majority of people from all societies and times in history see these same groups of acts as morally abhorrent to a certain extent. This could just be some built in feature of humans’ biology and basal social instincts that consider these acts right or wrong, but that implies morality is just some lower level animal instinct to survive and that these acts, when looked at through a logical scientific lens, have no significance other than how it affects society and future events. Right and wrong are no longer real things but just what someone likes and doesn’t like. The idea of a child being murdered but no one knowing about it or caring meaning that the event has no real significance doesn’t sit well with me though, logically or emotionally, and I doubt it does to others either.
This is really kind of a non answer, but I think it gives a really good glimpse into why so many people who understand Marxism or are part of the proletariat or who otherwise should “know better” than to indulge in capitalist societal constructs still have strong moral and even religious convictions that have no basis in dialectical materialism. Many people aren’t religious because they fell for some state sponsored scheme of social control, but because there is much more to being human and living than just applying scientific social theory to your life. Religious and moral structures provide things that I personally believe humans, not being unfeeling robots but highly developed versions of irrational animals, can’t fill in other ways. At least not for a long, long time; possibly until fully formed world communism has been establish, and even then I’m not super sure.
To end this barely coherent rant, MLs would do well to understand that people will stubbornly cling to moral and religious structures because people can only be so rational without losing a distinctly obvious but indescribable part of being human. We all feel morality, and can’t properly ascribe it a material basis, but nevertheless should engage with it with others as it has proven a powerful tool in the struggle to ultimately establish a post capitalist society.
I’m not opposed to morality and not as hardline against it as many other communists are.
I think using moral arguments in discussion is a very slippery slope that can backfire in many ways, and its extremely hard to teach selfish people morality.
I’m not interested in having a discussion about morality being subjective or being the same as the worldview of the capitalist ruling class or a human construct, because all of those are true.
Obviously communism is a more efficient system that leads to better outcomes and an astronomically higher quality of life than capitalism, but to reject morality as a whole I find to be ridiculous.
I think its immoral that in capitalism, a relative handful of know-it all selfish crackers and pricks control most of the economic activity and resources on the planet, and that what’s good for the working class and vast majority of the human population is good for everyone as a whole.
Morality is subjective.
Is it moral that some people work multiple jobs and barely survive?
Is it moral to have the bodys of refugees wash up at the shore because the country said they don’t want to take in that many?
Obviously these questions evoke our natural response of “No!”. But you would be shocked how, when asked these questions in the context of a debate between lib and ml, most libs might say that these are moral failings that are necessary and are outweighed by the good of the “fReE MaRkEt”.
Discussions on morality can be convoluted. People will disagree on even the definition of morality, whether it’s objective or subjective, etc. And people can and will always end up “accusing” your morality of being defined by your ideology and therefore biased. From a Marxist perspective the morality of a society is defined by the ruling class. For example, in a slave-owning society, owning slaves would not be considered immoral. Similarly, in a capitalist society, owning capital is not considered immoral by most people.
Instead of talking about “morality”, you should talk about what you ACTUALLY mean, which is what benefits people the most. Data on people’s happiness and well-being are far more objective and easily supported than discussing the finer details of moral philosophy and personal morality.
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For some, the following might be a hot topic, and I hope I don’t offend anyone
That being said:
Morality and science can contradict eachother. Science is not necessarily moralistic in any way. Rather, it’s a tool to draw conclusions about expirements. These conclusions can be tied to society’s morals.
Here comes the possible spicy part:
What if we decided we wanted to examine the brains of gay people and compare them to heterosexual people (this has been done in real life)? And what if it gets past the ethics commision? And what if we somehow found that gay people have structurally different brains compared to straight people?
This result in itself would be neither bad or good. It’s just a result. What we do with the result is what where morals enter the scene. Would we treat gay people different because they have a scientifically proven deviation in their brain? Would we try to ‘cure’ them? Or would we think that it doesn’t matter, being gay isn’t a bad thing, and just have gay people and straight people live in harmony? It all depends on societal norms. Science doesn’t have change the morals of society but it can influence our views on moralistic problems. But not always for the good.
Scientific progress in itself does not build a more ethical society per se if the results of said sciences are used for the wrong goals. In a weird way I don’t think science alone should guide the ethics of a society, but rather a critical analysis of society as a whole. Marxism does this of course. But it needs to be done continually, even in communist societies.
I hope I found a way to make myself clear. The example is I gave is not meant to offend, but I had to take something that seems so out there that I could get my point clear. If it’s in bad taste, let me know and I will delete it.
In hindsight I probably wouldn’t have commented this but I’m going to leave it anyway. I had a very clear POV in my head that I wanted to portray in my comment, but I feel like it didn’t go too well.
To try to stay within the words that you were using already, scientific progress of a community eliminates these injustices because it irons out contradictions, not because you can conduct experiments about morality. For example, here in the US, Black people, women, and fat people receive inferior healthcare. A scientific approach to improving healthcare outcomes would specifically target the healthcare they’re receiving to bring their outcomes in line with everyone else’s, not because it’s moral, but because it’s the easiest way to bring up the average healthcare outcome. When you approach problems within society in a scientific way, sooner or later, you must work on eliminating these injustices because they aren’t based on objective fact. If we were looking at healthcare outcomes between people with gunshot wounds vs people with a cold, we would expect a difference. It’s objective fact that for the vast majority of people, gunshot wounds cause far more trauma to the body than the cold does. We can measure it. We can show all the data for it. This is not the same for black people vs white people. In fact, we already know that it’s the treatment that makes the difference there. It just never gets addressed because there is no scientific approach to healthcare here.