An Ethical And Philosophical Treatise Upon Marxism, Hedonism, & Utilitarianism

Portrait of Bentham modified and used with permission of the artist.

FIRST CHAPTER: A CHARACTER STUDY: JEREMY BENTHAM

§1 / a true bourgeois radical

In the person of Jeremy Bentham, he that is called the leader or founder of early modern utilitarianism,¹ is demonstrated the possibility of a genuine radical mind within bourgeois thought.

Bentham wrote in the time of the Hanoverian dynasty of British monarchs (from George I Hanover to Victoria I’s marriage into the dynasty of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; much of Bentham’s career fell under George III Hanover); the Hanoverians had acceded to the throne of Great Britain and its colonies (including Ireland and the American colonies) after the extinction of the royal line of the Scottish Stewart² dynasty, which had been weakened and thinned out in the course of the bourgeois revolution, between the fall of Charles I and the conquest of William III Orange³, that had transformed Britain from two feudal kingdoms into an English-dominated capitalist economy and state. Bentham, in short, lived after the time of bourgeois revolution in his country and before the first outbreaks of proletarian revolutionary consciousness in Europe, under an early and developing liberal capitalist political-economy and state-social order⁴. The first generation of liberal philosophers of the new bourgeois class had come and passed already in England with the revolution- Locke, the arch-champion of private property, was of course the foremost⁵. So the English bourgeoisie were settling into the position of a ruling class, and the vast majority of their political and ideological minds were settling into the suitably reactionary position of maintainers of their system and order; the Whigs and Tories, once respectively revolutionary bourgeois and counterrevolutionary noble factions, settled down into the comfortable roles of the two opposing “right” and “left” wings of the state-social system and superstructure of the new capitalist political-economy⁶.

The exception to this was the Radical camp of the Whigs and liberals, who rallied to Bentham’s thought¹, and who came to stand as forerunners to such progressive new movements as the Chartists⁷.

The essence of Bentham’s radicalism lay simply in this, or so it seems to me: his was a profoundly original mind, and furthermore deeply rigorous and scientific in philosophy. Bentham’s was not a mind to fold happily into the dominant ideological forms of the hegemonic culture and ideology of the bourgeois order under which he lived and worked, even as he belonged to its ruling class; Bentham’s mind was always one to follow rigorous scientific methods in laying down philosophical thoughts and finding the theoretical conclusions to which they led. While his weaker ideas are to be found where he submitted himself to the larger ideological hegemony of his class, his truly great ones are always those that have come about through this, through rigorous scientific interrogation of unchallenged assumptions, leading to the scientific development of more true and more useful philosophical lessons.

§2 / his life and thought

Bentham was born into the bourgeoisie, the son of a wealthy lawyer, in 1748 (George II Hanover was king, the American revolution was 29 years off, the French 41), in London, and raised to succeed him as an arch-intellectual maintainer of the cultural and politicolegal machinery of the state-social order of bourgeois dictatorship¹. He made a try at this, passing the call to the Bar in 1769 through Lincoln’s Inn (one of the four Inns of Court, the professional associations that control legal practice and study in England and colonized Wales), but never went into practice².

For it was clear to the young Bentham that he could not make his livelihood as an enforcer of a code of laws and penalties he saw as unjust and absurd. For a start, Bentham did not accept the prevailing Christian idealist view that the state’s law was a priori true and morally correct, by nature of reflecting the immutable and eternal Natural Law of God- an old ideological offspring of feudal monarchy, surely destined to be overturned. He was skeptical of God, more skeptical of the state church and the monarch’s claim to knowledge of his will, and believed that “a body of proposed law, however complete soever, would be comparatively useless and uninstructive, unless explained and justified.”³ In other words, law, the system of command and punishment by which a state governs, is not unassailably and intrinsically true and to be trusted; law is invented and constructed by persons, for reasons, and on the basis of these reasons it may be appraised critically, and either defended and maintained or denounced and overturned. This doctrine of law as something positively socially constructed by people in the material reality of society, not as an eternal divine ideal, is known as legal positivism; it, and Bentham’s particular form of it devoted to rigorous utilitarian questioning of whether laws were truly in service to the common good, form a vital part of his philosophical legacy.

Bentham also applied his critical positivist reasoning to the doctrine of “natural rights,” which was meanwhile becoming a beloved dogma of most of the other philosophers of bourgeois liberalism. Rousseau (and after him Locke) had declared that “man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains⁴”; to this Bentham retorted that: “Not a single man that ever was, or is, or will be [was born free]. All men, on the contrary, are born in subjection, and the most absolute subjection: the subjection of a helpless child to the parent upon whom he depends every moment for his existence⁵.” Bentham denounced the idea that rights are intrinsically and metaphysically attached to souls at birth, an idealist view; on the contrary, he insisted in a philosophical outlook of scientific materialism that all liberties that human beings enjoy are those we have conquered, those we have enabled ourselves to enjoy through real material effort, struggle and development, in the monadal material reality of the universe. And indeed, while the doctrine of creator-endowed rights once formed a progressive rallying cry for revolutionaries against feudalism in places like Paris or Baltimore⁶, in all of those places it had been an entirely idealist and superficial cry, one which in practice applied only for those white male capitalists whose control of capital and property and others’ labour-power enabled them to actually exercise liberties in material social reality, and so Bentham was quite right to give it rigorous challenge. In his ruthless criticism of the ideology of the bourgeoisie as they came to establish themselves as political-economic ruling class and masters of the state and culture of society under capitalism, Bentham contributed to the progress of human philosophy and its progressive effects upon our collective social life. He established himself, with Babeuf and others, as a forerunner of the guiding ideology of proletarian revolutionary struggle, the scientific ideology that shall guide the working class in building a new and fairer political-economic system and state-social order, the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat: Marxism.

The most famed philosophical legacy of Bentham lies in the area of utilitarianism, the ethical theory to which he gave its name and its first systematic manifesto in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation⁷. This theory finds a simple mechanism for the answering in, its adherents say, a scientifically satisfactory manner of ethical quandaries, namely, the method of applying what Bentham called the “Principle of Utility,” which he stated in a few ways:

…the principle which approves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question… of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.⁸

By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.⁹

Nor for division [of acts] drawn from an ethical source. Under the principle of utility there can be but one such source, viz. the effect of the operation on the sum of happiness- the operation is preponderantly noxious or it is not.¹⁰ [first emphasis added, second original].

In summation, Bentham’s great ethical theory held that ethical or moral (the terms were to him interchangeable¹¹) goodness or badness of acts, of incidents occurring materially between persons in society, could be measured in a scientific matter viable under a materialistic philosophic worldview, by simple adding-up of negative and positive Utilities, or tendencies toward pleasure or pain, of the compared acts. Whether an act was or was not good to commit, or which of two or more possible outcomes was most preferable if one and only one had to transpire, could be determined objectively using a kind of scientific philosophical arithmetic- indeed, Bentham even gives us the variables with which to write out the equation for quite literally calculating the Utility of an act, though there is obviously a lot of subjective preference in how one assigns numerical values¹².

§3 / some of Bentham’s radical conclusions

Bentham’s utilitarianism, a scientific materialist philosophical approach to ethics, led him to conclusions breaking sharply with the backward hegemonic ideology of British bourgeois society in his time.

In Sex, though it was too incendiary to be published in his time, Bentham decried the insufficient condemnation of rape in his society and the excessive condemnation of consensual homosexual sodomy, arguing that the former was a much eviler act than the criminal codes and apologetic attitudes of patriarchal Britain considered it, and that the latter was not evil at all and should not be considered a crime¹,². He argued against the dominant view of sex propagated by and in the patriarchal family, that its function is simply propagation of the human species and thereby maintenance of the bloodlines of propertied ruling-class men, and against the oppressive norms coming from this view that women are to be only sexual objects for men to thusly use, and that non-reproductive sex is taboo and to be punished as contrary to the interests of the ruling class and its patriarchal family norms; he argued, instead, that the basic purpose of sex was pleasure, and thus that any pursuit of mutual pleasure by consenting persons was permissible³. Sex also contains what can be read as defenses of abortion, though Bentham does not draw a line between abortion and neonatal infanticide⁴. That Sex was not published in Bentham’s lifetime should not be taken to mean his status as one of the first philosophers in the core of the capitalist-imperialist world order to challenge its patriarchal ideology is not important and influential.

Bentham’s utilitarian convictions and belief in rational scientific pursuit of the greatest good for the most persons also led him to advocate democratizing political reforms. In Of Publicity, an essay drafted on the eve of and in support of the French Revolution, but not published until 1816, Bentham argued forcefully for the accountability and transparency of legislators to the will and consciousness of their mass electorate and citizenry- a revolutionary republican principle when compared with the politics of a Britain in which the parliament of lords and bourgeoisie were beholden only to the concerns of the crown and their own holdings of capital⁵.

And we have spoken already of Nonsense Upon Stilts- between that work and Of Publicity, we see that Bentham’s radical scientific mind compelled him at once to radical support of the progressive elements of the bourgeois liberal advance and to radical critique of its philosophical deficiencies. The linking ideological system in all of his radical thought was, of course, his utilitarianism.

SECOND CHAPTER: EVALUATION OF BENTHAM’S UTILITARIANISM

§1 / the nature of Bentham’s consequentialism

Bentham’s utilitarianism is, generally speaking, the first modern consequentialist theory of ethics. Consequentialism being:

any ethical theory that judges based on the consequences of things rather than intrinsic metaphysical notions of the value of the things themselves. The opposite of a consequentialist theory is a deontological one- a deontologist says “violence is bad,” a consequentialist says that whether a given violent act is good or bad depends on its context and what material impact it has. Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism, and broadly we may suppose that consequentialism is more materialist than deontology.¹

In comparison to other forms of consequentialism, although bearing in mind that any successive consequentialism owes something to Bentham’s, we can delineate two particular features: Bentham’s particular utilitarianism is hedonistic, and it is individualistic.

§1 sub§1 / Bentham’s hedonism

“Hedonism” is too often used as something of a dirty word, synonymous with opulence or decadence, associated specifically with pleasures that are perverse, short-sighted, wasteful, selfish, or products of grotesque privilege². But it does not per se mean this. In its strict philosophical usage, the usage here, hedonism entails precisely and only this: the view that the good, ethically and aesthetically, for persons, is equivalent to what brings them pleasure. But even the simple word pleasure has those that would treat it as dirty, so let us say, amounting to the same thing, that the hedonist thesis is that what is good amounts to what makes the concerned party, the party for whom it is good, happy. And this, I think, is surely an innocent enough thesis.

This, then, is what Bentham means when he says “Nature has placed man under two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure³.” Bentham opens his utilitarian manifesto with these words- he takes hedonism as given, and develops his utilitarianism as a particular ethical application of hedonism: what provides or furthers or preserves pleasure is positive ethical utility, what does so for pain negative. As a consequentialism, then, Benthamian utilitarianism or classical utilitarianism is devoted to consequences for the hedonic consideration of pleasure, for the consequences of an act for the begetting or curtailing of the pleasure of concerned parties. This is why the original form of Benthamian utilitarianism is sometimes called hedonistic utilitarianism (principally in contrast with the later and (arguably) distinct preference utilitarianism, on which more later).

With Bentham’s hedonism, I think the philosophical precepts of a Marxist materialist outlook, if applied to the case of ethics, are in alignment. After all, we surely want to be “good” to one another, to our friends and comrades, even if we see (correctly) many patterns of “morality” as imposed class ideology, symptomatic of a given class’s dominant state-social order and economic system (e.g. bourgeois morality under the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie and capitalism)⁴- and what other criterion for the good can materialists accept, other than what makes us and those we care about feel good in material reality? Certainly we can’t side with the theocratic idealist notion that the good is what pleases God. Or with Kant, the idealist who says, as we cannot know true external reality as it in in-itself (the so-called noumena) but only as it is shaped and experienced unto our rational soul-minds according to our own a-priori (i.e. learned from ideal thought, not concrete experience) rational concepts (the so-called phenomena⁵), that thus true knowledge can come only from logical thought in the realm of mind and not from material objects and incidents as they truly are⁶, and so ethical knowledge must come from absolute, unchanging, fixed and perfect logical rules or “categorical imperatives” bearing no relation to material reality⁷,⁸. And we cannot align with the idealized “virtues” of Classical ethics. It seems to me that some form of a hedonistic consequentialism is the most sensible form of ethical reasoning, given materialism as a (correct) philosophical worldview.

Importantly, hedonism in this sense does not imply only the most immediate kinds of pleasure, or the most “base” or “vulgar” physical pleasures. Thus most arguments made feebly against “hedonism” fall flat, and in fact themselves assume its premise (that pleasure is good) to be correct: the idea that one should defer pleasure now if it may lead to suffering in the future, in favor of more sophisticated pleasure then, is in fact itself a hedonistic suggestion, though it goes about disguised as an argument against hedonism⁹.

§1 sub§2 / Bentham’s individualism

Utilitarianism is often criticized, in a flimsy and superficial manner, for supposedly possessing a risky tendency toward violation of individuals’ rights and liberties. There is for instance the infamous thought experiment (a version of which:

A surgeon with one patient freshly anaesthetized for a relatively minor procedure, but five others waiting in the wings for organs (respectively a lung, a kidney, a heart, a kidney, a lung) decides, since five outweigh one, to murder the first patient and sacrifice their organs to the other five.

Which is silly, but it is outside the purview of this essay to deal with it.

In actual fact, Bentham’s philosophy is marked by a strong liberal individualism.

Some illustrative passages from the Introduction:

The community is a fictitious body composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community, then, what is it?- the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.¹⁰

It has been shown that the happiness of the individuals, of whom a community is composed, that is[,] their pleasures and their security, is the end and the sole end which the legislator ought to have in view.¹¹

And, of course, this same bourgeois-liberal individualism is baked into the structure of Bentham’s felicific calculus, as he frames it: the interests of a collective are only the sum of the interests of each individual member, and so calculating the ethical effect, the negative or positive ethical utility, of an act for a collective is simply adding up its ±utility for each individual constituent¹². According to Bentham, then, a collectivity has no distinct existence as an object or for itself, but rather is only a fiction invented by and to describe several discrete individuals.

But this is not correct. And indeed, applying a sensible dialectical logic, it does not make sense: what Bentham is doing in effect is drawing a line between “one” and “many,” and saying that “one” exists and “many” is only an illusion constructed around “one” (in this case, society around the individual. But this falls flat logically because every apparent one can be subdivided into a many, and every many often acts and interacts in the world as a one. Is an individual person truly a one, or are they a many- a grouping of many cells? And is a many not also a one? After all, an army is many when you are a member of it, but only one solid mass when it is charging at you!

Much of bourgeois-liberal modernist philosophy, not to mention contemporary post-modern philosophy, turns on the idea that it is the individual unit that is real and the larger whole illusory; this notion emerged as a deliberate negation of the classical idea (most prevalent in Plato- see the parable of the antrvm platonicvm in the Republic) that individual material objects were only illusory, partial facets or emanations of deeper spiritual realities that human minds could not perceive directly. But both ideas must negate each other, and a deeper materialist truth emerge. What was once the negation of an error in thought and resolved the contradictions in current thought is now itself an error, and must be negated and its contradictions resolved to produce new true thought. Both the “one” and the “many” are equally real facets of the divided whole of material reality, and both are also equally illusory, and exist in combination and in contradiction with one another.

A label like “individual” and a label like “collective” do both name real things in the universe- yet both the labels and the things they name are imperfect, subject to change, and containing internal paradoxes and contradictions out of whose dynamic interactions these things will collapse into new sets of things, or transform themselves into wholly other unities. So, that both the “individual” as a discrete unit and the “collective” as a cohesive whole are flawed and contradictory entities which collapse into contradiction and parts divided against each other when prodded does not mean either of these entities does not exist. The fact is that all real things, and all names or conceptualizations of them, are so constituted: as unities-of-opposites, not fixed and perfect but dynamical relationships of contradicting parts that evolve over time and ultimately collapse and are replaced by new forms as their contradictions develop. This is dialectical materialist philosophy’s Law of Contradiction¹³— it does not mean that the universe cannot be objectively known, for as materialists we say emphatically that it can, but that it must be known not as a hierarchy of fixed Platonic categories but as a whole divided infinitely into ever-evolving dialectical relationships between parts that both confirm and negate each other’s existence. All of the things in the universe and all of our models of them are awash in contradiction and dialectical, evolving interaction as contradictions develop and resolve- this makes our knowledge more true, not less.

All of which is to say, long-windedly, that it is an error to assume the individual or the collective exists. Properly understood the two are things, objects or happenings, which both exist, which interpenetrate each other, each of which exists in terms of the other but transcends and contradicts it, even so. Both exist in and form the other, and both also negate the other, and both also transcend the other. The community cannot be reduced to a pure fiction imagined out of discrete individuals, both because the discreteness of the individuals is not really so sure and because a collective has emergent qualities and interests which are more than simply the sum of its individual members’ wants. This is obvious in the fact that, in a revolutionary political organization, the members must sublate their own interests to those of the whole, and of the working class’s liberatory cause- both sets of interests exist and are equally real, and interpenetrate and contradict each other (but the contradiction can be resolved by bringing the two to point in common directions, and putting the right goals first).

It is an error in ethical reasoning, then, to reduce the interests of a group to the mere adding-up of those of each of its members, or more broadly to assign ethical primacy to individual interests over collective in every case. This philosophical error in Bentham’s system comes, of course, from his classical liberalism. In this any notion of Marxist ethics must certainly not follow his example. Indeed, understanding the class struggle as driving force of history, we must recognize the interests of classes as specially prominent, not those of reified “individuals.”

§2 / where Bentham was less radical

As we see above, Bentham in his liberalism, though radical compared to the nobilitized bourgeoisie of the Tory ouvre of his time (see the notes to chapter I on Jane Austen and the Hanoverian era), fell short of the modern ideological-political synthesis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism- which is, of course, only to be expected for a man of his time and place: as Marx says, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already¹.”

It would not do for me to hagiographize Bentham and take his thought as a starting point for my own work if I did not also catalogue where his work was, in light of present concerns for the universal ideology of proletarian liberation (MLMism), deficient. And where he forays out of ethics, the field for work in which he is notable, his deficiencies quickly grow sharper and more prominent.

He did, for instance, foray into political-economic analysis, with a Manual of Political Economy (circa 1790s, unpublished in his lifetime)². It is in all respects an unremarkable and uninteresting work- it amounts to a retreading of Adam Smith, founder of “classical” bourgeois economics (whom he calls “a writer of great and distinguished merit³”). He offers, he claims, a complement to Smith’s work in writing principally of the “το πρεπον” of political-economy over the “το ον”- the “what ought” over the “what is”; as he puts it, “his object was the science: my object is the art⁴.” This art he claims as its “great object, [its] great desideratum, […] to know what ought and what ought not to be done [economically] by government⁵.”

In general in the Manual Bentham concerns himself with the question of how best to manage an economy: “the degree of advantage with which a quantity of capital is applied… [&] the quantity of encrease given to the stock of wealth… [for]… the encrease of wealth made in any community.⁶” Much like Smith it does not occur to Bentham that the fruits of production and the benefits of economic development must be reaped for somebody, and it may not be everybody; it does not occur to him to question who gets to enjoy the “encrease of wealth,” and who might suffer to make it. He shares Smith’s fantasy of the capitalist economy as a free community of starting-out-equal liberal individuals, all of them acquiring and maneuvering capital for their own benefit such that whoever ends up on top has done so only on their own merits. Bentham defines “capital” as “a portion of wealth considered as employed for the purpose of encrease⁷,” and this I would say is more or less correct. But it does not occur to him that, with that “employment” meaning the allotment of capital to buying up and manifesting in “land and labour,” of which “all wealth is the joint result⁸,” so that that wealth can be extracted and re-purposed into further capital for the owner (the “employer”), then somebody whose labour-power is getting bought is not getting to enjoy the wealth they produce as the productive worker and employee. In other words, Bentham, like Smith, has not caught on that private ownership of the means of production through the institution of capital necessarily entails robbery and exploitation of the class of waged workers whose labour-power the capital buys and sucks up the produce of- otherwise, the capital wouldn’t expand, as it is teleologically driven to do, through buying and owning and commodifying the property that is worked upon and the produce of that work. No surprise then that Bentham, like Smith, concludes in support for laissez-faire policies and the total liberty of the capitalist market, the total freedom of the capitalist class to make profits at the expense of the worker, in the Manual as well as in 1782’s Indirect Legislation⁹. Nominally the only function of the state should be to protect free enterprise for all citizens; in practice, though, this means it should be reduced to its most essential function under capitalism: protecting the right of capital to parasitize the worker. If Bentham was a radical in other regards, in this he is allied with the most reactionary bourgeoisie and bourgeois ideologues of his own time, and of ours (Musk, Thiel, Hayek, Thatcher, Friedman, Pinochet, Milei, Hoppe, Rothbard, Reagan, Koch (and Koch), etc. etc.).

Marx’s Capital, of course, was the bomb of dynamic new scientific thinking that went off in the philosophy of political-economy, clearing away the willful naïveté of Smithian bourgeois economics with a blast of proletarian consciousness, with theories derived not from meditations of the propertied but from the real evolving existence of the workers in struggle. Marx exploded Locke and Smith’s premise of privately accumulated wealth and capital as earned purely by genuine heroic individual enterprise, of the liberal capitalist market as a free association of equally free and self-interested pure individuals. Marx pulled back the curtain hiding the ugliness of capital, revealing the brutal exploitation of nine-tenths of humanity, enabling the formulation of a revolutionary ideology of proletarian liberation, surpassing any progressive potential in bourgeois liberalism.

Bentham, of course, writing before Marx, before Lenin, and before Paris 1871, cannot possibly be blamed for failing to learn the scientific lessons of Marxist political-economy. Nonetheless, however, if we are going to laud Bentham for the radical aspects of his (admittedly bourgeois) thought and attempt to build on those aspects, it would be disingenuous to give no mention to the aspects of that thought which are purely backward.

Nevertheless, the radical aspects are there and valuable. With his hedonistic utilitarianism, he laid down the first modern and scientific theory of consequentialist ethics. Albeit a bourgeois, individualist, liberal theory- but a foundation on which to build, to be sure. To build critically, of course, dialectically: affirming Bentham’s principles where they are correct and meeting his affirmations with negations where they are wrong, building toward a greater synthesis.

THIRD CHAPTER: OTHER CONSEQUENTIALISMS

§1 / JS Mill

J.S. Mill, Bentham’s putative “successor” and author of Utilitarianism, is for many the figure most associated with Bentham’s theory, more so than the progenitor himself. He has a somewhat significant legacy in the early history of feminism, especially its liberal “first wave” among the women of the western European bourgeoisie- well-critiqued by Kollontai, progenitor of proletarian feminism, in On the Social Basis of the Women’s Question¹ among other works. He often mistakenly receives credit for being the first British MP to suggest women’s suffrage on the Parliament floor; he was the second; the first, as previously stated (see note 7 to Chapter 1 §1), was Henry Hunt, the proto-Chartist, who is of course a less convenient figure for bourgeois liberal historians to laud because he was the much more radical and allied to the working class (though even he did it only at the prompting of the women themselves- specifically, the petition came to him from Mary Smith of Stanmore, Yorkshire²).

For the most part, Mill’s function in philosophical history has been to assimilate the really radical edge of Whig and Radical thought after the Orange revolution into the increasingly calcified and reactionary superstructure of present-day capitalism, as it as a political-economic system and its corresponding order of bourgeois rule have gone from the revolutionary negation of feudal backwardness to the backwardness that a new proletarian revolution must once again negate.

Mill takes Bentham’s radical new ethic and sands down the edges, takes the radical current in 19th century Whig thought and sands down the edges, ensuring that they are not sharp enough to cut away the contradictory flaws in more mainstream liberal bourgeois ideology, especially its British form.

He isn’t terribly interesting to me; he shan’t be useful to us here, and we shan’t talk of him more.

§2 / Peter Singer & Mainstream contemporary utilitarianism

Peter Singer is probably the principal face of academic utilitarian philosophy in the present day. Certainly his Practical Ethics is probably the most widely read and assigned academic textbook on that subject. I read Practical Ethics in high school, with a strong but underdeveloped commitment to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and a burgeoning interest in ethical philosophy; I found it a profoundly frustrating book. I learned a lot from it, but much of that from contradicting Singer’s theses, and nearly every point on which he differed with my beloved Bentham- my idol, at the time- was a point on which I vehemently disagreed with him.

Singer, even more than Mill, atomizes and invizibilises any radical political potential in utilitarianism. Taking Bentham’s individualism to its extremest extreme, his is the (in)famous maxim that “An interest is an interest, no matter whose interest it is¹.” Of course some kindness comes from this dogma: he would for instance argue based on it that the comfort and dignity of an ex-convict are as valuable as those of an innocent child, and I would agree. But on the scale of history, the implications of this view are catastrophic. As I said in my “Further Notes on Ethics and Revolution”:

Singer, in his book, advocates this position precisely because it prevents preferencing one race over another, and it is quite right we should not have such preferences with races or sexes or any other categories in which participants have no choice. But with social classes, categories ultimately of how people act in relation to production, we must explicitly preference that group which is in the first place the majority and in the second place has not actively chosen to act cruelly, the proletariat, for if we were “fair” to the big capitalists we would be unfair to them…

We can observe even more specifically why Singer’s liberal individualist framing of the “interests” considered in a utilitarian calculation must be abandoned with a topical example pertaining to the global anti-imperialist struggle we wage in the progress of our species toward communism: shall we equally preference the interests of the Palestinian people fighting an uphill battle against the Zionist imperialist settler-colonial occupation of their land, and the citizens of the occupier state. Certainly, in an ideal world, I should like to be equally struck with sorrow for every dead child, on every side of every war. But in the world we have at present moment I cannot in good conscience do this. I cannot allow myself to mourn equally for the dead Zionist hundreds and the dead Palestinian millions, because if I did so I would falter and forget the broader dialectical reality of antagonistic struggle between imperialist finance capital and the oppressed peoples of the world, and forget which side of it is right. Certainly, the thought of fighters bursting in through the walls of my home to take my loved ones hostage is not one that brings me comfort; certainly, I would otherwise have some empathy for people facing that- but, when this suffering of a few hundred is the justification for extermination of a whole nation of two million, in the continuation of a genocidal project of decades which is central to the whole decrepit system of capitalist-imperialism- my empathy may not cease existing, but is negated and made irrelevant by the greater empathy, combined with deep rage and solidarity, I am obligated to have for the Palestinian nation, for the progressive-interested People of that nation, for their national liberation fighters and for their cause, which is just. The liberals and Zionists would call me heartless for making such a calculus between the two sides of this dialectic- yet they make the same, in reverse².

This case demonstrates a broader reality, unfortunate but true: in the world we have, in which present material reality is essentially defined by the antagonistic contradictions of capitalism-imperialism as a world political-economic system and oppressive state-social order of imperialist bourgeois dictatorship, any framing of ethics that is useful to the oppressed simply cannot consider all interests equally. It must prioritize positive utilities for the oppressed and downtrodden, the vast world majority of exploited toiling classes and oppressed strata and peoples, over those of the oppressors, the big imperialist bourgeoisie and their various lackeys and agents, and it must serve the political revolutionary project of constructing a new world order in which those utilities are available to all. It must serve the project of world communist revolution, through socialist revolution in each country.

In light of these discoveries, the more explicitly counterrevolutionary elements in Singer’s ouvre can no longer surprise us. He delights in inserting little sideways jabs at Marx into his works:

Marxism still, in a confused sort of way, provides impetus for a lot of woolly relativist ideas, often dressed up as ‘postmodernism.’³

And he is also the author of a garbage pamphlet on the philosophical legacy of Marx, in which he attempts to use a rather “woolly” version of Popper’s falsifiability dogma to prove Marxism invalid as “science.⁴” Popper, too, was a damnable liberal.

We must also discuss Singer’s alleged fraternity with eugenicism (an ideology which is always reactionary and antisocial, though it disguises itself as concern for the purity of society). Singer denies nearly all of the eugenics-related claims about his ideology made by his detractors, including autistic and disabled activists, but the said detractors will say that the evidence is right there in his most famous book- so let us look at what he says in Practical Ethics, specifically the chapter “Taking Life: Humans⁵.”

Singer, like other notable utilitarians, including Bentham, defends not only the right to an abortion for any reason at any point during pregnancy⁶, but furthermore the right of the mother (or the person who has given birth) to infanticide of the neonate before it is believed to have developed full consciousness, on the grounds that a mother has interests like a desire for freedom and a fear of death, while a neonatal infant does not yet have them and develops them at some later date (while this is debatable, it is a fact that much of human neurological development is not complete at birth)⁷. This is controversial, and I generally do not agree with it, though I believe we must have gentleness and understanding toward desperate women who commit infanticide because of fear and circumstances of deprivation- in a good society, a socialist society, they would not have to do this because the resources to help them would be provided by the soviets and the bodies of community/worker self-rule, but those resources under capitalism are witheld, and it is this witholding that kills. But Singer takes this divisive notion much further, with the suggestion that in certain situations abortion or infanticide can be, owing to conditions of the fetus or infant, an ethical imperative. He defends the abortion of fetuses likely to become persons with Down Syndrome on the grounds that “…lives [of disabled people] are less worth living than the lives of people who are not disabled” (pg. 165), and that we all secretly know this is true, otherwise we wouldn’t have banned thalidomide (a dubious argument at best- notably it ignores the role played by profit-driven deception in the thalidomide calamity). He further argues that it is acceptable to kill infants with Down Syndrome, if it is in the alleged interests of the parents, because “we saw [in the previous chapter] that birth is not a morally significant dividing line” (pg. 164). He concludes: “[K]illing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all” (pg. 167).

I reject Singer’s views, and largely accept their denunciation as eugenicist. But a mere emotional outrage, while it certainly is justified from those with Down Syndrome and their comrades, loved ones, and friends, must be supplemented with some analysis of the structure of Singer’s ideas, and their place in bourgeois ideology.

I think the key thing that is wrong, and reactionary, in Singer’s ideas about children is how much they center the interests of, not just adults, but specifically parents. Of course, when a person is pregnant, when the boundaries of their own body-self delineate the scope of the problem, then it is absolutely within the scope of their self-sovereignty to judge what tissues and organs, up to and including an embryo, they wish to invoke medicine to destroy. But once the embryo leaves the body, even if, as Singer asserts, it in itself has not changed substantially in nature, in the concrete reality of its material existence manifested in relations with other things it has changed significantly- for it is no longer parasitic, no longer a necessary dependent. It can be removed to another environment without needing to bring the host with it- why, then, should we assume a special significance to the host, the parent, in deciding what happens to the neonate? If it is not in the interests of the parents for the neonate to be in their care, why not simply move it to the care of another? Certainly this, which fulfills the interests both of the parent and of the neonate as well as those of a third party, a person or persons interested in caring for the child.

Admittedly there are in the present world capitalist-imperialist economic system and social order circumstances which both stand in the way of such childrearing outside the consanguine patriarchal nuclear family and make those avenues through it which it can be attempted tortuous and often ethically fraught. But this is precisely because of the same problem in society that lurks behind Singer’s unquestioned assumption that the interests of the child must always be more intertwined with those of the biological parent than those of any other adult peer: the assumption, enforced as absolute ideological dogma under the cultural superstructure of a class society with an economy built on private ownership, that people must be reared in and reproduce the ownership-preserving institution of the said consanguine patriarchal nuclear family. There is in fact no reason in the interests of the child themself that they must be always in the care of the biological parent; if it is in the better interests of the child and of the majority of persons let them be reared by someone else, in some other way. The reason the present culture so stigmatizes any form of childrearing, indeed any form of interpersonal relating, outside of the family is nothing to do with the interests of children and people; it simply has to do with preserving property relations through the maintenance of classed patriarchal bloodlines and the father-right of property inheritance. The solution to the problem of a parent with a disabled child they cannot care for ought not, then, to be infanticide; it ought to be daring to imagine, ultimately to construct, a culture in which children necessitating special circumstances of care can simply be allotted to the communities that will best serve them (of course, a socialist culture). This is in best service to the interests of all.

To conclude on Singer, having found his theory of interests woefully individualistic and his grotesque eugenicism symptomatic of the bourgeois ideology of the patriarchal traditional family, we should discuss a concept he introduces in Practical Ethics which may be somewhat more useful to us- I mean, the distinction between hedonistic utilitarianism (a la Bentham) and preference utilitarianism (a la Singer).

As we have established, utilitarianism as initially set out by Bentham turns on utilitarian concerns, assuming that what is good for a considered party is what best provides them with maximum pleasure and minimum pain, whatever sorts of pleasure or pain these may be. This presents an interesting problem, however, when confronted with the suggestion that parties do not always know what will be pleasurable to them. I might eat something expecting it to taste good, but find it has gone bad and in fact tastes terrible. Then, in pursuing positive utility for myself, I instead create negative. Given this, one might ask, under utilitarian ethics, if party A has a better knowledge of what would be pleasurable to party B then they themself do, is it ethically defensible, or even good, for A to force B to do other than what they want, for their own good? Certainly in a minor case, like our example of food that has gone bad, it would seem that if a friend of mine knows that the food has gone bad while I do not, it would be ethical of them to, concerned for my pleasure and health, strike the food from my hand before I bite into it. But in more extreme cases this quickly appears to become a strain of logic for the justification of tyranny and anti-democracy- shall a government overwrite its citizens’ will if it knows better than they what is good for them? What if it thinks it knows, but is wrong? To resolve this question, preference utilitarians like Singer have revised the meaning of Utility: positive and negative utility are not the maximization of pleasure or pain, but instead are the maximum satisfaction or maximum negation of one’s desires, or preferences. So, a good act is one which maximizes the ability of all involved parties to satisfy their preferences.

Notably, of course, this intimately connects the concept of Utility with the practice of Liberty, of individual Liberty when combined with the individualism common to Bentham and Singer, and for a liberal like Singer this is unsurprising.

But Singer himself points out:

Some scholars think that Bentham and Mill may have used ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ in a broad sense that allowed them to include achieving what one desires as a ‘pleasure’ and the reverse as a ‘pain.’ If this interpretation is correct, the difference between preference utilitarianism and the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill disappears.⁸

And we may find Singer’s concern for this distinction needlessly quotidian, if not outright pedantic. Nonetheless, even as the bulk of what we have here endeavored to learn from Singer has concerned the manner in which his preparation of the ethical science of utilitarian philosophy is in error, this interesting contradiction within the utilitarian project and how it may be resolved or rendered non-antagonistic is an interesting thing to keep in mind as we think about applying a radical utilitarianism for a revolutionary cause.

§3 / Long-Termism and Effective Altruism: feverish ideological brain-diseases of the hip bourgeoisie

§3 sub§1 Contra EA

Abigail Thorn, whose work I have over the years both unfairly praised and unfairly maligned, begins the title for her web show’s episode on “Effective Altruist” ethical theory with the phrase “The rich have their own ethics¹.” Thorn and I certainly have our political disagreements, but this is about the shape of it on this particular subject.

Effective Altruism, “EA,” is a recently popular dogma of utilitarian ethical theory, which has been adapted to make it as explicitly and directly as possible useful to capitalists and to the institution of capital, in its expansion and accumulation.

EA as a theory is quite explicitly and deliberately marketed to the big bourgeoisie and those who believe they stand to become big bourgeoisie. It, building in no small part on the work of Singer, who is a very enthusiastic advocate of NGO-type charitable giving, has taken as the essential unit of ethically positive action the giving of monies to charitable causes. The idea that one should maximize one’s effectiveness in altruism, by being able to give as much money to charity as possible (and choosing the best charities to give to)- so, one should actively try to get rich, in order to be able to be more effectively altruistic.As such, the gurus of EA actively encourage their students, if they be interested in enacting maximum ethical utility for the people of the world, to become venture capitalists in order to amass a great body of capital from which some part of a comparatively large size can then be alloted to charity. This is an ideology born out of the myth of the beneficent billionaire philanthropist. Notably, Sam Bankman-Fried, principal founder of the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the financial rigging clique Alameda Research, is an EAist and supposedly originally intended to use crypto-speculation to accumulate money-value to put toward charity. He is now in prison for defrauding clients of FTX out of millions of dollars.

If we take it seriously at face value, the problems with EA theory are two-fold:

Firstly, there is a failure to recognize the distinction between the potential and the actual in ethics. Utilitarianism authorizes prioritizing great utilities over small utilities, e.g. the feeding of a thousand over that of one, but we must also understand the difference between a potential and an actual utility. So it does not do to refuse to feed one, on the basis that it may allow us to feed a thousand tomorrow, if we know only that we may be able to, and this probability does not outweigh the certitude of the harm done now².

The profit that may be incurred from an outlaying of capital is necessarily a guess, which may or may not prove correct, subject to the whims of the market. Yet the outlaying of that capital now, into buying up certain means of production and labour power, is certain and actual, even as the assumption that the use-values produced by the labours undertaken and exploited can then be converted in the market into capital-value that expands the initially outlaid sum is only uncertain and potential. And we know, of course, that this process of buying-up of labour-power through ownership of capital-value and investment of it into control of the means of production as embodied “productive” capital is a harm to the majority class of workers in that, by buying up ownership of all the surplus product of their labour and leaving them only the bare minimum compensation of the wage to recuperate the power to work, it robs them of freedom in the exercise of their own labour and life-activity and leaves them chained for the vast majority of their social life to the tyrannical rule of capital, an institution which exists vampirically, sucking away their life and freedom to grow its own wealth and its own power to suck further³. The idea of staking the ability to do good, assuming that charitable giving really is the most effective way to do it, on a possible profit which depends upon a definite harm is, we can see, surely an error.

Secondly, the EA theory ignores the reality of the teleological character of capital itself, i.e., the ends toward which it directs itself as an entity developing across time, as a relation between things and forces and persons in society. To suppose that one can accumulate a sum of capital-value, act as its avatar in laying it out to buy up exploitable labour-power and grow itself further, but then, once some (unclear) threshold is reached, simply pull out of the circuitry of the capitalist economy and convert all that value into charitable money-gifts is tragically ignorant of the simple facts of how capital operates. Capital acts, and motivates its owner to act as its avatar, always for its own further expansion by further investment, further buying-up, further extraction of surplus, and further accumulation of that surplus as more capital-value. The capitalist is not, cannot be, impartial regarding this process. The moment they become an owner of any sizeable sum of pure capital-value, they are motivated to invest it, to embody it as “productive” capital and commodity-capital that can draw further profits unto itself, to buy up labour-power and means of production and profit by sale of pilfered labour-products upon the market, and a million little psychosocial factors will apply pressure on their psyche, conscious and unconscious and public and private, to push them toward this end, the teleological drive of capital to expand itself by exploitation of labour-power. They may say, and may initially believe, that they set out to accumulate only so much capital as to convert it into a really impressive charitable donation- but soon enough they will find themself driven to buy up just a little more, exploit just a little more, accumulate just a little more, until they are only another member of the big bourgeoisie, growing rich as the toilers of the world are worked to death. The example of Bankman-Fried himself proves this- where are all his charitable donations now? They disapeared into the mirage of crypto-capital that he built up to enrich himself.

But all of the above critique assumes that EA is, on some level, a sincere attempt at a pro-person ethical system. And I do not believe it is. We have shown that EA as a philosophical system would be a failure, if it were sincere- but it is not sincere. It is an artifice, invented only as a new cloak for the bourgeois to put on, a new philosophical costume to go together with the new costume of slick digital efficiency, cloaking the same old bloody-and-grimy mechanisms of capital. The excuse that a bourgeois is exploiting colonized countries’ peoples and resources now, but only to help them (through bullshit charity) later, rings hollow, and is just another reinvention of the capitalist-imperialist myth that colonialism exists for the benefit of the colonized. This is simply a new mask for the monster to wear, to make you thank it, even as it devours you. It is a cynical diversion, an open lie, a fraud, a trick. On both levels, then, the EA theory is to be thrown out.

§3 sub§2 Contra Longtermism

“Longtermism” denotes a specific paradigm for the application of consequentialist logics, one which is often embraced by the same quarters that advocate the EA framing of those logics. Notably, arch-bourgeois Elon Musk is a proponent, as are many of his ilk, bourgeois self-declared “futurists.”

The idea of longtermism is that those utilities which should be most prioritized are, not only those which are widest in spread and largest in impact, but those which are furthest into the future or stretch across the longest span of future time. The justification for this is that human population rises, and so further in the future there will be more people to benefit, and thus a benefit to all humanity in a thousand years- which, the bourgeois futurists like to claim, will be, through their ingenuity, a mighty hypercapitalist empire spanning thousands of star systems, or at least as far as Enceladus- is quantitatively a bigger benefit than a benefit to all humanity- the population of one planet- now. Extending from this, furthermore, the longtermists will argue that in fact quite large harms in the present can be justified by the confident assertion that they will beget greater benefits upon a greater scale in the far-flung future: whatever sufferings result, they argue, from the present extractive economic system of production and expenditure, they are justified by the vast future positives which will result from the present-day of hyper-exploited hyper-productivity.

In this we should easily be able to see the same error we critique in EA: conflation of the potential with the actual. The development now of monopolistic capital directed toward conquest of space may develop a paradisal multiplanetary human empire of Lockean classical liberalism, and it may not — I, being a Marxist, may think that is very unlikely, and Musk, being an idiot, may think it is very likely. But either of us must admit it is a possibility, a potentiality which is in things, but not actualized, not presently the actually dominant aspect of things. And while it is certainly ethically sound to preference a thousand over one, it cannot be so to preference an actual billion against a potential trillion, especially one of dubious probability.

Once again, as in the case of the EA system for which it provides basis, we should not look to longtermism expecting to find a “neutral” ethical system- such a thing is impossible. What we look for, what we find, is another ideological tool for capital. Whatever muck and shit and blood and gore capital depends upon today, to suck up labour-power and resources and grow itself at human beings’ expense, it can justify it all with the promise of tomorrow’s paradisal star-empire. Look not to the now, says Musk, look not to the slag heaps and bottomless cobalt mines where children drown in shit to feed surplus value to the endless foundry of my enrichment; look, rather, to what I promise tomorrow- clean, serene, pure, and sublime. And I should note that while I have talked of Musk and Bankman-Fried, two prominent bourgeoisie that have been overtly politically involved and have promoted these ideas intellectually, we cannot mistake a few figure-heads for the whole class of capitalists and institution of exploitative finance capital, the exploiters both publicly outspoken and not- whom these ideas truly serve.

Longtermism serves the ruling class, in fact, in a manner quite similar to organized religion. The message is: forgive or ignore all miseries unleashed upon you now, and raise up not one finger against them, only put all your faith in the justified deliverance of them of some far-flung “pie in the sky”- Heaven or Jannah or Nirvana in one case, the glorious capitalist future in the other. Except that longtermism is calibrated so much more directly to serve the interests of the ruling class, because it explicitly says the potential pie in the sky will come only through the actual suffering it is balanced against. In reality, of course, capital has no capacity and its owners no intention to ever deliver a world beyond exploitation of labour, for if the worker is not squeezed and oppressed and forced by state and private violence to produce a surplus they may not keep, capital ceases to exist. This paradigm of ethics is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, reactionary, bourgeois ideology to be thrown out.

§3 conclusion

In Singer’s rendering of utilitarian theory, we see an attempt to neutralize out of it any political class stand; in the re-renderings of EA and longtermist theories, we see an explicit instrumentalizing of utilitarian ethical theory for the interests of capital. But, really, either one is bourgeois ideology, either one serves only capital and the class of its owners in exploiting and victimizing nine-tenths of the human race, piloting civilization down the path of reaction and contradiction.

What we learn from this is plain. The only project of ethical philosophy that can be of real service to the movement for the liberation of the oppressed and exploited majority is one explicitly, consciously, willfully communist in character.

§4 / Capitalism, Communism, Consequence: Phony Calculi

Given our subject matter I must at least address in passing the usage of grotesquely malformed versions of a utilitarian calculus in various attempts to “debunk” the communist project. I do it with a rolling of my eyes.

Those who love books like The Black of Communism like to make a sort of pseudo-utilitarian argument against communism as a project, which goes like this: whatever promises it may make, those benefits are outweighed by the death toll of violent revolution. They calculate this death toll, of course, with a mixture of pretending violent counterrevolutionaries, fascists, imperialist lackeys, etc. were innocent victims, and simply blaming the communists for coincidences, natural disasters, and even things plainly done by our enemies.

I find the game of comparing death tolls grotesquely vulgar, but the enemy has started it, so I shall play. If we are really to reduce the contest of classes and of political-economic systems to a counting up of death tolls, then we must count up that of capitalism as well- they fail to do this, of course, because they view the capitalist system merely as the default state of things, not as a paradigm that can actually be challenged; the hegemonically dominant ideology of bourgeois society has inculcated itself so totally into popular understanding that it goes about as unquestioned “common sense,” the presumed truth, never needing to defend or justify itself.

Yet if we break out of this thought prison, if we recognize that it is possible to negate the dominant ideology with the guiding ideology of a revolution to overthrow the dominant capitalist ruling class, economic system of capitalism, and state-social order of bourgeois dictatorship, then we must tally up the crimes of the capitalists, before condemning communist revolution for the blood it sheds. And we will quickly enough find those crimes too vast in scope and scale to number. We will find that every death by starvation in the last half-century or so, during all which time human civilization has produced more than enough food to feed all its members, has been a death at the hands of the capitalist system, a murder by the capitalist class, by the insistence of the big property owners that that which all need must be held up in stores to be sold for profit, not distributed to those needing it. The vast majority of deaths by exposure or cold or heat, and a great many by drowning in flash-floods, in this country and the many others like it where there are more empty houses than unhoused persons, are deaths caused plainly by the capitalist insistence on shelter as a commodity to be sold for capital and not a use-value to be allotted to meeting human need and utility. Every death in an imperialist war, every death in a fascist genocide, every death under colonialism- these are deaths caused by capitalism, murders by the institution of capital, the inevitable violence of the bloody political-economic machinations of the capitalist economic system.

The war for communist socialism is a war on hunger, a war for the provision of the fundamental needs of life- food, water, medicine, shelter- to all who contribute to make up a civilization, from a common treasury owned by all, with all working to supply it as they are best able, and allot to each in proportion to their contribution and their need, not for purpose of profit. Whenever the enemies of revolution, of true liberty and true equality as they emerge in the struggle of the downtrodden for resolution of their exploitation, ask us how many died in the glorious revolutionary experiments of the past century, we must simply ask: how many more would have died without them? How many millions more dead, if Russia had remained a Tsarist despotism of feudal lords and factory capitalists, Albania a battleground of every imperialist power in Europe, China a backward feudal bureaucracy and the violent stomping ground of every imperialist power in the world? We know the answer. Whatever tragedies may have occurred in the past in socialist countries which the bourgeois historians have fraudulently blamed on the communist heroes, they cannot compare to the millions global capitalist-imperialism allows to starve, or freeze, or die of exposure, or kills in its wars to divide the world up into colonies owned by the finance capitalists of the imperialist core, every day, functioning normally and as intended in order to accrue profit, in order to serve capital in further adding surplus value to the sum held as capital-value by its owners.

Any utilitarian calculus comparing the relative merits of the maintenance of capitalism and bourgeois rule vs those of its revolutionary overthrow and establishment of socialism and proletarian rule, on the road to full communism and abolition of all class divisions, if that calculus is made in a manner at all extending human decency and sympathy to the interests of the poor and downtrodden and exploited and oppressed vast majority of humanity, can only conclude in favor of communism¹.

FOURTH CHAPTER: THE CONCEPT OF A CLASS-UTILITARIANISM; PROLETARIAN REVOLUTIONARY UTILITARIANISM

§1 / Concept of a Class-Utilitarianism; Principles

We have seen how such figures as Mill and even more so Singer have, with liberalism and individualism, removed the radical potential from utilitarianism as an ethical guidestone; we must now consider how it is to be put back. We have established that it is not possible to make ethical appraisals without consideration of political-economic and historical circumstances- attempting such only leads us back into the trap of ruling class ideology. We must, then, develop the theory and principles for the opposite, for an ethical theory that consciously and explicitly serves and is useful to the proletarian revolutionary movement, its partisans, and the acts undertaken therein.

I said in “Rough Notes Toward a Communist Theory of Ethics”:

What this means is a consequentialism where[in] the interests of a class take precedence and the evaluation of actions is based upon whether they serve those interests, and thus whether they progress society along the trajectory of that class’s (the proletariat’s) revolutionary cause. Any such view of ethics I will call a class-utilitarianism; in this one, the preferenced class is the proletariat.

Notably, to a great extent any system of ideology of ethics is, in practical terms, a class-utilitarianism of a given class- every idea is constructed in a material context serving, if under class society, the interests of a class, and an ethical idea when enacted under a class society with a state-social order of rule by a given class will be enacted in service to that state and its system of laws, and therefore in service to the class that pilots that state.

But the ethical theories utilized to justify the laws of the bourgeois state, be they a liberal individualist utilitarianism or, more likely, reactionary idealist deontology, attempt to effect an appearance of impartiality. Even as the nakedness of the lie grows chillier every day, the court system of the bourgeois republic in North America continues to insist that “all are equal under law.” Though a clique of big investment capitalists may cause the deaths of hundreds of workers by deliberately investing capital into production that is maximally efficient at producing surplus value, but not safe for the worker, and be struck with mere pittance fines, though a worker who strikes back at the exploiter under force of arms is meanwhile likely to be executed for murder, still the pilots of the state, those very big capitalists themselves, declare their courts are fair.

Conversely, communists can have no illusions about so-called impartiality or equal consideration, no pretensions of loyalty to ideal principles supposedly existing over and above the real material conditions of society. We know that real truth and justice belong to the oppressed, and are made in the material world by those that have been oppressed, in the course of their concrete struggle to conquer social power and concretely transform society, destroying the old and resolving the contradictions of their oppression, bringing forth a new world order with its own new relations and conditions.

A communistic philosophical approach to ethics, laid out consciously as such, must be in conscious service to this struggle. It must be applicable firstly in the waging of the struggle from the position of the communists and the up-rising working class as subordinated under the tyranny of the capitalists and the rule of capital and the bourgeois dictatorial state-social order; then, as the proletariat, led by their militarized Communist Party and forming a democratic and collectivistic workers’ semi-state and socialist economic system, are transformed into the ruling class of the new socialist society, so too must the ethical thought of the movement be transformed into a dynamic thought that can be utilized by this new proletarian state-social order to pursue genuine justice in the transformation of society into communism, the resolution of the contradictions between classes and the advancement of human civilization beyond class society and into a full-stage communist epoch of free and equal prosperity and fulfilling, meaningful labour and life-activity for all.

This is what we are trying to articulate when we, as communists or those aspiring to be communists, talk of having ethical concerns: an ethic of deducing how best to wage the world revolution of the oppressed and exploited, to claim collective ownership and rule of the means and fruits of production for those that work them, to end imperialist parasitism of the worlds’ peoples by the capitalists of wealthy states, and to reorient the economic activity of civilization away from profit and growth of invested capital and toward the meeting of the needs and pleasures of all people.

§2 / Engels on Morals in Anti-Dühring

The Anti-Dühring of Friedrich Engels, the second pivotal thinker and great teacher in the development of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, is a book on many things. It is above all a defense, and a further advancement, of the nascent Marxist ideology, against some of its earliest philosophical detractors. Marx and Engels, as thinkers, had come out of a diverse milieu of the so-called “Young Hegelians.” The only real unity of this grouping is that they, like the previous generation of German philosophers, were inheritors of Hegel, but unlike that generation they were dedicated to radical reevaluation of the German intellectuals’ philosophical outlook- advancing Hegel where he’d been correct and negating him where he hadn’t. Marx and Engels really completed the project of this milieu with the philosophical innovation that has historically been referred to as “turning Hegel on his head”: the negation of Hegel’s idealism, and a recontextualizing of the scientific kernel of his dialectical analysis into a context of Heraclitean materialism in which, combined with critical analysis of French utopianism and English political-economic science, and the lessons of the Paris communards’ revolution of 1871, the scientific guiding ideology of future proletarian revolution could begin to be forged.

But many other currents of thought came also out of the Young Hegelians. The sort of prototypical Young Hegelian was Feuerbach, who was a major influence on Marx and Engels and inspired their Critique of the German Ideology (as a negation to the Hegelian-Feuerbachian worldview prevailing before that book, which endeavoured toward a kind of scientific and dialectical understanding of history and society, but founded on Hegelian idealism and ignoring concrete material life and struggle of classes¹)- but also influenced Bruno Bauer, the scientistic militant individualist who, together with Max Stirner, formed a major rightwing aspect of the Young Hegelian legacy, which Marx and Engels opposed in that critique and in Marx’s The Holy Family. And then there was Dühring- not a Young Hegelian, but rather an opponent of Hegel and Marx. Allegedly Dühring was a socialist and a scientific positivist², but he was a “socialist” who clung ardently to idealist conceptions of a priori ideal truth beyond the material world, disdained materialist science as he claimed to advance it and its methods, despised Jews and other oppressed minorities, and attempted to construct a refutation of the nascent Marxist programme for revolution and supplant it with a project of idealistic bourgeois utopianism³. Anti-Dühring was Engels’s riposte, once again asserting the necessity of a scientific, dialectical-materialist guiding ideology of proletarian revolution.

In the three chapters later reworked into the short historiographic and political-economic philosophical textbook Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, along with a new preface in the form of the essay On Historical Materialism (cited here), Engels elucidates the materialist system of analysis of dialectics and its application to the understanding of historical progression through dialectical progression of class struggles- this matter is also worked out by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto and the opening chapters of the Critique of the German Ideology, among other places, and was further advanced in understanding by, among others, Mao in On Contradiction and the PCP under the leadership of Gonzalo in their Fundamental Documents and General Political Line. This scientific-materialist analysis of history and political-economy, Engels showed, leads to a robust scientific ideology of the building of socialism by and for the broad masses through conquest of social power in an all-encompassing revolution, shown as a historical inevitability insofar as it is the final resolution of problems which fundamentally define the whole shape of our society- which is quite different from the utopian fancy of a few dedicated intellectuals getting together to build socialism on a ranch in upstate New York. More to the point of our present subject, however, Anti-Dühring also speaks on morals.

Specifically, three chapters are under the heading “Morality and Law” in the table of contents of the edition I’ve consulted: chapters IX-XI of Part I. Here, Engels appraises critically what Dühring has said on the matter. I’m not interested in reproducing his critique of Dühring here, but shall lay out some of the themes it turns on.

In Chapter IX, Engels deals with the matters of “universal truth” and “sovereignty of human thought.” Are there such truths? Dühring says yea; like Hegel, he sees at the ontological base of things an Absolute singular pure ontic unit, unchanging and fixed, to which all dialectical conflicts in the end resolve. And with this, human thoughts and ideals are or can be “sovereign” from those conflicts and processes, which are fluid and not fixed, and so there is a possibility of pure, universal, a priori truth, of political and moral norms which would be correct in “all possible worlds.” But phooey on that, says Engels. Yes, human thought has a capacity for truth, for direct and legitimate reference to the world- but it can attain truth, or be in some sense “sovereign”ly valid, only through circles and circles of the practice of development of new ideas and learning of new lessons in the context of dialectical engagement with our fellow components of material reality, reaching new resolutions to our problems. Truth lies in a “succession of processes” of refinement of our thought through its application to real struggles and its further development in the lessons and resolutions of those struggles- not in eternal truths. All moral and political ideas must be the expressions of material social relations and the struggles that exist in and around them- not of eternal a priori ideals.

In Chapter X, reaffirming the dismissal of idealist a priori truth as a theory in favor of a dialectical-materialist theory of true knowledge as the product of struggle/practice, Engels rebuffs Dühring on the matter of the “entire equality” of persons, the “basic form of moral justice” (Dühring’s words). No, says Engels, “application of the mathematical method to history, morals and law [i.e., working outward from assumed perfect axioms]… is only giving a new twist to the old favourite ideological method, also known as the a priori method, which consists in ascertaining the properties of an object, by logical deduction from the concept of the object, instead of from the object itself.” I.e., it is idealism- masquerading, in the mouth of Dühring, as immutable science. To suppose that all people are inherently, immutably equal is a nice sentiment- and we have no problem with equality! But it implies that equality as a concept exists definitely and immutably, while social relations are existent only relative to and in relation to such a concept.

It does no good, Engels says, to deduce the material facts of society from an a priori concept, a tidy little story about the perfect ideals at the heart of everything⁴; to the contrary, we must start with the real existing relations of what is and deduce what ought to be from that⁵. The concept of “equality” cannot exist without being invented first by the nascent bourgeoisie struggling to win “equality of opportunity” to own property in place of the divinely ordered hierarchy of feudalism, then negated and reinvented by the proletariat struggling to win “real equality” in place of the phony equality of market capitalism. Only now, in the age of the proletariat’s struggle against capital and the bourgeoisie, does the material context for the demand of socialist equality exist. Is it a legitimate demand? Undoubtedly! It is the summation of centuries of political-economic struggle for justice- but only with that material context can it exist at all. Once again, we find that it is a mistake to deduce social and ethical reality from ideas- we must do the opposite, must root our ideas in the material reality of society, the concrete struggle to resolve its contradictions. This is the road to a communist ethics.

The third and final of these chapters delves further into direct critique of Dühring’s own methods. Dühring insists he is able to perceive the constant, a priori ideals underlying social moral and legal principles from an all-encompassing scientific study of law and morality in all societies; Engels reveals his work clearly only displays a vague knowledge of the law of his own home country of Prussia. And this, of course, further proves Engels’s point: even when the partisans of reaction and ruling-class ideology claim to have access to secret universal truths beyond the material reality in which we mere ordinary people live, they can only really draw conclusions from within the matrix of that reality.

We progressive thinkers, of course, also have this limitation. Except we do not see it as a limitation; we are not afraid of the reality of flesh and machinery, nor the non-reality of God and Satan. We find ourselves embroiled in the dialectical-material social reality of a society defined in its historical progress by class struggles, and we- without apology- deduce our ideas from this reality and the progressive stance of the workers and allied classes and strata within it, through the concrete thought of dialectical materialism.

§3 / On Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours

Seemingly the first expression of a project of constructing a revolutionary proletarian ethics in specific, the first one I can find, is this book by Trotsky. Some students of Marxism-Leninism, of course, thinking of his betrayal of the revolution and of the nascent socialist workers’ regime in the USSR, will immediately stick out their tongues and refuse to study seriously anything said by Trotsky- this I understand, and once I was of this temperament once myself. But I think it is a juvenile error, which puts emotion and cliqueish loyalty before rigorous scientific philosophy.

Trotsky’s betrayal was a great tragedy for the world proletarian revolution. So too was his death, which that betrayal had made necessary- precisely because he had once been a vital leader, a cornerstone strategist of the war of the soviet socialist republics against Russian reaction. With Trotsky’s betrayal was negated, overturned, and lost the potential in him to have been a great revolutionary- a true tragedy. And about Trotsky’s death I feel much as I do about the killings of the young Romanov heirs, necessary to ensure they would not become rallying points for foreign imperialist powers conspiring to restore tsarism and capitalism. That these deaths were necessary to the revolution, and that they were therefore not bad in a concrete sense, indeed even good, may somewhat negate but does not totally do away with the opposed fact that they were tragic, and make one sad. I accept the necessity of these deaths but nonetheless feel sorrow for the dead, and wish their deaths had not been necessary. Indeed, I would like nothing better than for no violence at all to be necessary to revolution, for communism to be established straightaway by penstroke, for Chairman Gonzalo to have been wrong about the decisive significance of violence in the resolution of historical class struggle- but study of real conditions shows he was right.

Let us, then, with a sad salute to comrade Ramón Mercader, study fairly what the traitor had to say in this book, published after his betrayal and a year before his death.

The first sections of Trotsky’s short book, or long essay, excoriates the viewpoint which sees violence and terror from both sides of politics or both sides of the class struggle as equivalent. The bourgeoisie and proletariat, or lords and peasants, meet each other in battle, he says, and so it is perfectly inevitable that they must match each other in the weapons, as surely as any two opposites engaged in a dialectic of antagonistic struggle must always match each other: “Armies in combat are always more or less symmetrical; were there nothing in common in their methods of struggle they could not inflict blows upon each other¹.” But implying this means they are morally equivalent must entail comparing both against some ideal of morals existing altogether outside the material matrix of real social relations in class society, after the fashion of Kant- and a materialist philosophical system cannot justify belief in such an ideal. No, such a notion is pure religious idealism. Rather, it would seem Trotsky is going to contend, each class-cause involved in social struggle must develop its own moral outlook, suited to its class, arising from material circumstances. And the matter of moral comparison and judgement can never be done “neutrally,” outside these frameworks. It is a matter, then, of choosing the right one- the one in service to the liberation of the downtrodden and oppressed, or the one in service to the amassing of wealth for the rich?

Trotsky responds to critics that have compared “Bolshevism” to “Jesuitism,” regarding the (he alleges) originally Jesuit doctrine that “the ends justify the means,” a sort of proto-consequentialist thesis. Indeed, he draws a clear connection between this Jesuitism and the “Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism” of Bentham and Mill, arguing both display the same complications derived from the dialectical vacillation between end and means², and both in turn played a role as justifying ideologies for the political-economic machinations of classes, in turn the feudal nobility and the capitalist-imperialist bourgeoisie that succeeded them, with the former being reactionary and the latter, in its time, progressive, but not so progressive that the venerable (bourgeois ideological leader) Martin Luther could not “call… for the execution of revolting peasants as ‘mad dogs’.”³

In short, Trotsky is dismissing the idea that there has ever been a class or a ruling clique which has been morally “pure” in a way that other rulers of other societies through history have not been, or that there has ever been an ethics which was over and above its material social context- as he puts it, “Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing immutable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality… has a class character.”⁴ A system of ethical thinking, in short, is part of the ideology of a class and its historical movement in the material-dialectical dynamics of class society; moral systems exist as part of the ideological thought emerging from and guiding the political projects of classes, from which they cannot be separated, and each system of ethical thought belongs distinctly to a class and to its historical project. Every class-movement maintains its own moral superiority over the dogma that “the ends justify the means” when the ends and means in question are those of the enemy; every class-movement is willing to justify the means by the ends when they are sufficiently desirable ends, sufficiently familiar means.

It is easy for a ruling class, whichever one (the feudal nobility, the bourgeoisie, the democratic proletarian majority of socialism), to maintain moral superiority above violent means when it rules, when its ends are seemingly achieved- not to say violence is not ever-present in the capitalist economy maintained presently under bourgeois rule, which it unambiguously is, but it is well hidden. Yet in time of crisis an old ruling class will turn to any means to achieve the end of staying in power, a new one turn to any means to win power. Revolution and reaction alike, when the contradictions between classes and their causes come to a head, turn to terror. The same bourgeois moralists who condemned the “amoralism” of Bolshevik revolutionary terror in 1917, 1922 were eager to queue up for the reactionary terror of Franco if it defeated communism, for the reactionary terror of violent union-busting throughout the 1910s-30s if it defeated socialism.⁵ So, says Trotsky, and I agree with him at least in this, let there be no pretense of a moral high ground in a discussion of ethics and socialist revolution.

“Common sense,” whether such a normative rationalist abstraction exists or not⁶, cannot be depended upon in a calculation of ethical merits for acts in a revolutionary or crisis situation. In such a circumstance, rigorous, scientific, dialectical-materialist analysis is needed.⁷

This is a good thesis, well taken. From here on the essay devolves- he is concerned, in a not altogether valueless way, with disproving the liberal thesis that there was some special “amoralism” to the Bolsheviks’ revolution that superseded the goodness of its ends, as though the bourgeoisie are not as willing to resort to (fascist) terror for their, less noble⁸, own ends⁹ (maintenance of capitalist-imperialism). But thereafter, the essay degenerates in the main into a silly screed against “Stalinism”- just what we expect from the traitor, who was vital to the initial conquest of power for the workers’ socialist semi-state but turned against it when he discovered its citizenry, the liberated ruling socialist proletariat of the soviet-socialist Republics, did not want him for its head of state.

Trotsky is very keen to prove to his audience, of Trotskyites and liberals wary of “Stalinism,” that the supposed Stalinist horror is of a different character than genuine socialist revolution, that it stands in relation to the socialist project as the Thermidorian Reaction did¹⁰. Yet he is keen also to justify the right of genuine socialist revolution to use violence, to explicate the utilitarian calculus that makes revolutionary terror acceptable as a weapon against reaction; in this he is correct (revolutionary terror is an acceptable and necessary weapon against reaction), but he has a further goal which is illegitimate: an insistence that the legitimate force used by revolution is distinct from the illegitimate force of so-called “Stalinism¹¹.” In this, Trotsky is writing less for an audience of communists or real members or friends of the proletariat struggling for liberation than for liberals, making a simpering “not all communists” appeal for vaguely “progressive” liberals to feel safe in calling themselves “communists” without associating with Stalin- and, more significantly, with genuine proletarian revolutionary militancy which, in every country, has had the name of Stalin emblazoned on its banner as surely as that of Lenin and, today, of Mao.

Trotsky is fighting a losing ideological battle in these parts of the essay. His dearest wish is to convince us that yes, violent revolutionary seizure of power for the proletariat is justifiable, ethical, necessary, and good as a road to the worthy goal of communism… and that the so-called Stalinism, i.e. the use of force to advance soviet-democratic and socialist power in the USSR against the counterrevolutionary machinations of bourgeois elements within and without, was illegitimate. But once we accept the first clause, we must see that the second is nonsense. It is interesting how often Trotsky appeals to the anti-fascist war in Spain, insisting that the use of extreme tactics by revolutionaries in that war were legitimate¹² (about which he is correct); yet he also condemns the “Stalinist” communists of Spain (of the Spanish and Catalan Marxist-Leninist communist parties, PCE and PSUC) for their tactical alliance with anarchists and bourgeois democrats in the Spanish war and the revolutionary terror those anti-fascist forces utilized against their enemies and against Trotskyite cliques (like the so-called “Workers’ Marxist Unification Party,” POUM.) which sought to fight the real communists while allowing Franco to advance¹³- precisely that terror which was justified in fighting against fascism and for socialism! And more interesting still is a passage in which Trotsky admits:

If it is true that the repressions safeguarding the privileges of the new aristocracy have the same moral value as the revolutionary measures of the liberating struggle, then Stalin is completely justified [as is the administration he has led]…¹⁴ (emphasis added)

And what, then, are these “privileges of the new aristocracy?” This is only Trotsky’s dirty epithet for the organs of soviet-democratic semi-state power by which the proletariat in the Soviet Republics governed itself, dispossesed and proletarianized its former exploiters, ran economic production democratically for the common good of all and with all expected to contribute and benefit fairly, and owned all things in common! In short, what Trotsky slanders as “repressions safeguarding the privileges of the new aristocracy” is precisely the continuation of “the revolutionary measures of the liberating struggle,” led heroically and democratically by the CPSU(b), whose great leader was Stalin!

Does this clown suppose that the moment the Union of Republics was founded it became illegitimate for it to exercise state power to continue its existence; does he suppose that the workers then lost all right to take over control of the means and fruit of production, to defend their collective economic structures from imperialist antagonism, to utilize arms against those who would destroy this socialist economy and society- to do, in short, precisely what they’d founded it to do?! Nonsense, nonsense!This fellow should learn from Engels and Lenin- it is right and just that the proletariat, the majority class into which all others are subsumed as socialism advances, take power over economic life by force and authority and maintain it under force and authority as they utilize their semi-state power, under the state-social order of the Democratic D. of the P., as they overturn the oppressions of class society and build up the new free and equal relations of communism¹⁵. This man who was once a great revolutionary general should have had the strength of character to put the revolution before his petty rivalries and pride, to cheer on the further advancement of the soviet workers’ state toward freedom, equality, and final resolution of unjust contradictions of class society even if it was his old rival, Stalin, and not he, whom the revolutionary soviet-democratic citizenry chose to be their captain.

relevant image.

There is some interesting material after he goes off on his anti-“Stalinist” jilted lover’s jealous screed. I’ll close this section quoting at length from this passage:

The clerks of the ruling classes call [the communists] ‘amoralists.’ In the eyes of conscious workers this accusation carries a complimentary character. It signifies: Lenin refused to recognize moral norms established by slave-owners for their slaves and never observed by the slave-owners themselves; he called upon the proletariat to extend the class struggle into the moral sphere too. Whoever fawns before precepts established by the enemy will never vanquish that enemy!¹⁶

But we must add to this, as an addendum to the penultimate sentence: and so too did Stalin, and so have Mao and Gonzalo!

Trotsky’s work has some good ideas in it. Shame about the betrayal of the revolution. Summing up, what takeaways we can carry forward from studying this work of Trotsky’s:

Cautious affirmation of Trotsky’s work on these points:

1. Rejection of all pretenses of neutrality, or the higher impartial morals thereof
2. Taking up the ethics of the proletariat, the ideological outlook upon ethics born from and in the progressive struggle waged by the proletariat and allied classes and strata against exploitation by capitalists and capital, unreservedly and proudly, not as phony neutrals but genuine communist partisans, explicitly and unapologetically taking a side.
3. Application of this ethical viewpoint in service to the revolutionary movement, bringing the lessons we have refined from resolving the dialectical struggles of experience to bear in helping us resolve the next struggles, moving towards the final victory over the capitalist-imperialist enemy.

And firm negation on these:

1. Rejecting the “anti-Stalinist” counterrevolution, instead understanding that the use of force against class-enemies by the workers’ socialist and soviet-democratic semi-state of the USSR under socialism as the ethically and politically correct and historically progressive continuation of the revolutionary class struggle, maintaining and advancing the power of the victorious new democratic majority ruling class, the liberated socialist proletariat, on the communist road.
2. Taking from the experience of the USSR, and the further lessons of the Chinese revolution and the ongoing revolutionary People’s Wars around the world, continuing this struggle further, toward the spread of socialism everywhere and the further march of class struggle under socialism and triumphant proletarian majority rule toward the construction of full-stage communism. We must learn from, and apply and advance, the lessons of Marxism, the Marxism-Leninism that developed in and beyond its application to revolution in Russia and Europe, and the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that developed in and beyond its application to revolution in China and the modern colonized world, the guiding ideology of the proletariat and its revolutionary cause today.

These lessons, from a critical dialectical engagement with the work of a former communist turned traitor, will be useful to us in the development of a rigorous, scientific, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist outlook on ethical questions. This is our revolutionary and progressive class-utilitarianism of the proletariat, of its interests and revolutionary cause and destiny, the final liberation of humanity from class contradictions and the unfreedom and inequality of class society.

§4 / Mao’s “Proletarian Revolutionary Utilitarianism” in Aesthetics and Ethics

It is not Trotsky, of course, but Mao, and after him Sison and Majumdar and above all Gonzalo, who sets the real foundation for a present-day communist ethics. And we will find in his ideas further advancement of the concepts we see in earlier writings, the fruits of further material advancements in the world communist revolution made through the socialist revolution in China of the Chinese proletariat and their Communist Party.

In his Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, Mao Tse Tung said:

Is this attitude of ours utilitarian? Materialists do not oppose utilitarianism in general but the utilitarianism of the feudal, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois classes; they oppose those hypocrites who attack utilitarianism in words but in deeds embrace the most selfish and short-sighted utilitarianism. There is no “ism” in the world that transcends utilitarian considerations; in class society there can be only the utilitarianism of this or that class. We are proletarian revolutionary utilitarians and take as our point of departure the unity of the present and future interests of the broadest masses, who constitute over 90 per cent of the population; hence we are revolutionary utilitarians aiming for the broadest and the most long-range objectives[.]¹

“This attitude of ours,” in this context, is an attitude about aesthetics, the philosophy of artistic and aesthetic experience its role in society and psychosocial life; specifically this attitude to the role of art in society:

To sum up: through the creative labour of revolutionary writers and artists, the raw materials found in the life of the people are shaped into the ideological form of literature and art serving the masses of the people. [And, that (making art that serves the People ideologically and helps advance their struggle with agitation and propaganda) is what revolutionary-minded artists should be doing.]²

Nonetheless, the same attitude, proletarian revolutionary utilitarianism, can clearly extend to the ethical field of philosophy; furthermore, it is indeed the correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist attitude to have. Understanding this attitude and what it meant to Mao and his Chinese communist comrades at Yenan, in which we can build upon the correct aspects of what Trotsky said (while necessarily negating the bad, for Mao was a loyal student of Stalin who, while vigorously criticizing his errors, never failed to uphold the correct aspects of his leadership³).

What is this attitude; what does it entail? A rejection, first of all, of any dogma about a “higher” cause or purpose or justificatory agent for acts, deeds, and causes that lies beyond material reality, beyond the interactive dialectical processes of becoming which constitute the actual being of objects, events, and persons in concrete reality. We shall not appeal, for moral absolution, to the will of God, or the pure ideals of virtues, or a unilateral context-neutral “categorical imperative” derived from “pure reason” with no reference to material dialectical interactions as they stand in reality. No- our concerns and judgements about how we act derive exclusively from the critical analysis of the situations we are actually in, and the resolution of the contradictions or problems in those situations- we develop all knowledge from, first, the empirical lessons derived in practical experience of resolution of contradictions by struggle in social life, and, second, the rational refinements and universals derived from further development of those lessons in struggle to resolve contradictions in thought⁴. Put even more simply, we derive all truths from the resolutions reached through struggle in the real material world, and the refining and rational analysis thereof- not from any a priori ideal.

This means we abjure any supposed ethical constant that allegedly forbids what would otherwise be the appropriate tactic to a situation. And it means that, in place of such an ideal, we uphold as ethical lodestar only the concrete interests of the progressive cause of the protagonists of historical development in the present epoch- the proletarian class, waging their struggle against the imperialist bourgeoisie, and leading the other allied classes and strata in that struggle, to resolve the contradictions of the capitalist-imperialist political-economic system and its state-social order, the reactionary class-dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

In short, Mao’s conception of proletarian revolutionary utilitarianism must mean: we eschew the idealism of appealing to something “higher” and more important than the real material reality with which we and the masses we stand with interface objectively and subjectively with in everyday social life as a lodestar for judging what is correct and good; rather, it is precisely to this reality, and to the standing and potentiality of the progressive masses and principally the proletariat within its relations, that we look for that guidance.

Maoist Proletarian Revolutionary Utilitarianism, as I see it, provides us the core of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ethics we need. It realizes perfectly the lessons we found in Engels, and in the positive aspects of the work of Trotsky, the traitor. More significantly, it is rooted in, and returns to aid and guide, the struggle of the proletariat, peasantry, and oppressed classes and strata of the world, struggling concretely for concrete liberation.

§5 / The meaning of “Good” for Proletarian Revolutionary Utilitarianism

Alright then, but let’s have some thought experiments in practical application. We use ethical thought to decide what it is “good” for us to do in a certain moment. We have shown that we should deduce “good” from concrete social study, not from universal a priori ideals of any kind, and we have built a foundation for how to do that on consequentialism and radical utilitarianism. But what practical definition of a “good act” does this give to us?

What act is most good for Proletarian Revolutionary Utilitarianism, in a given context, is that which is most historically progressive of the class struggle, of the further development of humanity, principally through the coming-into-power of a proletarian majority ruling itself and society through a socialist political-economy and a state social order of sovietist-type worker democracy, toward communism. An act is good, and the more good, the more conducive it is to this forward progress; an act is bad, and the more bad, the more it impedes it. All acts have a dual aspect; we must reckon the contradictory and fluid dialectical nature of our acts to find the progressive and reactionary aspects, reckon which is dominant and which emerges finally in resolution, and by this decide what possible actions are best to undertake.

This is a very easy rubric to apply, of course, in obviously political situations. Should the revolution advance, or should it not? It should. It even works well in the political aspects of one’s personal life. Should I go to the protest against US military support to the fascist bureaucrat — capitalist semicolonial regime in the Philippines tomorrow with my comrades, if I am able, or should I not? I should. Of course there could be slightly more complex questions (Should I go to the protest, which will be a positive act for the agitation of the masses today, or should I spend the time on my propaganda artwork, which may aid in agitation at several protests in the future? Which good is the larger?), but the rubric works well here, and is easy.

But seemingly it falls flat in less obviously politically, but still undoubtedly ethically fraught situations. I want this candy- should I steal it? Well. In reality, of course, any case involving the acquisition or loss of a use-value (e.g. the use of candy for eating) is an economic situation, and therefore, immensely political. Is taking the candy exploitatively appropriating a use-value away from its makers, or is it an act of re-appropriation of use-value away from the capitalists that extract value from labour to sell it and back to the dispossessed toiling masses? If it is the former, certainly I should not do it. If it is the latter, perhaps I should, but then again, there are further questions to ask:

• Does this act have possible longer term consequences which may be harmful to the interests of the working class, its allies, and its cause of human liberation? If I steal candy from my friend’s job, and do it frequently, and get caught frequently, my friend may be fired, the boss may use this excuse to worsen security protocols that are antagonistic to worker organizing and solidarity, and I will seem a selfish fool, making it much less likely I can successfully promote the doctrine of selfless commitment to revolutionary community.
• Does this act have potential value as a propaganda communication? Note that in most cases, the anarchist idea of “propaganda of the deed” is pure nonsense. But on a small scale, is it possible that, in demonstrating that it is possible to get away with such an act to my friend who is frightened of the seemingly total power of the bourgeoisie in their state will increase their confidence in the possibility of successful disobedience, making it easier to win them over to illegal methods of struggle (a category which, theoretically, ultimately includes guerrilla war against the state).
• and so on.

About the above case, note this: certainly in a multitude of cases, theft is to be regarded as wrong. But there are quite plausible scenarios in which the answers to the above questions lead us to consider it permissible, or indeed “good.” This is to be contrasted sharply with the absolutist deontological ethics of the bourgeoisie, in which an a priori “categorical imperative” makes absolute decrees about whether an act is, in any possible case, Good or Bad- and any act violating the bourgeois cult of property and ownership is certainly Bad.

So, we can see, even the most quotidian, incidental, seemingly apolitical moments of personal life can in fact be evaluated within the matrix of political economy and history. And indeed, it should be obvious that any crime to do with ownership is of political-economic nature, and therefore becomes a battleground of the class war between capital and the productively labouring humanity of the proletariat. But indeed, any act by persons, persons being social creatures, is a social act, and so can be understood to have a role in the historical dynamics of history- i.e., the class struggle.

What of homicide, murder, physical affront, etc? We understand these things in a majority of cases to be wrongs- but why? Rigorous inquiry into our ethical convictions is of value, not to bring us to a state of immorality, but rather precisely to strengthen to the point of a rigorous scientific ideology our convictions about what we ought to do in the matrix of society. These acts, the above-named, are understood as wrong in that they are predominantly productive of negative utility (in the terms we take from Bentham)- they are opposed to the interests of a majority of those involved, propagating suffering over pleasure and the undesired over the desired of the involved parties, exacting a net-bad effect upon society. In short we understand these acts as bad in that they are against the social interests of the involved parties- they are contrary to that doctrine and attitude which says “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” They are bad because they negate the potentiality for a society in which none is oppressed or repressed or exploited, in which all meet their needs together, aiding one another and themselves, for the good of both the collective and each and every individual. These acts are understood to us as bad, in a majority of cases, precisely insofar as they negate our emerging consciousness of the communist society toward which we develop through productive political struggle and the class struggle waged for liberation of the toiling majority. Acts of wanton or misanthropic violence are bad in that they negate the growing, developing, collectively harmonious and mutually-affirming attitude of collaboration and aid between persons, for the good of all and of each individual, the attitude that reaches its zenith in the communist revolution.

And when acts of violence are justified, it is when they are instead conducive to that attitude’s propagation and to the concrete unification of humanity- principally the proletariat- into the social force that can bring about the forward historical development of communism: the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat as a state-social order, and the revolutionary movement to build it, organized according to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Such is the case for the revolutionary liquidation of exploiters by the armed masses, the use of violent means to prevent exploitation or imperialist war, the violent resistance of bourgeois state repression, etc. There may be excesses in revolution where more negative utility than necessary is incurred, but still revolutionary violence is good because it is productive in its consequences, in this way.

Very roughly: what is bad is that which is negatory to the development of society, across history, toward communism. What is good is that which propagates the communist attitude and the concrete social movement toward communism.

This is not to say such old watchwords as kindness, fairness, reciprocity, decency, etc. have no utility- rather, they have a use-value precisely in that, at the present stage in the historical development of human civilization, in which we aspire to resolve the contradictions of capitalist-imperialism with development to socialism and communism, they express the nascent communist attitude, the collective consciousness which can reach full fruition only through the material achievement of communist political-economy and a communist community order across the whole world.

CONCLUSION: WHAT TO DO WITH A COMMUNIST ETHICS

A communist flag. This clipart of the hammer and sickle was made by me, based on a version used in propaganda of the PCP circa 1980s.

What good, what use is it to have a communist view of ethics, of right and wrong? It is useless in itself. It has a use-value in a context, however. It is something we must carry with us into the streets, in urban class struggle and People’s War, and into the countryside, in rural class struggle and People’s War, as we carry out the tasks of the movement.

There is a view popular with some who aspire to be Marxists that “ethics” and “politics” are altogether separate modes of thought. Memorably, I recall an academic colleague once trying to convince me along this line of thought to vote for Joe Biden: perhaps ethically we as individuals may object to showing any sort of support for an imperialist warmonger, but this ethical concern exists only in the realm of our liberal individualist consciousness; in the real material world of the class struggle all that truly matters (he said) is preventing fascism, and that means (he said) a vote for the said warmonger. The nonsensical conclusions which this supposed distinction leads to reveals the nonsensical nature of the idea itself.

Ethics is a philosophical rubric, at its best a scientific one, for the comparative analysis of human acts. And human acts necessarily occur in social contexts, i.e. within the dialectical interactions of material systems of political-economy- see again the quotation from Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in the second section of chapter 2. So if our ethical rubric is scientific and materialist, understood as fundamentally based in and describing the real materiality of human acts, then it is altogether inseparable from a scientific philosophical analysis-critique of political economy, and from the ideology which guides political action.

For communists, our judgement of what acts to undertake derives principally not from any abstract reified ideal morals, but from the material conditions of society and the ideological lessons, derived from study of those conditions, needed to apply action to change those conditions in a progressive way. Certainly we do not undertake revolution, principally, in the name of an abstract sense of moral good- we undertake revolution to resolve the contradictions and injustices of class society, and we understand these contradictions and the need for progressive change to resolve them from the concrete lessons of collective human and class experience, principally that of the proletariat, as well as other oppressed people-groups and classes, and with the ideological lessons of that experience. Any idea of morality in the abstract is not a cardinal philosophical guide for communists- but ethical principles founded under Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology can be useful tools to apply in how we act in the world.

In the true and scientific historiography of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist philosophy, we understand the necessary deciding role of violence in the process of history, the dialectical struggle waged between classes with contradicting interests, progressing toward revolutionary resolutions and new social modes and economic systems. We are not afraid of violence; neither are we reckless and irrational cultists of violence for its own sake. One use for a communist ethics is to guide us in how we approach acts of revolutionary struggle, especially violent struggle. As we have seen in the previous chapter’s final section, we are on no account to be cowed from revolution by the necessity of violence, for violence necessary for revolution is, in its revolutionary progressive import, good. Have no reservation against force or terror when it is really productive in its outcome, when it takes up a use-value for the cause- for a positive outcome of an act for society, for the progressive historic development toward communism, must be understood as the very essence of good for our revolutionary progressive utilitarianism. To kill what must die to be stayed from evil… is no evil. But have no love of retribution or cruelty for itself; it is unseemly. To be sure excesses of violence occur in revolutionary explosions of mass struggle, and must be accepted, for they are by no means worse than the centuries of brutality under the old order such a revolution negates and overturns. But it is the role of principled communists to encourage a revolution toward the most effective scientifically-directed path of socialist-communist construction; a sense of Proletarian Revolutionary Utilitarian ethics is a tool in this task. Rehabilitate the evildoers you can. But do not apologize for those you cannot.

The revolution is founded not on highfalutin’ moral concerns, but on the immediate material reality of the exploited peoples of the world: their dialectical relation to the forces repressing them, their consciousness of that relation’s central problems, and the struggle they undertake to transform reality and resolve those problems. Yet a revolutionary ethical understanding is one part of the guiding ideology that emerges in this consciousness, in the manner described by dialectical materialism¹, and aids the gathering revolutionary forces in deducing what to do. Specifically, its use is to evaluate on the relatively small scale of the immediate which particular courses are preferable, in the advancement of the cause of communism, in the broader context of the relatively large scale of the historical achievement of the tasks of the proletariat’s struggle to seize political-economic social power, abolish capitalist-imperialism, and emancipate itself and all humanity. In accomplishing these tasks,

What are these tasks?

I don’t wish to be verbose in repeating yet again what I’ve already said, and what I am only repeating from the great leaders and teachers of our movement (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Gonzalo, etc.), who’ve said it better, about what must be done: the proletariat must organize itself, around the democratic leadership of its militarized and militant Communist Party in each country, into in each country a new nascent state-social order and socialist political-economy of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, uniting into it all allied social strata and ultimately all humanity, paving the way toward global communism; it must do this by the strategies of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (and the universal lessons of local revolutions’ guiding thoughts, such as the Gonzalo Thought of Peru), the strategies it has developed over centuries of this struggle. I have said this elsewhere. And again, more to the point, others have said it far better- I have only tried to make the classics more familiar to my twenty-first century, mainly North American peers.

Yet we can talk about what specific tasks stand at the present moment, and how the philosophizing we’ve done herein stands relevant to them. In the countries where the revolutionary People’s War is underway, or those where it is near launch, it must be advanced always, and liquidated never. It must advance along the path neither toward liquidation of revolutionary violence nor toward reactionary excesses of violence, both of which are paths embodied in opportunist lines; the correct path, the negation of opportunism and furtherance of revolutionary struggle and construction, is the principled deployment of violence in line with the careful analysis of the situation by dialectical materialist methods and in line with revolutionary ethics. We may use the People’s War in Peru as an example: neither should revolutionaries take the path of the MOVADEF opportunists, who have liquidated genuine progress in favor of stagnant efforts to reform the comprador- and bureaucrat-bourgeois semi-colonial state, nor that of the so-called “MPCP,” a gang of thugs who claim to represent a Left line while in reality simply negating MLMism and Gonzalo Thought and deploying pointless horrific violence against the very oppressed groups and peasants and workers that revolutionaries ought to aid, in the name of their own lumpen-bourgeois private interests; the path revolutionaries must follow is that still blazed by the legitimate PCP in base areas like Mantaro Rojo, and as an international leading Party in the Liga Comunista Internacional: the construction by the masses with the Party’s democratic Mass Line leadership of the nascent New economy and state, through means of both armed struggle and organized worker-peasant seizure of power and democratic rule. This is the path to an end to semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism and capitalist-imperialism, then to socialism and an end to all capitalism, then to global full-stage communism.

In countries like ours (I mean the part of North America governed as the so-called United States), where a revolutionary Leadership does not yet clearly exist or has not yet cemented itself in the role of leading a vanguard Party recognized by the masses, the effort of communists must be focused especially toward (re)constituting such a Leadership and such a Party. In the work of this, which entails organizing into pre-Party formations and what will become the organizations of the United Front and going amongst the masses to practice and develop the Mass Line that will in time guide that emergent Leadership, revolutionary ethics can aid us in developing the correct attitudes to carry. We must understand how to be “more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any individual, and more concerned about others than about [our]sel[ves],”² understanding the collective (negating the individualism in Bentham’s version of utilitarian) interests of the proletariat and allied strata in revolution and liberation as the central source for Proletarian Revolutionary Utilitarian calculations of the good. We must also have a concerned regard for the interests of our comrades, including ourselves, recognizing that the liberation of each and the liberation of all exist in a unity, with common utilitarian interests- a dialectic which should be harmonious and nonantagonistic, with the collective understood as principal but the personal seen as a vital subordinate part. These are the correct attitudes, ethical and ideological, to carry as we go about our work of building up the movement for revolution.

On the international level, now is a time for two things: militancy and unity. The International Communist Movement must understand itself as a movement at war- the capitalist-imperialist world political-economic order today functions at perpetual war; so if the enemy exists at war, the movement against it, the communist movement, of course must also be at war. It must be militant, militarized. Not shrinking from revolutionary violence, it must understand the further advancement of communist revolution, by any means, as fundamentally good- it must meet the enemy in kind, with matched weapons, on the battlefield. The People’s Wars must advance, toward the building of New States and, in time, socialist political-economic institutions and revolutionary workers’ semi-states across the world, leading unto full-stage communism.

And in the waging of the global revolutionary war against the forces of the capitalist-imperialist states and big bourgeoisie, and their lackeys (reactionaries, fascists, compradors, comprador- and bureaucrat-bourgeoisie and semifeudal cronies in the colonized countries, revisionists, etc.), the International Communist Movement must have unity. A “joint war room” of the militant communist Parties of the world, a new Communist International, is to be built. This is already underway under the banner of the International Communist League. Some are dismissive of its efforts; certainly, there remains much struggle to be had toward the synthesis of a new International- after all, it is easy for things to divide from one into two, and preciously difficult and rare to unify into one. But the supposed opportunist unilateralism of the ICL leadership alleged by the so-called CPS-RF in Switzerland and other revisionists, opportunists, wreckers, and pigs does not exist; on the matter of its building open democratic line struggle does and should go on; in seeking new and higher resolutions to present contradictions, it strengthens, not weakens, what is being built³.

The task of the communist movement in each country and in the whole world is to work toward preparing for, readying for, launching, advancing, and winning revolutionary People’s Wars waged by the proletariat, to liberate themselves and all humanity by seizing political-economic power in a socialist order, on the road to communism. Anyone who aspires to be a communist must aspire to contribute to this effort, on the national and international effort. Revolutionary Proletarian Utilitarian ethics shows: this is the highest good a person, in the present historic moment, can do.

☙NOTES & CITATIONS❧

Chapter 1, § 1

1. “‘Utilitarianism’ and ‘Radicalism’ were newly coined philosophical and political labels in Bentham’s time, both of which were proudly worn by him (although the latter not until the latter decades of his life).” -Stephen G Engelmann. See Selected Writings, Jeremy Bentham et al, edited by Stephen G. Engelmann, Yale University Press, 2011. See Engelmann’s introduction. Quotation is from page 18.
2. Stewart is the older, Scots spelling. As England was the richer and more powerful of the two central Stewart kingdoms, the anglicized Stuart was often used instead.
3. The last Stewart monarch was William’s heir and sister-in-law Anne I Stewart. George I Hanover succeeded her. The bourgeois revolution in England is well-historicized in Engels’s On Historical Materialism, identified with the emergence of Calvinism as part of the second of the three big steps in the emergence of capitalist political-economy and bourgeois-dictatorship states in Europe (the first is Luther’s reformation, the third the French Revolution; this second, Calvinist step would also include the bourgeois revolution in the Netherlands). Says Engels, after decades or centuries of intensifying contradictions in feudalism (the details of which have been gone into elsewhere), the explosive struggle of the “third estate”- the nascent bourgeoisie, the burghers and upper peasant freeholders and the merchants in the towns- to overthrow the feudal economy and state-social order and set up their own (capitalism and a class-dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) began with the revolutionary overthrow of Charles I Stewart and was mostly completed over the course of the war for rule by a bourgeois Parliament, got a minor setback with the Stewart restoration of Charles II (and, I might add, the traitorousness of Cromwell the génocidaire), and then was finally completed with Charles’s son (James II and VII Stewart) being overthrown by the bourgeois Calvinist and market-liberal partisans of William II Orange and his wife, Mary II Stewart (James’s own daughter). He also remarks, however, on how quickly the British bourgeoisie began to emulate the styles and politics of their noble predecessors, relative to in other countries of Europe (chiefly France)- see note below.
4. The Hanovers were not only monarchs of Great Britain (which had officially become one state, not two kingdoms, under Anne I Stewart, though the supplanting of local Scots and English feudal lords by the grand international power of capital and bourgeoisie was largely done by William III Orange’s reign), but also first electoral princes and then kings of Hanover in Germany- one of the many tiny states that had been feudal fiefdoms in the Holy Roman Empires, which were left uneasily transitioning into the new capitalist European order after the revolutions in the Netherlands and France and then Napoleon’s wars had left the HRE first decrepit and then shattered. By the time of George III Hanover, the Hanoverian dynasty largely treated their namesake state as a secondary concern, and Britain and its growing capitalist empire as the principal. The novels of Jane Austen, written under George III Hanover, with their gentle satire of the pastoral rich, present a valuable picture of the British ruling classes in the time of the Hanoverian dynasty: the real essence of the economy was capitalist and the real ruling classes were a new urban bourgeoisie, but their capitalistic manner of gaining wealth was ugly and industrial, and so they bought their way into pretenses of feudal titles and houses and landed estates in the countryside (where the smallest and least important of feudal holdings still, nominally, existed), so as to appeal to the remnants of feudal hegemonic ideology (remember, after all, that their monarchs came from a place where the ascendance of the bourgeoisie was not yet really established); meanwhile, the remnants of the actual and original feudal gentry still clung to their titles and lands and servants and exorbitant lifestiles, but in practice were continually in financial destitution as they tried to survive in the new capitalist economy and so, holding their noses all the while at the stink of London factories and Black Country foundries, allied themselves by contract and marriage with the new bourgeoisie. Compare, in short, some characters in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Bennet is a feudal landholder of noble blood, master of the little fief of Longbourn (fictitious), whose family is in perpetual financial panic over the lack of fortunes for their daughters (though his father-in-law is a bourgeois). His richer friend Lucas, not noble but a new-made bourgeois capital-holder and buyer and seller of commodities, “had been formerly in trade… where he had made a tolerable fortune and risen to the honour of knighthood,” buying his way into the rural gentry and then affecting “disgust to his business” in hindsight (See Pride and Prejudice chapters V, VII). Another major character, Bingley, is similarly a bourgeois whose family is possessed of a wealth held as and derived from capital, “their… fortune… acquired by trade,” and now- in the course of the book- set themselves the task of marrying or buying into some faux noble titles (Chapter IV). Clearly, on the most ephemeral aesthetic level, Yet it is the sisters of the richer bourgeois Bingley that look down on their counterparts, the daughters of the poorer feudal master Bennet, and not the reverse! The radical and revolutionary bourgeoisie, the early liberals and Whigs that had won a revolution against feudalism, were increasingly replaced with an established class of reactionary capitalists who, while making all their social power on the grounds of capital (especially capital held in the slave trade and the factory industries), did their best to disguise themselves as pastoral feudal lords.
5. Locke argued the private ownership of productive property, the means of the production of the wealth of society, by a minority propertied class was justified, because it had arisen from the honest labours of the progenitors of the said class in the process of humanity’s emergence from the “state of nature” into “civilization.” Marx decisively purged the myth that the origins of private ownership were peaceful and “fair” from the philosophy and science of political-economy in the chapters of his opus Capital dealing with “primitive accumulation” and the violent origins of the institution of capital. The “state of nature” thought experiment, questioning how human beings arose out of that supposed pre-civilized state and achieved civilization, was once an enormously popular game of political philosophers (Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau all offer versions, as, after a fashion, does the Hebrew Bible); Engels offers a sort of recontextualizing and sublation of the notion of an abrupt break between “natural” animals and “civilized” humans in his On the Role Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, an essay which is dated but ingenuous and discusses the manner in which complex class societies among humans emerged through the development by evolution of an ability to apply labour-power in creating use-values for the community to use, rather than merely harvesting the use-values furnished by nature, leading to the development of settled societies and repressive states in which a select minority, the emerging propertied classes, would utilize force to maintain control of labour-power and means of production at the expense of the working majority, who came to be enslaved as this process unfolded in ancient “cradles of civilization” like Greece, Mesopotamia, the river valleys of China and that of Egypt, the middle stretches of the Americas, etc. Modern natural sciences have taught us, of course, that there is no special distinction between humans and other animals that is beyond the scope of dialectical development in the material world- many other animals perform productive labour in their societies of roughly the same kind that defines human societies, including macaques that utilize tools in harvesting insects and attine ants that farm fungi, though only humans (thus far) do so in a manner of industry.
6. Engels discusses the turn of the English bourgeoisie toward reaction and alliance with what remained of the English gentry (who today have been subsumed into the bourgeoisie) while the bourgeoisie elsewhere- namely in France- remained revolutionary and progressive during the early 1800s, in On Historical Materialism- See also note 4.
7. The Chartists were a working-class movement in 19th century politics under Victoria I Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, demanding the right to vote for all men regardless of property qualifications. Some elements of the Chartist movement also demanded a republic in Britain; Bentham was ideologically close to them, but before their time. The first publication of The Communist Manifesto in English was in The Red Republican, a socialist publication representing the left wing of the Chartists. Another Chartist forerunner, Henry Hunt, was the first British politician to propose suffrage for women in Parliament, in response to a petition from his women constituents.

Chapter 1, § 2

1. See Engelmann’s introduction again, § “Life and Work”.
2. See this biography and remembrance of Bentham published in the Cambridge Law Journal in 1948, page 5.
3. Quotation from the author’s own preface to Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. In my edition (Anodos Books, 2019), this passage is found on page 6.
4. Quotation from On the State of Nature, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s relationship with liberalism, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie was complex and internally contradictory. He inspired liberals but wasn’t one, he inspired bourgeois revolutionaries but opposed bourgeoisie (despite being of bourgeois background), he inspired individualists but believed in communalism, he inspired rationalists and revolutionary cultists of Reason but believed in sensitivity and subjectivity and whimsy. Rousseau, the Romanticist, was a forebear of both Jacobin liberals and Communard socialists, yet cannot be called either. Nonetheless, he can be said to have massively inspired liberal bourgeois revolutionaries from England’s Locke to France’s Robespierre to America’s Jefferson, especially with his version of the doctrine of the social contract. See also: Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau; Rousseau’s State of Nature, Marc F. Plattner.
5. Nonsense Upon Stilts:… Right the child of Law, Jeremy Bentham, pages 318–394 in the Selected Writings edited by Engelmann. An essay responding to a declaration of “natural rights” published together with the French constitution of 1791 and to earlier such documents from America, notably Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.
6. Though other British colonies in the New World (such as Massachusetts Bay) were founded from the beginning on capitalist political-economic terms, run by companies of bourgeoisie who had invested capital in the endeavour of colonization, and expected returns of credit on this equity, like the Massachusetts Bay Company, the colony of Maryland was a feudal fiefdom of the Baron of Baltimore until its bourgeoisie took power in 1776, though those bourgeoisie had certainly been building up stockpiles of capital and capitalist power in the cities all the while, and there had been earlier instances of class struggle for state power in Maryland between the Catholic barons and New England’s largely Puritan bourgeois merchant class.
7. Bentham did not per se coin the name “utilitarianism” in the Introduction; rather he named the Principle of Utility, from which that name derives.
8. Introduction to the Principles Chapter 1 § II, page 7 in the Anodos 2019 edition.
9. ibid Chapter 1 § III, same page.
10. An unpublished essay on sexual morality by Bentham, edited from unfinished manuscripts (and titled simply as Sex) by Philip Schofield. Pages 34–100 in the Engelmann Selected Writings, quotation from Chapter 3, page 39. Sex (1814–16) is a later work than An Introduction (first edition 1780, ); Bentham is applying the principle he had earlier laid out.
11. They were to him, though not to all ethicists. It is my own view that the distinction made by some, of an ethic being any code or rubric of what conduct is and is not “good” and by what margin vs a moral being an ethic imposed socially by the cultural-ideological superstructure of a given social order and political-economic mode, is a useful one. But I believe it postdates Bentham’s work.
12. Bentham gives us this rubric for calculating the Utility (let us apply to it the name of 𝕌 of an action):

“To a person considered by himself, the value of a pleasure or pain considered by itself, will be greater or less, according to the four following circumstances:

• Its intensity
• Its duration
• Its certainty or uncertainty
• Its propinquity or remoteness [‘proximity’ might be a better word in modern parlance]”

For a group of considered parties, instead of one, we add the further variables of

• fecundity
• purity
• extent, i.e. number of affected persons.

We then “sum up all the values of all the pleasures on one side, and those of all the pains on the other.” Thusly we calculate the goodness or badness of the act as a number, negative or positive.

So, an equation for Bentham’s famous felicific calculus of ethics can be written as 𝕌=((i+d+c+r)+(f-p))pleasure-((i+d+c+r)+(f-p))pain for an individual; 𝕌ₙ for a group n can then be calculated by adding up 𝕌₁±𝕌₂±𝕌₃…±𝕌ₙ. In general, it is more useful to apply this rubric with some amount of flexibility, not in the rigid manner one would use with formulae of physics or chemistry.

See An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation Chapter IV, “The Value of a Lot of Pleasure or Pain, How to be Measured, esp. §II-V. In my edition of the Introduction (Anodos 2019), this is pages 17–18.

Chapter 1, § 3

1. See Sex, especially Chapters 3–7. Rape and any nonconsensual sex Bentham declares “noxious” on page 40, decrying British society’s forgiving attitude to rapists on pages 41–42. Homosexual sodomy, Bentham argues in Chapter 6 (pages 49–64), should be permissible- for it leads to no great social harm (he dismisses as absurd the idea that it could lead to mass underpopulation due to failure to reproduce, an idea which homophobes still deploy sometimes today) and may render positive Utility to the participating individuals, and any minor negative Utility it may sometimes render (a bad breakup, say) is massively outweighed in scale of evil by the injustice of the means by which British society at the time punished it. Page numbers given for the Yale 2011 edition.
2. More controversially, Bentham also argues in Sex that bestiality can be permissible if pleasurable to the animal, that nonreproductive sex with a partner should always be sought over masturbation because of the health hazards of the latter (widely believed in by medical scientists of the time, now known to be nonexistent), and that romantic and sexual relations between teachers and students of the same sex could be socially valuable as conducive to dedicated learning. Sex should certainly not be held up as a perfect volume; parts of it are also quite misogynistic (see page 41, note on “adulteresses)” and in defending “pedærasty” (a term which at the time would have referred to any homosexual “sodomy”) Bentham also engages in apologetics for slavery in ancient Greece (see page 49). Page numbers given for the Yale 2011 edition.
3. See Sex, chapter 2, page 36; chapter 3, page 39. Page numbers given for the Yale 2011 edition.
4. See Sex page 52, Yale 2011 edition.
5. See Of Publicity, esp. introduction and pages 291–294, in the Yale 2011 edition of the Selected Writings.

Chapter 2, § 1

1. Quotation from “Rough Notes Toward a Complete Communist Theory of Ethics,” self.
2. Another philosophical term misused in this manner is “epicureanism,” the eponymous name for the ideological tendency of Epicurus. Epicurus indeed is a forebear of Bentham: an early materialist, one who preached an eschewing of faith in the transcendental existence of the soul and, resultant therefrom, a reorientation of priorities from the “higher” matter of the soul’s station after death to the more genuinely real concerns of comfort and wellbeing for oneself and others in the real (material) reality of the universe. In actual fact, Epicurus should be looked on with approval and an eagerness to learn by anyone working to develop or apply a current of scientific materialist progressive philosophy for human liberation, for he is certainly a forebear to any such project- indeed, a forebear to both Bentham and Marx.
3. This is the opening line of the first section of Bentham’s Introduction, chapter one. It’s located on page 7 in the Anodos 2019 edition. The same passage is on page 111 of the Yale 2011 Selected Writings.
4. Some Marxists eschew having an ethical viewpoint altogether on these grounds. The bourgeois-libertarian utilitarian ethicist, although in most respects I am pretty unimpressed with his work and will be pretty harsh on it in the course of this essay, refutes this view I think fairly: “If all morality is relative, what’s so special about communism? Why side with the proletariat over the bourgeoisie?” See Practical Ethics, pg. 6 (in the Cambridge University Press edition of 2011). He then follows this up with some utter nonsense about postmodernism, before articulating his own, weak, version of utilitarianism.
5. The word phenomenology comes from this use (by Kant) of the word phenomenon (or its German equivalent).
6. See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or “First Critique.”
7. See Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement, or “Second Critique” and “Third Critique.”
8. The best Marxist retort to Kantian attitudes about the un-knowability of the thing-in-itself, or reality as it truly is, is probably in the chapters on that subject in Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The philosophical attitude Lenin critiques therein, which sadly continues to influence many intellectuals today, called “Machism” or “empirio-criticism,” is a kind of philosophy-of-science and epistemology (philosophic theory of knowledge) about what can and can’t be known about the world, drawing on Kant and Hume’s idealisms to say human knowledge can know archetypal ideals or rationally or empirically constructed non-material pictures of reality, but not reality as it truly is. The philosophers of the working class, who every day experience material reality as it truly is in the dialectical waging of the class struggle, of course disdain this nonsense in favor of Dialectical Materialism- the epistemology of which I’ve written on elsewhere.
9. This point is made by Bentham himself in Chapter 1, §XIII of the Introduction (page 8 in the Anodos edition- again, it can also be found in the Yale Selected Writings).
10. Introduction Chapter I §IV. In the Anodos 2019 text, pg. 7.
11. ibid. Chapter III §I. In the Anodos 2019 text, pg. 15.
12. ibid. Chapter IV. In the Anodos 2019 text, pg. 17–18. See also note 12 to Chapter 1 §2, where the calculus given by Bentham is expressed in mathematico-logical terms.
13. I use this term to denote the central ontological and epistemological concept in Dialectical Materialist philosophy (see e.g. Mao’s On Contradiction) because it is the standard vocabulary, but in fact I would prefer not to use the word “law” to refer to this or any philosophical or scientific precept. To call something a law implies that it is an idea endowed with binding authority. Ergo to refer to “laws” regarding nature or the shape of reality implies the existence of metaphysical causative agents, super-material ideals existing outside of material reality which force that reality to “follow” their “rules.” This terminology does not match what the universe is really like- it is an atavism of pre-materialistic physics, a la Plato and Aristotle. In actuality we must understand ontological propositions, even (especially) true ones, as a posteriori descriptions of the shape of material reality constructed within that reality through the process of partaking in it, not as external metaphysical causal forces or divine “laws.” And for this reason I prefer not using any terms like “natural law” in science and philosophy, and phasing them out where they are used.

Chapter 2, § 2

1. Quotation is from the first chapter of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, by Marx. A noted work of historical materialist historiography, it is here that Marx first presents the Marxist view of history as driven both by human free will and determining factors of contradictory interrelating of opposites within social unities (e.g class relations) (a kind of compatibilism) that Mariátegui would go on to outline in Marxist Determinism.
2. The first two chapters of this occupy pages 308–317 in the Yale Selected Writings.
3. Manual of Political Economy, Jeremy Bentham, Introduction. Pg. 309 in the Yale Selected Writings.
4. ibid 309–310.
5. ibid 310.
6. Manual, Bentham, Chapter 2, pg. 314.
7. ibid 312.
8. ibid 311
9. see note 8, page 2 of Engelmann’s introduction to the Yale Selected Writings.

Chapter 2, § 1

1. This work is available from Red Prairie Press. It comes with my high recommendation.
2. See this short article about the petition on the Parliament’s official website. The rude dismissal with which it was met forms but one stitch in the tapestry of shame and tyranny that is that body’s recorded history.

Chapter 3, § 2

1. Practical Ethics, Peter Singer, third edition from Cambridge University Press (2011), Chapter 2 “Equality and its Implications,” page 20.
2. I invoke those steady and unshakeable true words of Mao, in his 1948 Talks at the Yenan Forum: “There is no ‘ism’ in the world that transcends utilitarian considerations; in class society there can be only the utilitarianism of this or that class.”
3. Practical Ethics Chapter I “About Ethics,” page 6 in the Cambridge 2011 edition. This quasi-Petersonian jab is itself revealed as “woolly” nonsense to anyone who has studied either Marxism or the post-structuralists.
4. Marx, Peter Singer, Oxford University Press, 1980.
5. Occupying pages 155–190 of the Cambridge 2011 edition.
6. The most popular argument against abortion is in the form of a modus ponens argument, as logicians call it, i.e. an argument in the form

a) if A then B

b) A

c) therefore, B

or, in symbolic logical notation: A→B,A⊢B.

In the case of abortion the opposed argument goes

a) if abortion were the taking of a human life, it would be wrong.

b) abortion is the taking of a human life.

c) therefore, abortion is wrong.

A modus ponens can be challenged by challenging either of the conclusion’s premises- i.e., we can disprove c) by disproving either a) or b). The vast majority of defenders of abortion rights focus all of their energy on disproving b), i.e. proving that abortion is not the taking of a human life. But Singer is one of a minority of philosophers who instead choose to challenge c) by challenging b), conceding that abortion may be the taking of a human life, but maintaining that this would not necessarily make it wrong. He is joined in this by the feminist philosopher Judith J Thomson, whose famous “violinist argument” for this position he recounts in his book (see pg. 132 of the Cambridge 2011 edition).

7. Singer argues that the fetus may be sentient, i.e. having a capacity to suffer and therefore interests pertaining to positive or negative utilities- but to a lesser extent than adult persons, justifying prioritizing the pregnant party’s interests over those of the said fetus. Page 137 of Practical Ethics, in the chapter “Taking Life: The Embryo and Fetus” says: “…the interests of the fetus in not suffering should be taken into account in the same way that we should take into account the interests of sentient, but not self-conscious, nonhuman animals [it is worth noting that Singer advocates veganism].” At the end of that chapter and in the following one he extends this to the neonate: “…these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus” (pg. 151). Page numbers relating to the Cambridge 2011 edition.

8. Practical Ethics Chapter 1, “About Ethics.” Page 13 in the Cambridge 2011 edition.

Chapter 3, § 3

1. “The Rich Have Their Own Ethics: Effective Altruism & the Crypto Crash (ft. F1nn5ter),” Philosophy Tube, Abigail Thorn et al., 2023. I should also note: I reject some past comments I’ve made lumping Thorn in with other “left-tubers,” especially those we have here in the US, who talk a big talk and do nothing- to her credit, Thorn does indeed appear out on the streets fighting for the interests of her fellow Queers and acting workers. Three cheers from me. At the same time, I should wish her version of “Leftism,” and that sold as a solution to so many young people online, were a bit more Marxist, a bit more scientific and materialist, a bit more revolutionary and communist, and a bit more militant; a bit less liberal, a bit less eclectic, a bit less reformist, etc. Above all, of course, I should like all those young people to be studying the genuine ideology of revolution: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
2. The potential-actual distinction comes with some interesting questions when it comes to the philosophical modeling of time, such questions as whether the material things which are in the future exist, or whether they are things that will exist, but do not now- whether the universe has four dimensions and its contents exist equally in all times, i.e. in all places along the notional axis of the fourth dimension, or whether only the present exists, and later, when the future exists, what is now the present will be the past, and not exist. The natural sciences have laid some interesting light on these philosophical questions, and so too have poets and novelists. But this is an area past the scope of this treatise.

Chapter 3, §4

1. I am not altogether unsympathetic with those who struggle to embrace support for revolutionary politics because of an aversion to violence. But, again, the presently prevailing hegemonic ideological order has profoundly blinkered us on matters of violence, training us to be shocked by revolutionary violence, but ignore the far larger violence- colonialism, imperialist war, labour exploitation (which often involves assault and murder of various forms, especially in the colonized world), genocide, etc.- which is ubiquitous under capitalist-imperialist political economy and the state-social order of global bourgeois dictatorship. That violence necessitates revolution, to put a stop to an unimaginable amount of suffering. And there is no revolution without revolutionary violence. The working class cannot conquer the world and build socialism and communism if their partisans, the Communists, do not take up arms. Control over a country’s means of production cannot be seized with a petition. Gonzalo, that estimable great teacher and founding thinker of Maoism, adroitly teaches us this lesson. There comes a point, indeed, at which aversion to violence becomes violent- for refusal to endorse or take up revolutionary violence, once it reaches a boiling point in the dialectical development of class struggle, allows reactionary violence to continue unabated where revolutionary violence could have checked or overcome it. I have written more on this elsewhere.

Chapter 4, §2

1. See “Feuerbach’s ‘Political Manifestoes’” by Louis Althusser, in For Marx. In my edition (translated Ben Brewster, Vintage Books, 1969), the especially relevant pages are 44–46.
2. Per the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Versatile and prolific, Eugen Dühring constructed a metaphysical system uniting naturalism with a priori principles.”
3. It is Dühring’s project of a new spiritualistic and idealist pseudo-“science” of universal perfect truth that is sarcastically referred to in the subtitle of Anti-Dühring: “Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science”. Engels retorted with the genuinely scientific materialist philosophy he, Marx, and the revolutionary experiences of the whole proletariat had worked out to guide the further historic march of the proletariat toward communist liberty.
4. In criticizing this method of philosophizing, we should note, he is not merely raising a correct negation of the idealist methodology of Dühring, but that used by many influential philosophers in “state of nature” thought experiments and “from first principles” rationalist treatises on social theory, including people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, e.g.
5. Hume, another great idealist, would maintain, famously, that “one cannot deduce what ought to be from what is.” Once again we verge outside the scope of this treatise, but I would maintain that he is right to distinguish the two kinds of statements, wrong to suppose that one cannot be deduced or transformed from the other.

Chapter 4, §3

1. Quotation from Their Morals and Ours, Leon Trotsky. Page 14 in the 1973 edition from Pathfinder Press (the printing house of the Trotskyist SWP in the US).
2. Trotsky is quite right in framing this dialectic of means↔️ends, making it a philosophical problem to discuss, regarding the manner in which the one becomes the other, its opposite, and each confirms the other in the ways they are both opposite and equivalent (ibid pg. 20). The flaws in how he applies this question, largely in a dogmatic and ahistorical screed against “Stalinism,” do not change that it is a real and interesting question worthy of further philosophical examination.
3. ibid, pg 19. Luther did indeed make this call, in a pamphlet entitled Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants- his response to the German Peasants’ War of 1524–5.
4. ibid, pg. 21.
5. ibid, pg. 23–24.
6. While he is correct to insist on its inapplicability to a revolutionary situation, Trotsky fails to interrogate the assumption that an a priori, context-neutral rational “common sense” exists at all. On this question he could have stood to learn, and so we all, from the great Italian Marxist-Leninist Antonio Gramsci. While Trotsky assumes implicitly that there is some “common sense” beyond the material circumstances of the now, only that it is not terribly relevant in a revolutionary or class situation, Gramsci shows us we can make no such assumption. A ruling class, especially an exploiter class like the bourgeoisie, which occupies the dominant position of rule in the economic system and thus in the superstructure of culture and ideology and politics it builds up around itself, inculcates the ideas serving its class-interests into the public mind, as hegemonic assumed-truth. When we think without critical interrogation of the contradictions in the world, relying merely on assumption, these are the assumptions we are leaning on, this is our so-called “common sense”: the hegemonic ideological precepts of the dominant class (the bourgeoisie) in our political-economic mode (capitalist-imperialism). So no, there is no impartial common sense to be called upon- it is not merely unhelpful; it simply does not exist. Trotsky describes “common sense” as “[the] lowest form of intellect” which “consists of the elementary conclusions of universal experience”- a serviceable enough understanding of the basic, simple lessons of so-called “common sense,” like, to use his example, that one should not put one’s hand in a fire (quotations from page 24). But it is a mistake to suppose these lessons have no class character- if we learned them in class society, then they must do. Treating these lessons, even the most basic ones, as separate from class-ideology ignores the real context of the “universal experience” they derive from- and so, while it seems empiricist in form, it treats them as a-experiential a priori truths in essence.
7. Their Morals and Ours, Trotsky, pg. 24–25.
8. How ‘less noble,’ one may reasonably ask? Indeed, if, as Trotsky and I agree, an ideological outlook on questions of ethics is inseparable from one’s position in a social dialectical struggle, how can we judge which side of that struggle is better? This is essentially Singer’s question from earlier: “what’s so special about communism?” (see notes to Ch2 §1). The answer, or at least my answer, is: the interests of the proletariat, today, are historically progressive in a way those of the bourgeoisie no longer can be. The class struggle for communism necessarily addresses, as no other thing does, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist-imperialist epoch. By its triumph alone will they be resolved, with the birth of a new epoch. And so, as long as the capitalist-imperialist economic system and its contradictions persist, as long as there are bourgeoisie and workers they employ and exploit, as long as there are imperialists and countries they colonize to export capital to and extract surplus values from, these contradictions will persist and the rebel cause of the proletariat will exist, or manifest anew where it has not yet appeared, to address them. So the terror of the bourgeoisie fights a battle condemned to lose, sooner or later, or else condemned to be waged forever. The “good” of maintaining the current epoch is necessarily incapable of final victory, because the contradictions and struggles that make this epoch doomed exist always necessarily within its institutions, and so the battle must be waged forever. Only the “good” of winning a new epoch, the good of communist victory, has an end in sight, and can promise a better tomorrow, in which wars may end and terror be forgotten. This is why I choose the latter good, why the exploited workers and toilers and oppressed peoples of the world can believe in no others, why all decent people must ally with them. Forward, to communism!!
9. ibid, pg. 24, 34–36.
10. See e.g. ibid pg. 26- “the Soviet Thermidor with all its coils of crimes,” and more broadly the sections from 26–28, 31–34, 34–37, 37–40.
11. See again the section from pg. 37–40, comparing “genuine” vs “Stalinist” usage of extreme revolutionary tactics.
12. See e.g. ibid pg. 36: “Civil war is the most severe of all forms of war… [but] [c]ivil war is better than fascist slavery.”
13. ibid, pg. 29–30.
14. ibid, pg. 39–40.
15. See On Authority, Friedrich Engels; The State and Revolution, VI Lenin.
16. Their Morals and Ours, Trotsky, same edition, pg. 45.

Chapter 4, §4

1. “Talks at the Yenan [or Yanan, or Yan’an] Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao Tse Tung, 1948.
2. ibid.
3. Mao is said to have maintained that, very approximately, 70% of Stalin’s thought and political practice had been correct, 30% incorrect. The 70%, the dominant aspect, was to be affirmed and carried forward in the further advancement of Marxist thought and the revolutionary effort it guides; the incorrect secondary aspect was to be negated by the correct and, in the further advancement of Marxist thought, overturned and surpassed and its contradictions with the correct aspect resolved. Much the same rubric should be applied to all the past leaders and experiments in socialist politics and political-economy we regard as good examples or endeavour to follow in the footsteps of.
4. This is a rough sketch of dialectical materialist epistemology. The best piece of writing on that subject I know is Mao’s On Practice.

Conclusion

1. See again On Practice and what has been said about and/or citing it.
2. “Combat Liberalism,” Mao Tse Tung. From a passage quoted in Chapter 28 of his Quotations.
3. “Our Evaluation of The Stand of CPI (Maoist) on the Formation of International Communist League (ICL),” International Communist League. A note about this document: while I unite with it on the lion’s share of what it says, and absolutely what it represents, about the need for open, public, and democratic line struggle amongst the communists and communist Parties of the world toward the synthesis of a new war-waging Unity of the International Communist Movement, I think we should be critical of a certain passage about “real facts” vs “‘the facts’ we create in our minds.” What was meant here is perfectly unobjectionable: we must take our ideas from how the world really is, not how we should like it to be. But the manner in which it is said implies something quite different. For all facts, a fact being a unit of thought or language, are created in our minds; the question is not whether we believe the facts that are in the world or the ones in our minds, but whether the facts created in our minds resemble the world. This usage of “fact” as seemingly referring at once to the abstract postulate or statement of a thing in the world and the actual state of affairs of the thing itself, rather than the more usual usage to mean only the former, also seems to appear (in English translation) in Mao’s “Reform our Study”; here, too, I would suggest it is a malformed usage that should be avoided, for its risk of giving semantic credence to the ideas about facts’ intrinsic reality of, among others, the idealist philosopher Bertrand Russell (a huge influence on mainstream bourgeois philosophy today). But I suspect the difficulty lies largely in translation: the distinction between a state of affairs existing and the semiotic (i.e. representative, semantic, signifying, etc.) statement that it exists, the fact, and the contradiction between understanding one or the other as primary, is a subtle and difficult enough matter in one language, so much the harder when one must think in several. This may seem a minute distinction, but it is an important philosophical matter: if taken to really mean what it says, the idea that “facts” exist outside of human consciousness amounts to pure idealism. Being that we are materialists of proletarian ideology, working to propagate it against a hegemonic ideology of bourgeois idealism, communists must be guarded against unintentional idealist notions and preconceptions in our own intellectual efforts to advance the communist cause.

☙CITED TEXTS❧

[Kindly note: not all authors cited are political philosophers, and not all political philosophers I agree with. Do not take a citation as a gesture of endorsement, please. If you want to know what I think of a person I’ve cited, their work, their life, their ideas, etc.- ask.]

Capital vol. 1, Karl Marx.

On the Role Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Friedrich Engels.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham.

Sex, Jeremy Bentham, edited by Philip Schofield.

Nonsense Upon Stilts, Jeremy Bentham.

Of Publicity, Jeremy Bentham.

Introduction to Selected Writings: Jeremy Bentham, Stephen G. Engelmann.

“Rough Notes Toward a Complete Communist Theory of Ethics,” self.

Rousseau’s State of Nature, Marc F. Plattner.

Some cannibalized passages from my own Philosophical Reflections of Summer 2021 (unpublished) regarding Rousseau.

Practical Ethics, Peter Singer.

Their Morals and Ours, Leon Trotsky.

The Three “Critiques” of Immanuel Kant. Also the introductions thereto in Robert Solomon’s Introducing the German Idealists, a helpful pamphlet for college students, of Hackett Publishing Co.

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, V.I. Lenin.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen.

On Historical Materialism, Friedrich Engels (a preface to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by same).

Republic (or Politeia), Book VII, Plato.

On Contradiction, Mao Tse Tung.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Marxist Determinism, José Carlos Mariátegui.

Manual of Political Economy, Jeremy Bentham.

On the Social Basis of the Women’s Question, Alexandra Kollontai.

“Further Notes on Ethics and Revolution,” self.

Marx, Peter Singer.

“The Rich Have Their Own Ethics: Effective Altruism & the Crypto Crash (ft. F1nn5ter),” Philosophy Tube, Abigail Thorn et al.

A Treatise on Violence, self.

The State and Revolution, VI Lenin.

On Authority, Friedrich Engels.

“Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao Tse Tung.

On Practice, Mao Tse Tung.

Critique of the German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Anti-Dühring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (see body of text for why these are cited as one), Friedrich Engels.

Fundamental Documents, Partido Comunista del Perú.

General Political Line, Partido Comunista del Perú.

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

For Marx, Louis Althusser