User:RD/9k/no morality in Marxism (Q65,30)
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Marxism doesn't talk about morality
/ Historical materialism has no need for morality -> this is subtly wrong for reasons that it's hard to see from within mainstream Marxism-Leninism. you really have to step outside and look at all movements descriptively. when you do that, you see that morality is a label people mistakenly assign to things that Marxists would consider historical materialism, and what's really happening is when Marxists refuse to talk about morality anarchists think you hate historical materialism. you have to engage with other ideologies' concepts of what progress is to be able to properly understand where they are on understanding 'historical contradictions'- Justice can only be had by those who win / Historical materialism has no need for morality (generic) / (9k) -> ... justice is the set of victories that we rationalize. so in that sense, yes, only the winners get justice, and it's very hard or maybe impossible to remove that requirement. unless maybe you cover the entire industrial world in Trotskyism and there are no wars, or you somehow create an anarchism that big which is not a bunch of tiny fragments. at that point justice would not be resolved by amoral conflicts between material things. but, not already being there has led the world to justify all kinds of imperial atrocities and claimed 'unjust hierarchies' simply to get to a point where justice exists. it seems like the most moral thing you could do is not believe in morality until the time justice becomes possible at which time there paradoxically might not be any morality any more. morality is like a problem claiming to be a solution.
Is early Trotskyism morally neutral?
- You can't declare the Trotskyite conspiracy a crime without morality / Because the statement "Trotsky should not have led or contributed to attacks on the Soviet government" contains an "I believe that everybody" structure ("should not have"), you must believe in morality or ethics in order to make this claim; somebody who did not believe in morality or ethics as they currently exist could not in fact say this statement with confidence because they cannot assert that Trotsky is obligated to subscribe to the same definitions of what is a good outcome (in ethics, what "creates value") that Stalin does; this is to speak of the Trotskyite conspiracy as a general 'wrong action taken by enemies of the state' or figurative crime, not as a literal crime or matter of law ->
this is one of the few statements that's uniquely violet because currently neither mainstream Marxist-Leninists nor Trotskyists like this kind of thinking.
I feel like if I could get Trotskyists to understand the concept of existential materialism it's possible that could change. some of them get super deep into Materialism and throwing out Idealism so in the end, I feel like if I could convince them that getting rid of ethics gets rid of the stigma around Trotskyism they might just take that. the hard part is then getting them to realize that actions have consequences anyway, and that actually makes them more responsible for bad outcomes.
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- / ethics