Moral Relativism And The Left

We are accused by our opposition of engaging in moral relativism. It is a self-serving criticism that implies that we have no moral or ethical compass, that we lack any standards for behavior and that we are therefore inherently unfit to hold or use political power. That this criticism comes from a racist right-wing which has made its peace with militarism and imperialism the world over while enjoying the power and fruits of racism and imperialism at home can almost pass without comment. The left often seems to divide between those whose critiques of capitalism and war are in the first place founded on morality and those who apply a dialectical or historical materialist method in understanding capitalism and war. Whatever our divisions, both sides recognize morality and ethics as guiding forces. If some of us situate morality in a historical context it is because we see morality unfolding historically through human effort and have in mind the creation of a society which works on a basis which is at once both moral and scientific: from each according to her/his ability to each according to her/his needs. The following begins a critique of capitalist moral relativism and debunks the myth that we are moral relativists. It comes from Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism.

Many apologists of the bourgeoisie choose another means of combating scientific socialism. Denying the laws of history, they reject the very conception of social development and progress and instead propose that we should speak of "social change."...This view, states...L. von Wiese, makes it possible "to refrain from any judgement as to better or worse, or even as to a casual connection between the past and the present, still less with the future, and to determine merely alteration or change." Thus for the sake of their class interests modern bourgeois sociologists throw overboard the important achievement of nineteenth-century science--the concept of progressive development, governed by objective laws.

According to theories that have gained wide currency in bourgeoisie ideology, progress...is possible only in science and technology but not in the sphere of social relations, politics and morals...These spheres of social life, say reactionary theoreticians, are determined by the eternal and immutable qualities of "human nature," which lead people to commit acts of violence, crime, aggression, etc. The development of science and technology, they say, merely gives these destructive instincts new and more dangerous weapons...

In their efforts to protect capitalism from criticism, the supporters of these views single out science and technology as the chief evil...

Certain works of fiction, such as those of Aldous Huxley or E. M. Forster, enable us to judge how dark and grim the ideologists of the bourgeoisie imagine the future of society will be.

In these novels there is not a trace of the bright hopes and faith in the future, of that life-asserting optimism that permeated most of the utopian works of the past. The best that the authors of contemporary bourgeois utopias can promise the world today is a society where a certain material well-being is achieved at the cost of complete rejection of democracy, culture and human dignity, a society inhabited by people who have nothing human in them, people who have become mere appendages of the machine, its slaves. Not infrequently they prophesy an even grimmer future for humanity---(a) return to barbarism...

A hopeless pessimism infects the whole ideology of the reactionary bourgeoisie of today, and also its culture, giving rise to decadent trends in art and amorality. These gloomy moods are not accidental. The era of the supremacy of capitalism is drawing to a close; capitalism now bars the path to human progress. And with the blindness characteristic of the ideologists of a dying class the modern bourgeois theoreticians and writers equate the fate of their class with the fate of humanity and represent the decline and inevitable ruin of that class as the decline and ruin of civilization as a whole.