The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, first published in 1962 and corrected and revised for a 1972 edition, examines carefully and critically the origin, precise nature and subsequent role of Marx’s ethical beliefs. Drawing freely on Marx’s still largely untranslated philosophical works and drafts the author elicits the ethical presuppositions with which Marx began. He then examines the intellectual development that made Marx a Communist and seeks to clarify the place of Marx’s ethic in his mature, ‘materialist’ work. Professor Kamenka distinguishes sharply between the critical, ethical views of Marx and the inept, conventional applications of his doctrine by Engels. He appraises the ‘ethics’ of the Communist Party and traces the development of the moral and legal theory in the Soviet Union. He concludes by subjecting Marxism as a whole to a radical, ethical and philosophical criticism for which Marx himself laid some of the foundations.

Excerpt from Ethical Foundations of Marxism Karl marx, I Shall argue in this book, came to Communism in the interests of freedom, not of security. In his early years he sought to free himself from the pressure exercised by the mediocre German police state of Frederick William IV. He rejected its censorship, its elevation of authority and of religion, its cultural Philistinism and its empty talk of national interest and moral duty. Later he came to believe that such pressures and such human dependence could not be destroyed without destroying capitalism and the whole system of private property from which capitalism had developed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Does Marxism possess an ethical impulse? Is there a moral foundation that underpins the Marxist critique of capitalism and the vision for social progress? The essays collected in Constructing Marxist Ethics: Critique, Normativity, Praxis argue that there is such an ethical grounding for Marxist theory. The essays, each from different vantage points, construct what a Marxian ethics should look like: what kind of values should be at the heart of the Marxian enterprise. Contributors are: Dan Albanese, Paul Blackledge, Bob Cannon, Tony Burns, Ian Fraser, Ruth Groff, Wadood Hamad, Christoph Henning, Peter Hudis, Lauren Langman, George E. McCarthy, Sean Sayers, Michael J. Thompson, and Lawrence Wilde.

This book reveals Marx’s moral philosophy and analyzes its nature. The author shows that there is an underlying system of ethics which runs the length and breadth of Marx’s thought. The book begins by discussing the methodological side of Marx’s ethics showing how Marx’s criticism of conventional morality and his views on historical materialism, determinism and ideology are compatible with having an ideological system of his own. In the light of contemporary social, moral and political philosophy the insights and defects of Marx’s major ethical themes are discussed.