The morality of the Hottentots

"Their morals and ours" is a book published by Pathfinder, the publishing arm of the U.S. Socialist Workers' Party. Its main piece is an article by Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, also titled "Their morals and ours". Trotsky attempts to explain and defend the Marxist position on morality.

The volume also contains further articles by Trotsky. A critical article by John Dewey follows. Dewey had chaired the Dewey Commission, which had exposed the Moscow show trials and exonerated Trotsky from Stalin's accusations. The SWP therefore allowed the "bourgeois" liberal Dewey the rare privilege of writing a critique of Trotsky in a SWP-controlled magazine. Pathfinder's book ends with an article by George Novack, in which he defends Trotsky's perspective against Dewey's critical remarks. Apparently, Novack was the SWP's house philosopher.

Trotsky, of course, was no philosopher. His articles consist mostly of polemical attacks on various political opponents. Buried somewhere beneath all the attacks is his view of morality. Trotsky explicitly rejects the idea that morality is "absolute", since absolute morality requires God. To Trotsky, the non-existence of God is so obvious that the matter hardly needs to be proved. He ends the section with the following words: "Heaven remains the only fortified position for military operations against dialectical materialism". He also makes the observation that appeals to "conscience" or an unchanging "human nature" are really a form of covert natural theology, and hence cowardly attempts to smuggle in God without mentioning him by name. While this argument might strike a modern reader as somewhat odd - surely Neo-Darwinists aren't covert theists - it's nevertheless an intriguing fact that the morality Darwinists claim is a product of blind evolution, is suspiciously similar to the morals of the educated British gentleman, and even somewhat Benthamite. A strange co-incidence, this!

But what is the real basis for morality, if it can't be "absolute" and based on God? Here, Trotsky doesn't have a real answer. At one point, he writes: "A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and to the abolition of the power of one person over another". In other words, Trotsky is himself forced to appeal to something absolute, to something that flows from (real) human nature - the classless society a.k.a. communism. By his own standards, he is doing natural theology!

Of course, Trotsky never justifies communism. Why is it good that humans increase their power over nature? A deep ecologist would disagree. So, presumably, would Gandhi, who is chided for drinking goat's milk in Trotsky's article. And why is it good to abolish one person's power over another person? Southern slave-holders would disagree, working-class males want to control "their" women, and women want full control of their children. Besides, communism means collectivism. Individual anarchists presumably also want to abolish the power of one person over another. Yet, Trotsky doesn't consider them moral. The observation that Marxism represents the interests of the proletariat is unhelpful, since the proletariat is supposed to abolish all classes and hence itself during the transformation of society to communism. Since the struggle of the proletariat is only a means to an end, and since the end is all-human, communism (the end) can only be justified by supra-class principles, applicable to all humans. Yet, Trotsky rejects such principles throughout his articles.

With no metaphysical grounds on which to base his morality, Trotsky changes tactics and in practice adopts a very different position: "It (the proletariat) deduces a rule for conduct from the laws of development of society, thus primarily from the class struggle, this law of all laws. (...) Dialectical materialism does not know dualism between means and ends. The end flows naturally from the historical movement. Organically the means are subordinated to the end. The immediate end becomes the means for a further end". Please note the sudden relativism, in which means and ends constantly change places. Note also that the end (communism) simply "flows naturally" from "the historical movement". Logically, if the historical movement could be shown to culminate in capitalism, fascism or Stalinism, Trotsky would be morally bound to support these systems instead!

But, of course, that wasn't Trotsky's position. In "In Defence of Marxism", Trotsky writes that a victory for fascism or Stalinism would show that Marxism was a utopia, and a classless society impossible. However, he doesn't suggest that Marxists in such an eventuality should actually support these new slave societies. Rather, he writes that they should defend the slaves! While Trotsky was speaking hypothetically (he was sure of victory for the Fourth International), this does show that his real criterion for morality wasn't "the historical movement". Rather, he viewed communism as morally desirable in itself. But, as already pointed out, he had no way of grounding such a belief, being opposed to eternal principles (God or natural theology). Instead, he cheated in a way similar to that of the Neo-Darwinists: the historical process just happens to culminate in the end Trotsky finds so desirable. Strange co-incidence!

In the end, Trotsky had no way of justifying his moral (or "moral") convictions.