Marxist ethics

Marxist ethics is a doctrine of morality and ethics that is based on, or derived from, Marxist philosophy. Marxism–Leninism holds that morality, like other forms of ideology, is of a class character and is manifested in people’s behavior in different ways in different historical conditions in accordance with the interests of what classes or social strata a person occupies.[1]^:47

The main methodological principles of Marxist ethics are materialism and dialectics. Marxist–Leninist ethics is materialist: the ideals, standards and virtues prevailing in society are interpreted as a reflection of actually existing interpersonal (value) relations, an expression of interests and requirements of social groups and classes. Morality is not reduced to an ethical ideology that has isolated itself from the world and lays claim to absolute value. Marxist ethics describes morality as a property of one's behavior conditioned by social and historical existence as those moral values that bring together (or force apart) living individuals.

Marxist–Leninist ethics is dialectical: it maintains that like morality as a whole, each of its manifestations, each standard, and virtue, is in perpetual motion, emerging, developing, disappearing, passing from one qualitative state to another. Torn out of the concrete historical process, morality in general simply does not exist. Each type of morality is socially and historically conditioned—this is the fundamental tenet of Marxist ethics. The objective core of morality conveys the character of definite social relations—relations of ownership of the means of production, the interaction of the various classes and social groups and the forms of distribution and exchange. It follows from this that morality has class content. If the nature of social bonds determines the essence of morality (and in a class society these bonds manifest themselves, first and foremost, in the relations between classes), then the morality reflecting them has a class stamp.

References

1. "What is What? A Concise Dictionary of Social and Political Terms." Translated from the Russian by Margaret Webley. Compiled by Sofia Kholod. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988, ISBN 5-01-000448-8.

Bibliography

• Howard Selsam. Socialism and Ethics. New York: International Publishers. 1943.
• Howard Selsam. Ethics and Progress: New Values in a Revolutionary World. New York: International Publishers. 1965.
• Ethics. Ed. by A.I. Titarenko. Translated from the Russian by Natalia Belskaya. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989, ISBN 5-01-001098-4.
• Galina Kirilenko and Lydia Korshunova. What Is Personality? Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1989.
• A Dictionary of Ethics. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1990.