Rough Notes Toward a Complete Communist Theory of Ethics
note: definitions for somewhat specialist terminology from ethical philosophy are given in footnotes; these definitions are simplistic and should not be supposed to be complete or perfect in every circumstance
What Mao prescribed for judging the social impacts of art was “proletarian revolutionary utilitarianism†{1},” and I shall start from this with the supposition it can be applied for all ethical questions. What this means is a consequentialism* where 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.
This theory of how one should act (i.e., what is good for the workers’ cause is good) is easily accepted for anyone committed to our cause and for any worker who understands their class position, but it also shows itself to be true if one looks at it from the position of a utilitarianism concerned with all persons equally (even if imagining such a thing under class society is somewhat fanciful), because the proletariat and proto-proletarian classes (peasants etc.) are the vast majority of people. Thus, Proletarian Revolutionary Utilitarianism is the only practical expression of a truly understood such utilitarianism, anything else claiming to be such can only be folly and/or liberal deception.
Another class-utilitarianism is already at play: we may see quite plainly that the bourgeois states preference capitalist-imperialist interests. For the People (using Mao’s definition of that term{2}) to respond with their own is only to be accepted. This is ideological dialectics developing as a consequence of physical class dialectics.
Proletarian Revolutionary Utilitarianism can and must be objective and scientific, because it is only by the science of Marxism (today, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism with the universal contributions of Gonzalo Thought) that the methodology of proletarian revolt has ever, since Paris, evolved. We must strive with exacting precision to judge what serves the cause and what harms it, and what does neither, and declare the first good, the second evil, and the third neither.
One may ask whether this really should be the only criterion; i.e., whether anything can be (ethically) wrong without harming the cause or right without helping it. At first the answer seems obviously yes- after all a serial killer seems not to be harming the communist movement in any obvious way, and certainly serial murder is ethically wrong. But I think an argument could be made that actually anything one does which is unethical, at least to another human person, is something that is also counterrevolutionary- thus the two qualities (that of being unethical and that of being counterrevolutionary) are, arguably, synonyms when theoretically viewed clearly enough. Consider: any unjustified harm one does to another human being, being that humanity has today under the banner of capitalism formed a single global society that shall shortly be transformed into a communist one (barring extreme outliers like the Sentinelese and other uncontacted peoples remaining in primitive communality), has an antisocial character; that is, it is a harm also to the whole of human society in that it robs this great body of an organ. Conversely the proletarian struggle, societal political-economic progress, is the growth, the self-improvement, the maturation of this body: its metamorphosis from the chaotic and self-flagellant beast of capitalist-imperialism to the delicate chrysalis of socialism to the resplendent and strange butterfly of full-stage communism. And so any unethical behaviour is opposite to societal progress, is counterrevolutionary, and vice versa. This argument could be made. All the same I do not feel that the question is resolved, nor that it is my place to resolve it as a single individual writing in relative ignorance.
The reason a communist theory of ethics is necessary is that the historical progress of society, or “history,” like so many of the dialectical processes defining the shape and motion of the universe, does not move purely automatically in its principal trajectory; its path is halting, sometimes faltering, and human actions can make it move faster or slower. This is because such systems are complex. Their conflicting segments(in this case classes) themselves have segments (in this case persons, with intelligence and free will), which themselves are masses of contradictions and conflicts too complex, at least now, to be totally understood enough to predict. These lower-order objects/phenomena have complicated effects on the higher-order ones they make up. Thus it is not enough to assume history will move swiftly toward its inevitable arrival at communism; we must actively prescribe proper actions for society’s constituent persons to make to move it in that direction as efficiently as possible.
The duty of this theory, as pertains to the revolutionary movement toward communist cultural and ideological hegemony as must be carried out by the People in each country via the three revolutionary instruments, is to supplant and replace postmodern relativism or amoralism and puritanical theistic deontology• with an objective and scientific approach to ethical questions which not only promotes positive behaviour in society but furthermore subordinates the acts of individuals to the good of a whole society and the progress of history. In a future socialist society, with its proletarian state built by the masses through the aforementioned Instruments of Party, Army, and United Front, this theory must be cemented in law. In the meanwhile, it should in the present communist movement act as a guide for personal conduct and for efforts to prepare for establishing that future social order of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which means of course constructing these three instruments, chiefly constituting in each country a militarized Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Party around which the others can rally for the cause of constructing a socialist economy and worker-democratic soviet state.
SOURCES AND FOOTNOTES
†: Utilitarianism= ethical theories positing that the “goodness” or “badness” of a thing or action should be judged based upon how much good and how much harm it does to people; a thing doing more good to more people than harm is good and vice versa. How this good or harm is defined or measured depends on the interpretation in question.
*: Consequentialism= 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.
•: see above
- “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao Zedong
- Mao defined this term in On New Democracy, giving it an exact and scientific usage where essentially it means those classes in a given place and time whose interests are historically progressive- in other words, under capitalism or semifeudal capitalism, the proletariat and those who share their interests.
