i am so incredibly used to defending good things by explaining how they help people and make their lives better because, yeah obviously that’s why good things are good and people with empathy would want that. i get that modern Western bourgeois “morality” is fucked, but if you tell people that they just think you are amoral or don’t think morals are good or just don’t care about them.
i’m so used to describing things and “good” and “bad” and the fact that Marxist theory just doesn’t seem to bother with that throws me for a loop. and then comes the question of “well REALLY what IS morality” and whether its objective (which i dont think it possibly could be? i’m a hard atheist) and its just kind of a mess in my brain as i’m trying to parse it all out.
edit: i get that the immorality of exploitation is apparent in Marxist analysis and should be to anybody, i’m more talking about how the argument isn’t framed as a moral one, because then you can get really annoying people in there trying to facts-and-logic their way out of it, if that makes sense
I think it’s often important to sometimes (though dont get carried away and lose the kernel) discuss how Marxism is really at least 2 major schools/claims brought together. The method of analysis call dialectical materialism is a sort of ontological and historical claim about how the world works, which makes no prescriptive claims about what that exactly means for 'good’and ‘bad’. Then you have marxism as a normative system which discusses how the system of inefficiencies and exploitation are good to be removed through processes which the former side of marxism can describe. Marx was a much more interesting polemicist than many because he was able to freely move between these fields throughout a work, and really gives no indication that I know of that these are really separable to any meaningful extent.
But this reading means that the morality might not be central to scientific claims, but cannot be seen as apart from the whole of marxism, which makes claims about exploitation with the assumption that it’s bad (actually marx argues why, including in efficiency terms instead of morality)