BY LEON TROTSKY
Moralists of the Anglo-Saxon type… appear conscious or unconscious students of Viscount Shaftesbury, who—at the beginning of the eighteenth century!—deduced moral judgments from a special “moral sense” supposedly once and for all given to humanity. Supraclass morality inevitably leads to the acknowledgment of a special substance, of a “moral sense,” “conscience,” some kind of absolute, which is nothing more than the cowardly philosophical pseudonym for God. Independent of “ends”—that is, of society—morality, whether we deduce it from eternal truths or from the “nature of man,” proves in the end to be a form of “natural theology.” Heaven remains the only fortified position for military operations against dialectical materialism….
Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ, or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodgepodges 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 more than any other form of ideology has a class character.
But do not elementary moral precepts exist, worked out in the development of humanity as a whole and indispensable for the existence of every collective body? Undoubtedly such precepts exist but the extent of their action is extremely limited and unstable. Norms “obligatory upon all” become the less forceful the sharper the character assumed by the class struggle. The highest form of the class struggle is civil war, which explodes into midair all moral ties between the hostile classes.
Under “normal” conditions a “normal” person observes the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill!” But if one kills under exceptional conditions for self-defense, the jury acquits that person. If one falls victim to a murderer, the court will kill the murderer. The necessity of courts, as well as that of self-defense, flows from antagonistic interests. In so far as the state is concerned, in peaceful times it limits itself to legalized killings of individuals so that in time of war it may transform the “obligatory” commandment, “Thou shalt not kill!” into its opposite. The most “humane” governments, which in peaceful times “detest” war, proclaim during war that the highest duty of their armies is the extermination of the greatest possible number of people.
The so-called “generally recognized” moral precepts in essence preserve an algebraic, that is, an indeterminate character. They merely express the fact that people in their individual conduct are bound by certain common norms that flow from their being members of society. The highest generalization of these norms is the “categorical imperative” of Kant.1 But in spite of the fact that it occupies a high position in the philosophic Olympus this imperative does not embody anything categoric because it embodies nothing concrete. It is a shell without content.
This vacuity in the norms obligatory upon all arises from the fact that in all decisive questions people feel their class membership considerably more profoundly and more directly than their membership in “society.” The norms of “obligatory” morality are in reality filled with class, that is, antagonistic content. The moral norm becomes the more categoric the less it is “obligatory upon all.” The solidarity of workers, especially of strikers or barricade fighters, is incomparably more “categoric” than human solidarity in general.
The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilability of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions patronized by religion, philosophy, or by that hybrid which is called “common sense.” The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophical mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception. The exposure of this deceit which retains the tradition of thousands of years is the first duty of a proletarian revolutionist.
In order to guarantee the triumph of their interests in big questions, the ruling classes are constrained to make concessions on secondary questions, naturally only so long as these concessions are reconciled in the bookkeeping. During the epoch of capitalist upsurge especially in the last decades before the World War, industry expanded almost uninterruptedly. The prosperity of the civilized nations increased—partially, too, that of the toiling masses. Democracy appeared solid….The rising line of progress seemed infinite to “common sense.”
Instead, however, war broke out with a train of convulsions, crises, catastrophes, epidemics, and bestiality. The economic life of humankind landed in an impasse. The class antagonisms became sharp and naked. The safety valves of democracy began to explode one after the other. The elementary moral precepts turned out to be even more fragile than the democratic institutions and reformist illusions. Lying, slander, bribery, venality, coercion, murder, grew to unprecedented dimensions. To a stunned simpleton all these vexations seem a temporary result of war. Actually they were and remain manifestations of imperialist decline. The decay of capitalism denotes the decay of contemporary society with its laws and morals.