Re: [Marxism] why did Marx reject moral?

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Julius

I have given what I think is a marxist reply to a New Statesman
article below about relativism (Marx is sometimes called a
relativist), in the hope that it may throw some light on your
question. -- J. D.

************************

JD>

Unfortunately, the author leaves out economics, and poses his question
in a Habermasian way as if it were about relativism, a question of the
perennial philosophical question of the objectivity of morals.  The
real issue is the unmasking of Bush's latest lie that the Usuk forces
are in Iraq to bring democracy.

And yet, Bush may well believe that that is what Usuk is doing. For,
as he said in his Moscow press conference, he told Vladimir that
democracy means that if you make an investment, you can be sure that
the laws will not change.  In other words, democracy is freedom -- of
enterprise (backed to the hilt, including financially, by the state);
separation of the capitalist economy from social politics, of
profitmaking from community care for all.


*In that sense*, in the name of democracy Bush is imposing the
politics of laissez-faire liberalism, for the sake of its
corresponding economics of imperialism -- commodification, and
ownership or control, of all the resources of the planet in the hands
of and to the economic benefit of the dominant owners of capital.  The
pursuit of this requires the repudiation of any concept of
international law, and the unlimited use of military force.

Full and real democracy can only be international, economic and
participatory, not national, political and representative. But in the
meantime in an oppressed country true democracy and genuine
enlightenment requires resistance to economic, political and cultural
imperialism.  In this process religion may attract those who most feel
the need of the community which laissez-faire possessive individualism
smashes, as has been seen recently in New Orleans.  The technical and
social success of anti-imperialist Cuba's communal approach to
hurricanes has shown that such socialism embodies essential humanism
for today. If such anti-imperialist socialism could succeed on a
worldwide basis most cultural identity problems would disappear in
dialogue.  But that is the genetic order; it cannot successfully be
reversed by beginning with relativism about cultural identity
problems -- for example equally validating the word views of the Ku
Klux Klan and the NAACP, or -- as is happening in the Conflict
Resolution approach of the present "Peace Process" -- of the Orange
Order and the Irish liberation movement.  In that sense relativism is
a pernicious instrument of control.  In the form of Humean scepticism,
the reduction of the rational and common good to individual pleasure
and utility, and the claim that there are no experts in values, it has
played this role, for example in justifying Enlightened mill- and
mine-owners' employing eight-year-old children.


Comradely
James Daly

********************


New Statesman Essay (October 03 2005)
by Sholto Byrnes


There is no thought-crime greater today, it seems, than sympathy for
relativism. To label an argument "relativist" is to dismiss it
instantly, to imply that the argument's proposer has fallen into such
moral jeopardy that no further rebuttal is required. This is curious.
One might have thought that the relativist position - to judge a
society by its own cultural and ethical customs - was not only
sensible, as our understanding of other societies will be severely
limited if we do not take these customs into account, but also the
genuinely liberal position. Do not liberals pride themselves on their
willingness to accept that others may have different ideas about how
the world should be ordered?

But we are all worshippers at the altar of western liberal democracy
now, and the paradox at the heart of this supposedly tolerant creed is
that it is intolerant of any society which orders its affairs
according to different principles.

Our faith in western liberal democracy, and our unshakeable belief
that it is the unique possessor of a superior moral truth, have
blinded us time and again to the realities in countries with other
traditions. Furthermore, it endangers our own security. Seeing the
world through this prism, we are unable to concede the force of other
bonds, such as religion, tribe or a non-democratic form of hierarchy.
We may admit that these factors carry some weight in parts of the
world where the United States and its deputy sheriffs, Britain and
Australia, so arrogantly assume the right to interfere, but we
consider them to be no more than veils of ignorance to be swept aside.
Then, we say, the peoples of these countries will gladly embrace our
values as surely as medieval man would have accepted that the earth
was round, not flat, had he been privy to the wonders of modern
science.

Only it doesn't quite work like that. The mystery is that we persist
in our belief in the universality of western liberal democracy in the
face of consistent evidence that other parts of the world have deep
attachments to different value systems. Some may say that we ought to
look to our own house given that, under varied forms of our treasured
faith, the wrong US president was elected in 2000 and the Labour Party
gained a large majority in the House of Commons with the lowest share
of the vote in British electoral history earlier this year. But the
more salient point is that there is no tradition of anything
approaching western liberal democracy in many countries. Why should
they be so desperate to adopt it? Especially when our attempts to
persuade others of its merits are often accompanied by threats, to
withhold aid, trading rights or the like, thus leading legitimate
reasoned argument to degenerate into bullying.

Convinced of the universal appeal and application of our creed, we
ignore local historical and cultural factors. So we remove Saddam
Hussein (whom no one disputes was an evil dictator) and are then
surprised when liberal democracy does not instantly flourish in the
soil of ancient Mesopotamia. Instead, as Iraq falls apart, its
population demonstrates an appetite for using the democratic process
to vote for parties whose express purpose is to set up an Islamic, not
a liberal democratic, state. Already the cause of women's rights has
been seriously set back. (One of the positive aspects of Ba'athism,
from a western point of view, is that it is a secular and, at least in
terms of equality between the sexes, a modern political philosophy.
Yet we are not interested in finding areas of common ground; liberal
democracy does not negotiate.)

Whatever colours are flown by an eventual Iraqi government - assuming
there is an Iraq left to be governed - we are deluded if we expect
them to bear any similarity to the tricolour of liberte, egalite and
fraternite. Throughout most of the Middle East, the popular
alternative to dictatorial or semi-dictatorial regimes is not our
system of government but Wahhabist or Shia theocracy. This is
headbangingly obvious to anyone who has spent time in the region. But,
of course, the leaders of the west are not Arabists. Why should they
know anything of the Middle East's history?

Why should they be expected to remember that Iraq is a country cobbled
together from three provinces of the old Ottoman empire (the same
three areas that had so much trouble agreeing a constitution)? Or that
a Hashemite prince from the Hijaz, who was being compensated by the
British for their failure to ensure that his father became ruler of
the Arabian peninsula, was plonked on its throne after the First World
War? We wave aside such complications in our certainty of the cure-all
properties of our faith, frequently damaging our own interests in the
process.

Yet if we cannot expect our leaders to bother to take into account a
little local history, or to reflect that the Arab nationalism which
the west did so much to undermine might have been preferable to the
militant Islam we helped to unleash, we certainly can't expect the
vast majority of the western populace to have any genuine
understanding of these societies.

Western liberal commentators are at particular fault here for their
unwillingness to recognise shades of grey. If they find anything
disagreeable about a regime, it is instantly condemned. Little do they
realise - or if they do realise, they fail to acknowledge - that the
alternative may be still less palatable according to their tastes. So
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, for instance, is damned for banning
certain parties from last month's presidential election. He is less
than perfect according to our criteria. But would western critics
really prefer a candidate from one of the banned parties, the Muslim
Brotherhood, to determine Egyptian policy towards Israel instead? And
who do they think is standing in the wings waiting to take over if the
House of Saud falls? That Osama Bin Laden is one of those most eager
for the overthrow of the Saudi royal family should give liberal
critics pause for thought.

This determination to see the world as entirely black and white, as
either meeting or failing by the standards of western liberal
democracy, blinds us from seeing what we would otherwise recognise as
good in our terms. It leads us to act with enmity towards those who
should be our friends. The British media collude in this polarisation,
at times through ignorance, at times through ideology. Positive
aspects are brushed aside in order that our prosecution should not be
hindered by inconvenient mitigating factors.

Thus, one newspaper attacked Cherie Blair over her recent lecture in
Kuala Lumpur on the grounds that Malaysia was a "repressive regime".
This is an absurd oversimplification of a cosmopolitan society in
which three main ethnic groups manage to exist mostly in harmony; of
an Islamic state where non-Muslims are free from the restrictions of
sharia law; and in which the Islam that is practised is far removed
from the more conservative form familiar to us through television
reports from the Middle East.

It ignores the fact that Malaysia is a democracy in which - not that
you'd know it from western reports - the governmental coalition loses
elections; and that it is a country where criticism of the previous
prime minister, Mahathir Mohamed
(it's usually him people have in mind when they attack the Malaysian
political system), is to be found in books, in newspapers and even on
the walls of the museum dedicated to the father of Malaysian
independence, Tunku Abdul Rahman.

No, it is not perfect. The charges of sodomy and corruption for which
the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was jailed in 1999 were
openly acknowledged as politically motivated and dubious. Anwar was
released last year after the sodomy conviction was quashed, but he is
not quite the liberal reformist the west likes to portray him as.
Keadilan, the party of which he is de facto head
(he is still banned from political office until 2008), is allied with
Pas, an Islamic fundamentalist party which favours the imposition of a
very strict form of sharia law. For all its faults, anyone familiar
with Malaysia would describe it as a modern, vibrant place. Western
critics, however, judge it wanting by their standards, and so condemn
it as a "repressive regime". The disparity would be laughable, if it
did not constitute so grave a failure to understand the local
historical factors that have led Malaysia to develop as it has.

If the west doesn't try to understand the forces that swirl through
societies which have not drawn deeply from the wells of Athenian
democracy and the European Enlightenment, it will never be able to
engage with them. Instead, it will continue to barge in, stirring up
all sorts of post-imperial resentments and fuelling religious
conflicts on the way, and it will continue to be baffled by the lack
of gratitude that greets its interventions.

Why should it be any different, however, given that the west considers
itself to have a monopoly on the truth? Now that the proselytisers are
to the fore more than ever, they consider it their right and duty to
lecture others on how to behave. When the leaders of countries with
different values express irritation at being patronised by countries
that were once their colonial masters, they are often dismissed as
either corrupt or dictatorial.

We may not agree with the way affairs are ordered in other countries,
and we might take to the streets if there were any suggestion that
such systems should be implemented here. Can we not concede, though,
that the populations of other countries may find them not only
tolerable but even desirable? The western liberal-democratic consensus
says not. But why has this consensus become so rigid? Just where does
this unquestioning faith in the universal applicability of our values
come from?

One theory traces our moral certainty in this political faith to the
Christian roots of the west. In Christian theology, God is the source
of all morality. In societies which for centuries were almost wholly
Christian and whose laws were informed by religion, Christian morality
became conflated with objective universal morality - that which is
somehow built into the fabric of the universe. We have, by and large,
removed God from the equation, but our conviction remains. Christians
can fudge the question of whether their morality is objective or not;
the buck stops, ultimately, with God. The rest of us need a better
justification of our moral beliefs than the unsupported and unprovable
statement that they are objective. That is no more than an assertion.

If, then, we cannot prove the universality and objectivity of our
moral creed - for that is exactly what our belief in western liberal
democracy is - why should we expect others to accept it? To downgrade
western liberal democracy to a social contractual morality is, of
course, to deny it the quasi-religious force that we are accustomed to
ascribe to it. Yet it is much more justifiable, and it also allows us
to make sense of other countries' obstinate refusal to take the
medicine we keep trying to force upon them.

Seeing different countries' value systems and cultural customs in the
context of their own implicit social contracts enables us to relate to
them more easily. Then you can accept, for instance, that in many
countries there is sufficient attachment to tribal solidarity and
hereditary rule as to make a different form of government appropriate.
The western liberal sees no merit in such considerations because he
has long ceased to give them any weight, but others do.

To give a more down-to-earth example: recognising different social
contractual arrangements would also help if you were buying land in
the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Because many local tribes consider
the land to contain the spirits of their ancestors, they can never
deem it sold in the way that we would. Consequently, westerners who
have bought plots of land have often been asked, quite volubly, to pay
for them again a few years later. You could rail and reason and
explain the western concept of property ownership until the mosquitoes
swarm at dusk, and it would make no difference. They have a different
value system. It is, after all, their country.

If to understand and accept that is a form of relativism, then where
is the sin? We in the west continue to maintain that we know better,
and that we have the right to impose our values on the rest of the
world. While we continue to enjoy superiority in wealth and weaponry
we can get away with it. But what if one day the objects of our
lecturing turn round and demand, "Says who?" If, in their fury, their
response goes beyond words, we should not be surprised.

Sholto Byrnes is a staff writer on the Independent

Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2005

----- Original Message -----

From: "Julius Wilm" <jwilm@xxxxxx> To: "Activists and scholars in
Marxist tradition" <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday,
September 28, 2005 9:25 AM Subject: [Marxism] why did Marx reject
moral?

This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm



________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism