“Marx and Engels, refusing to associate ethical concepts with any standard of value of their own, regard them as a phenomenon to be explained rather than as a code of obligations to which men should be induced to pay obedience. “Communists neither take the side of egoism against self-sacrifice, nor that of self-sacrifice against egoism; they do not conceive of the antagonism of these two either in that sentimental nor in the other exuberant, ideological form [these expressions refer to the preceding polemic against Max Stirner] but rather point out its birth place in material conditions together with which it will eventually disappear. The Communists do not preach morality… They do not address to human beings the moral demand: love each other, do not be egoists, etc. The Communists, on the contrary, know very well that egoism and self-sacrifice are each a different way for individuals to realize themselves either one necessary under certain conditions” (97). When Marx and Engels wrote these sentences, they stood at the beginning of their careers. Although they were already full of partisan sentiment and determined to play a role in the revolutionary struggle, they had not yet had any prolonged experience to teach them that it is not enough for the revolutionary or reformer to understand the origin of ethical concepts: that he has to develop his own ethical standard, to accept it as an “eternal truth” and to judge his actions and those of other in accordance with this standard. Yet although later writings by Marx and Engels reflect that experience (98), the latter still protested thirty years later – in his Anti-Dühring – against the “attempt to impose upon us any moral dogmatism as an eternal and definitive moral law, immutable in the future”; he regards it as a mere pretext for such an attempt to assert “that the moral world has any unchangeable principles which are above history and the differences between nations”. “On the contrary, we maintain that hitherto all ethical theory has in the last instance been a product of particular socioeconomic conditions. And just as society has up to now been moved through class antagonism, so morality has always been class morality; either it justified the rule and the interests of the dominating class, or, as soon as the oppressed class had become powerful enough, morality justified the revolt against the system of domination and the future interests of the oppressed. It is indubitably true that thereby, on the whole, progress as made in morality itself as in all other fields of human knowledge, but we are not yet beyond class morality. A morality above class antagonism and above the tradition=n of such antagonism, a truly human morality will become possible only when development has reached a stage at which class antagonism hat not merely been eliminated but forgotten” ” [Carl Landauer, European Socialism. A History of Ideas and Movements. Volume I. From the Industrial Revolution to Hitler’s Seizure of Power, Berkeley, 1959] [(97) Engels “Anti-Dühring”, Landmark, ed., p: 127; (98) Translated from “Die deutsche Ideologie”, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, series I; V, 227. The America edition, ‘The German Ideology’ (1939), does not contain this part of “Die deutsche Ideologie”]
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- Articolo pubblicato:18 Febbraio 2016