Does Socialism Need Morality?

Robin Zheng

Marx’s Ethical Vision
By Vanessa Wills
Oxford University Press, 2024, 320 pages, $45 hardcover.

CAN MARX TEACH us how we ought to treat one another, and how we ought to live? Can he help us distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad?

Surely, one would think, the answer is yes. After all, Marx denounces the “accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, [and] mental degradation” entailed by the accumulation of capital. And he exalts the “nobility of man shin[ing] upon us” through “the most splendid results [of] French socialist workers” in their development of human solidarity.

He advocates the “genuine and free development of individuals,” attainable only in a communist society. These certainly look like moral judgments: he is describing good societies in which humans treat each other as they ought, and bad societies where they do not.

Yet in the Communist Manifesto, Marx appears to almost flippantly embrace the accusation that communists seek to abolish morality. He and Engels, in the Critique of German Ideology, write explicitly: “The Communists do not preach morality.”

Insofar as they insist that theirs is a “scientific socialism,” moreover, it seems that Marx and Engels want to distance themselves from prescribing how the world ought to be, in favor of describing how it actually is and will be. And while there is fairly general consensus that there are ethical dimensions to the themes of alienation, species-being, human nature, and self-realization that permeate Marx’s early writings, many interpreters believe that Marx eventually abandoned these moral reflections.

Is it really possible, then, to derive a coherent ethical theory from Marx’s corpus? This is the task that Vanessa Wills undertakes in Marx’s Ethical Vision — with considerable success.

Theoretical and Practical Aims

Wills identifies three major aims of her book, which we might take to correspond to three distinct (though to a sizeable extent overlapping) audiences.

For scholars of Marx, she critically reconstructs tenets that remain consistent throughout his oeuvre. For ethicists, she introduces a distinctive theoretical approach that appears to strongly depart from mainstream moral philosophy. And for socialists, she explicates a Marxist ethics that is intended to aid in theorizing and deciding how to act — in short, socialist praxis. Here I will prioritize the last of these, but all three are highly interrelated.

The beating heart of Marxist ethics, as construed by Wills, is a historical materialist understanding of human nature. Starting from these foundational theoretical commitments, Wills manages to weave together diverse strands of Marx’s thinking on the essential features of human existence: our needs, inherent sociality, labor, relationship to the environment, and change over time.

In doing so, she presents an original and elegant exposition of the idea that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” I find this in itself a great contribution, likely of interest to her different audiences. And Wills’ interpretation of Marx’s beliefs about human nature allows her directly to construct an ethical theory in which advancing the development of human nature is morally good, and hindering it is wrong.

For Wills, a thorough examination of Marx’s overall ethical views leads us through a number of other exegetical tasks. For once we grasp this historical materialist rendering of human nature (Ch. 3), we can easily recognize a theory in which the moral judgment of a thing is determined by whether it promotes or inhibits what Marx calls our “many-sided,” “rich individuality.” (Ch. 6)

At present, capitalism is the chief hindrance to our flourishing because, famously, it engenders what he calls “alienation.” (Ch. 4) Alienation, furthermore, is supported by bourgeois ideology. (Ch. 2)

Understanding Marx’s rejection of bourgeois ideology is crucial, because it allows us to make sense of what he means by the “abolition of morality.” (Ch. 9) And parts of his critique involve substantive engagement with enduring philosophical problems: the question of free will (Ch. 5), definitions of “freedom,” “justice,” and “equal rights” (Ch.7), and competing moral theories. (Ch. 8)

Human Nature and Rich Individuality

What are Marx’s views on human nature? The answer here is complex, because the historical materialist cannot simply generate an abstract list of fixed, universal traits (e.g. rationality, self-interestedness, “sprouts” of virtue), as other philosophers have.

Rather, the essential nature of human beings is to aim at preserving human life and satisfying human needs — the most basic of which are material — but this looks very different depending on where they are in a given environment and at a given historical moment.

This means, argues Wills, that human nature for Marx is just a dynamic process: an unfolding that is continually in motion, always changing over time, and whose elements are in constant interplay. This evolving process — human nature — comprises the entire totality of all actual human activity. That is, activity is by everyone, everywhere, across all times.

Here it gets Hegelian: we can make sense of this ever-changing totality, i.e. the complete set of concrete appearances of human nature, by observing it in motion over time. By abstracting what is common across all these appearances, we can derive an understanding of what kind of process could give rise to these infinite phenomenal appearances.

(It may help here to consider an analogy: an orchestra concert. The music itself is a process; it is not a single instant of sound, but rather a constantly changing blend of different notes interacting with each other. By listening to the concert as it unfolds, we are able to understand the nature of that process, namely, that is produced by the combined playing of sounds produced by a varied group of instruments.)

By observing what common thing inheres within the entirety of human activities, Wills explains, Marx is able to identify the nature of this process: it is labor. Labor is “the conscious intervention of human beings into the world, setting causal processes into motion in order to realize ends that they first posit in thought.” (53)

These ends are needs, and the essence of human existence is the process of acting on the world so as to satisfy those needs.

As is commonly known, these begin with our biological needs (food, shelter, etc.), but as we make use of resources from our natural environment to meet them (by hunting, building, etc.), the resulting changes in our environment quickly generate new and more complex needs, and our acting to meet those needs will generate changes in the world that produce even more sophisticated new needs, and so on. (Of course, our earlier needs are also continually reproduced and must be re-met, in increasingly novel ways.)

With each iteration, we expand our physical, intellectual, and social capacities — in other words, we change our very selves. This ongoing dialectical transformation of ourselves and nature is the labor process, which is the essence of human nature.

So far, so (perhaps) familiar. But Wills takes pains to contextualize this picture of human nature within a tapestry of human potentiality. Marx’s historical materialist approach leads him to develop the concept of the “rich individual,” that is, an individual who engages in genuine and free labor.

Unlike the repetitive, demeaning, “one-sided” labor forced upon us under capitalism, the laboring of the rich individual is “all-sided”: it is “the creative manifestation of life arising from the free development of all abilities of the whole person.”  Writes Wills, Marx believes in “the principle in limitless proliferation of human talents, capacities, and diverse forms of life.” (3)

This may sound abstract, or overly optimistic, but one need only think of the spectacular transformations of human life and the natural world over the last century — no doubt totally unfathomable to humans of yore — to feel the persuasive force. The rich individual manifests their nature, i.e. they perform labor, because this infinitely ongoing development is the true purpose of human existence.

Morality and Sociality

From here, Wills maintains, it is only a short step to uncovering a moral theory which states, simply: any action, practice, principle, institution, movement, society, or other object of ethical evaluation must be measured against the yardstick of whether it facilitates or impedes the development of human nature.

This is Wills’ ultimate answer to the central question of the book. All I can say is that it seems eminently correct.

This, the major contribution of Wills’ book, is fleshed out in what are perhaps her most practically-oriented passages. She emphasizes that on Marx’s theory there will be no eternal moral truths, no universal moral principles, no acts which are by their very nature moral or immoral.

The moral valence of any act will depend entirely on the concrete historical context in which it is performed, and the possibilities actually open to a moral agent in that situation. (For instance — and this is Marx’s criticism of the Utopian Socialists — trying to enact communism here and now, when current historical circumstances make it impossible, is actually morally wrong insofar as it is likely to thwart our very efforts to achieve the goal of communism.)

Rather, finding out how we ought to act must be informed by our most thorough, accurate, best understanding of the historical moment in which we find ourselves.

Wills lays out a detailed illustration of this kind of moral reasoning, moving across facets of reality we must investigate: the existing mode of production, who does what in the division of labor (if there is one), the distribution of socially produced goods and the size of surplus (if there is any), the availability of material resources, what social classes exist and the balance of forces between them, the level of consciousness achieved by those classes, the class to which the moral actor belongs and what abilities she possesses, and so on.

Only by accounting for all of these factors and the effects of their interactions can we, for example, say whether it is morally right to send weapons to Ukraine at this moment, or commit political assassinations. Marxian moral reasoning is no easy task, and Wills unfortunately does not provide a concrete demonstration of going through this reasoning process — her focus, again, is on exegesis.

Perhaps, in this view, the answer to whether something is morally right may often be knowable only in hindsight. So the actual application of the theory — the interpretation of her interpretation of Marx, if you will — is left open to the rest of us.

Still, her theory undoubtedly opens up many new avenues to explore, and her guidance along these paths remains valuable since it points to the kinds of considerations that a Marxist ethicist — as opposed to, say, a utilitarian or Kantian or Christian one — would use in trying to answer such a question.

To round things out, one part of Wills’ discussion that I take to be of paramount importance is her gloss on the creation of social needs, which Marx defines as “historic” needs “created by production itself,” in other words, needs that arise at a certain point in the labor process whenever human beings work together in pursuit of satisfying their earlier needs.

Social needs consist in our enjoyment of and desire to be with one another — not merely as a means to achieve some other goal, but as worthwhile in and of itself.

Returning to the French socialist workers mentioned above, Marx describes a progression wherein workers who are initially brought into contact as they jointly satisfy their needs to eat, drink, and smoke eventually acquire a need for that social contact itself — that is, for brotherhood and solidarity with one another.

Writ large, this ingrained sociality is what makes it the case that the flourishing of one human being requires the mutual flourishing of other human beings, insofar as we have by now developed deep desires to live together.

Communist society, then, as theorized by Wills, would be realized when the sociality of human beings is so unhindered, so highly developed that every person “has an understanding of himself as a member of the species, and regards other persons as the source of his freedom, not as limiting barriers against it.” (154)

Our human nature is not actually in conflict with a world in which everyone can live well, which means that treating one another ethically is not some onerous duty which requires great sacrifice. (Think of the things you do for people you love: even if you view these as sacrifices, they are actions you gladly undertake.) No one will need to exact obligations from or exercise rights against another.

As she so memorably puts it: we are seeking “a world of people for whom the injunction to treat their fellow beings as though they are ends in themselves is no more or less necessary than enjoining one’s heart to beat.” (238)

Eliminating Morality

Unsurprisingly, it is capitalism that frustrates our attempts to build such a society; it alienates us from the products of our labor, our laboring, and the aims of our labor — in short, from our essential nature. But in the interests of space, I must curtail further examination of the plentiful insights to be found in the rest of Wills’ book.

One final point which cannot go unmentioned, however, is Wills’ argument that morality is historically contingent. Indeed, it is a form of bourgeois ideology — which, she contends, has useful aspects in addition to being devastatingly pernicious — but it is and has been a necessary one for now.

Morality is something that emerged at the historical moment when human oppression and exploitation arose, and it will pass away if and when these disappear. In an interview with New Politics, Wills portrays morality as a “stopgap”; since we live in a world in which there is a “gap” between how the world is and how it should be, morality acts as kind of heuristic to guide us toward the right and the good.

But if that gap doesn’t exist, it doesn’t even make any sense to ask how we should close it. There simply won’t be any fact of the matter about whether some act (practice, institution, etc.) is morally right or wrong.

We are not yet people who could actually live in a communist society, but we are already in the process of laboring to become such people. Many tasks remain.

The biggest challenge, as I see it, is not convincing the proletariat that Marx’s claims about human nature are attractive. With some argument and reflection on human activity, I think even their accuracy is likely to be conceded, and his standards of ethical evaluation accepted. So the real value of Wills’ work for socialist praxis is how it succeeds (in the words of the late Jane McAlevey) in raising expectations.

My worry is whether Marx’s ethical vision will be successful in motivating proletarian action, in the face of what feels like constant, crushing defeat. Can it prevail over louder, more primitive, but easy-to-understand moralities based in powerful drivers of fear, contempt, self-interest, and servility? These threaten to destroy our efforts at collective organization.

The great moral challenge of our times is the fight against the racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, ableism, and the other temptations to oppression that are sown by the right. Hence, it falls on all socialists to energetically affirm our human nature, our higher needs, and our sociality. This enables us to discern wherever possible the glimpses of a society to which our best moral principles, at present, are leading us.

November-December 2025, ATC 239