Marxism and Ethics — A Reconsideration

Abstract

Eleven years ago, when one’s serious friends and mentors were almost all ex-Marxists, convinced that they had witnessed the end of ideology and of socialism as a significant radical, revolutionary movement, I wrote the following:

“To those political fighters whom I have found it in my heart to admire, socialism meant the revolt against a society based on commerce and calculation; it meant the fusion, in a united effort and a single morality, of worker and intellectual, of the productive hand and the productive brain; it meant, above all, the birth of a new humanity, purified and ennobled in struggle and deprivation. If socialism means that — and I believe it does — then socialism is dead. Let us bury it before its last rites can no longer be performed with honour.