ONE of the more illuminating concepts in Marx’s complex body of work that any self-respecting intellectual should grapple with is the idea of how the concept of dialectics informs the Marxist ethical program.
There has been consistent criticism leveled against revolutionaries about how, in the course of engendering comprehensive social change, they have thrown all moral scruples in service of the ultimate political goal, that is the overthrow of the bourgeois state, and the establishment of a classless society.
This moral criticism is masked in many forms, including references to how the revolution will devour its own children, or how an insistence in class analysis make Marxism dogmatic and inflexible. It also includes the criticism that in the bid to fend off the monster that is capitalism, revolutionaries have become monsters themselves.
For some, this inherent flaw that creates this seeming moral impasse in Marxism as a political practice, is the ultimate deal-breaker that cause many to shirk from the revolutionary challenge. A significant number also turn their backs on the promise of the revolutionary future because they cannot swallow the ethical demands of this radical political practice at the moment as it faces persecution from the ruling class and their apparatuses.
A variation of this logic from those who see themselves as the new vanguards of an undefined movement for freedom (whatever this means for them) is the view that the bourgeois state’s failures are also reflected in the revolutionary movements that seek to overthrow these. If the State runs roughshod on individuals and their rights, the revolutionary movement also has the penchant to do the same, according to this cynical point of view.
Implied by this standpoint is the fashionable assertion about the dangers of the practices of power regardless of whether it is wielded by the left or right. Romanticized here is the lonely struggle of the individual before the totalitarian impulses of institutions whether these are operating based on the logic of bureaucrat capitalism or the subversive programs of underground party formations without interrogating the origins and limitations of such individualism.
This is the magic trick actually of this cynical and paranoid appreciation of the operations of power, one that elides the dialectical stance that Marx’s put forward. The conflation of everyone and everything, add to this a dollop of postmodern paranoia for good measure, in order to achieve a specific goal – to mess up people’s ability to observe a sense of proportion.
In this warped moral universe, the revolutionary movement that acts to end its regime of class rule is as morally liable as the State that acts in the behest of the ruling class. The actions of the corrupt ruling order are equated with the political practices of revolutionary taxation in areas where they can exact such. We must be reminded that when revolutionary forces act on meting revolutionary justice, it is not done to preserve a moribund order but actually undertaken necessarily to give birth to a new. A return to Marx’s dialectical method would allow us to take into account this important principle actually.
Marx’s always had a keen sense of the existing balance of forces. When he spoke about the thesis and anti-thesis dynamic that produce new syntheses, he was not referring to co-equal forces that cancel each other out, but of diametrically-opposed, unequal forces that struggle against each other until they produce new dynamics. Thus, history and society are always in the process of transformation based upon fluctuations in the balance of forces.
Rigid moral guideposts that subject revolutionary practice to such an ahistorical appreciation are therefore inherently flawed. It is not to say that revolutionary practices are exempted from standards of morality. But such morality must be doubted if it does not interrogate, first and foremost, the immorality of an existing social order that benefits only the ruling class. In the balance of forces, the guilt and burden must be ascribed primarily to one side.
There is an oft-repeated quote attributed to Marx that responds to all these concerns in a single sentence that showcases the brilliance and simplicity of this class-based morality. When critics of the revolution turn blue and livid with all their ahistorical moralizing trying to preserve a social order that can only see ethical practice in terms of the here and now instead of the future that has yet be born but to quote Arundhati Roy, well on its way, we can always refer to the wise words of the old man - do not judge the society of the future by the standards of today.