1 Marx, Karl, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed., Struik, Dirk J. (New York: International Publishers 1964).Google Scholar For an account of Marx's reactions to Prussian state policies and the evaluative nature of Marx's early Journalistic efforts, see Kamenka, Eugene, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Praeger 1962),Google Scholar chapters two and three.

2 Marx, KarlGrundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nicolaus, Martin (New York: Vintage Books 1973).Google Scholar For example, consider Max's remarks on the effects of the conditions of production in bourgeois societies on the possibility of human self-development, (p. 488).

3 Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. l-III., ed. Engels, Frederick (New York: International Publishers 1967).Google Scholar For one of numerous examples, consider the following: Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks … (Vol. I, p. 233.)

4 It is, however, much less clear as to whether the methodological commitments of Marx (and his concept of man) remain consistent throughout his work. Cf. Mandelbaum, MauriceHistory, Man, & Reason (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. 1971) 70–71Google Scholar and 186·191. For an interesting discussion of Marx's concepts of man, cf. Dawson, George W., ‘Man in the Marxian Kingdom of Freedom: A Critique,' Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 59 (1973).Google Scholar The only point I want to hold here is that Marx never abandoned a moral point of view.

5 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx, Karl and Engels, FrederickCollected Works (New York: International Publishers 1975) Vol. 5, p. 29.Google Scholar In what follows, I shall avoid the issue as to whether or not Engels views on morality were precisely the same as those of Marx. Since The German Ideology was in fact a Joint venture and there seems to be no adequate evidence extant which would allow anything more than a guess as to the nature and extent of the contributions of the respective authors, it seems wise to attribute the views discussed henceforth as those of both authors. For reasons of convenience, however, I shall speak of these views as those of Marx without intending that I believe Engels did not share these views. It could be argued, though, that while Engels did share the views which shall be considered, he did not have as sophisticated an understanding of them as did Marx. Evidence for this claim might be drawn from Engels’ discussion of moral concepts and theories in Anti·Dühring (Frederick Engels Her Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (New York: International Publishers 1972), where Engels seems to embrace a form of Ethical Relativism. Nonetheless, I believe that, on careful inspection of Engels remarks here (cf. pp. 104-5), relativism is not being endorsed, but rather, Engels believed that the conditions appropriate for a genuine moral theory were yet to be historically realized. As we shall see, this is quite consistent with the analysis of the views of The German Ideology which I shall offer.

7 What follows relies heavily on Marx's views as stated in the German Ideology where the foundations of Marx's theory of social and historical development are established. However, I do not want to suggest that the theory is either completed or fully developed in the German Ideology. As recent important studies of Marx's theory have shown (cf. Cohen, G.A., Karl Marx's Theory of History (Princeton: Princeton U.P. 1978)Google Scholar; McMurtry, John, The Structure of Marx's World-View (Princeton: Princeton U.P. 1978);Google ScholarShaw, William H., Marx's Theory of History (Stanford: Stanford U.P. 1978)).Google Scholar Marx's theory of social and historical development develops from his early writings (including specifically the German Ideology) through A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the Grundrisse and Capital. I concentrate on the German Ideology because it is here that Marx indicates (as shall be seen below) how his views differ from those of his predecessors and because Marx's views on morality are more explicit here than elsewhere (especially later) in the corpus of his work.

8 The German Ideology, 30. Parenthetical remark is mine.

9 Cf., Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (London: Cambridge U.P. 1968) 10–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 66·77.

10 The German Ideology, 39.

11 Ibid., 39-41.

12 This raises the issue of the nature of Marx's materialism which is well beyond the scope of this paper. For a useful discussion of this issue, cf. Schmidt, Alfred, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: NLB Publications 1971) 19–61.Google Scholar

13 For further evidence of Marx's holism, consider G.A. Cohen's argument (Karl Marx's Theory of History, Chapter 11) that the fundamental constructs of the theory of historical development are social relationships. Other forces (for example, brute productive forces) are relevant only insofar as they enter into such relationships. The basic facts with which the theory is concerned are thus societal facts and this is what makes Marx's theory holistic. For a recent collection of papers on the disputes between holists and individualists, cf. O'Neill, John ed., Modes of Individualism and Collectivism (New York: St. Martin's Press 1973),Google Scholar parts three and four. Also relevant to Marx's holism is John O'Neill's ‘Scientism, Historicism and the Problem of Rationality, 3-26.

14 The German Ideology, 36.

15 Ibid., 44.

16 Ibid., 31.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 44. For Marx, the development of a human consciousness is a conceptual phenomenon in a quite literal, linguistic sense. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it really exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.

19 The issue of whether Marx could use moral arguments, and what that implies given his sociohistorical theory will be taken up in Section Ill below.

20 As is well known, philosophical refutations of various forms of relativism are as old as Socrates. Nonetheless, some anthropologists (notably Kluckhohn, Clyde, 'Ethical Relativity: Sic et Non,’ Journal of Philosophy, 52 (1955) 663-77,CrossRefGoogle Scholar have argued that there are in fact universal (that is, transcultural) values, and that from this it follows that there are moral absolutes. For a refutation of this view (which involves the same genetic fallacy as the view that since there are no commonly held values there can be no universal moral theories) and a defense of the claim that whether or not there are different values in different societies is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of both relativism and absolutism, see Paul Taylor, ‘Social Science and Ethical Relativism,’ Journal of Philosophy 55 (1958), 32-44. For an interesting discussion of the relevance of anthropological facts to metaethical relativism, cf. Nielsen, Kai, ‘Anthropology and Ethics,’ Journal of Value Inquiry, 5 (1971) 253–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 The German Ideology, 193-4.

22 Ibid., p. 409.

23 Marx states: ‘The advances made by the theory of utility and exploitation, its various phases, are closely connected with the various periods of development of the bourgeoisie’ (The German Ideology, p. 411 ), and goes on to explain the views of Helvetius, Holbach, Locke and Hobbes in ways which he believed consistent with the rise of the English and Dutch bourgeoisie. Also relevant here are Marx's scathing remarks concerning Bentham in Capital (op cit., Vol. I., pp. 609-611; e.g., that Bentham was the ‘insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century', a ‘ … genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity’).

24 The German Ideology, 30.

25 Ibid., 58.

26 Ibid., 195.

27 Ibid., 409.

28 Recently it has been argued that Marx in fact used arguments which are Utilitarian (cf. Allen, Derek P. H., ‘The Utilitarianism of Marx and Engels,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1973) 189-99Google Scholar) and exhibited Kantian sympathies (cf. Murphy, Jeffrie G., ‘Marxism and Retribution,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972-3) 217-43Google Scholar).

29 The German Ideology, 247.

30 Thus, when Marx claims in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers 1966) p. 10 that ‘Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined,' he is to be understood as making a descriptive, sociohistorical claim, and not an endorsement of some form of social or cultural relativism. Cf. Lenin's reading of Marx's remarks in State and Revolution (Peking: Foreign Languages Press 1970) Chapter V, sections 2, 3 and 4.

31 Cf. Marx's discussion of how an increase in the division of labor implies a loss of personal freedom to all those (including the bourgeoisie) who are affected by the class relationships resulting from the material forces of a capitalist economy (The German Ideology, 78-9).

32 Ibid., 80.

33 I do not want to suggest here either that Marx said little about what a communist society would not be like, or that he totally avoided the issue of what sort of general programs would be conducive to establishing the beginnings of socialist or communist societies. Rather the point is that with respect to a detailed program intended to guide in the continued development of a socialist (and then communist) society, Marx said next to nothing. For a discussion of Marx's suggestions, see Avineri, op. cit., Chapter 8.

34 This suggestion has been made on numerous occasions, for example, see Tucker's, Richard C.The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (Norton: New York 1969)Google Scholar Chapters I and II.

35 I say ‘with respect to that specific moral problem’ here because if it were the case that some moral theory systematically required information which was impossible to obtain, then moral Judgments would be systematically impossible. And, insofar as moral theory is by definition capable of yielding moral Judgments, such a theory could not count as a moral theory at all.

36 Cf. Thomas McClintock's ‘The Basic Varieties of Skepticism', Ethical, Metaphilosophy 2 (1971) 32.Google Scholar

37 For interesting criticisms of radical moral skepticism, see Miller's, Leonard G. 'Moral Skepticism', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 22 (1961).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 The time and facilities necessary to prepare this paper were made possible by funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am grateful for their support.