“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!” This dictum, articulated by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program, elucidates the horizon of an ethos meant to remediate what a bourgeois universalist conception of right elides: a fundamental inequality among human beings—be it socially produced or a matter of natural endowment. From his early agitprop in the Communist Manifesto through the granular scientific analyses of Capital, an ethical vision motivates and undergirds the entirety of Marx’s work—one all too often overlooked by moral philosophers and Marxist theorists alike. Is morality merely bourgeois ideology? It’s against this misreading of Marx, on the part of both his adherents and his opponents, that Vanessa Wills’s Marx’s Ethical Vision is oriented. What, Wills asks, would constitute individual and human “rights” in a communist society organized on the principle of mass human flourishing? What role might such rights play in activist undertakings, where the aim is not only to interpret the world, but to change it? What, after all, is the place of “morality” in practical political struggle?
In this course, we will dive deep into Wills’s pathbreaking book, exploring, with her, both the explicit and implicit moral impetus coursing through Marx’s body of work, with special focus on three key texts: The Grundrisse, Capital, and Critique of the Gotha Program. We will examine, on the one hand, what light longstanding debates in moral philosophy—from Plato and Aristotle to Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Stirner—can shed on our reading of Marx, and, on the other, how the historical experience of rights—and their absence—have shaped actually existing socialist societies, past and present. How do ethical ideas inform organized mass struggle? And what would moral philosophy, undertaken from the perspective of the working classes, look like in concrete practice?
