This was a contribution to a talk on The Marxist Attitude to War

I wanted to look at how Marxists should approach the moral question of war. We're taught that war is inherently bound up in morality, that it's cruel, barbaric, unjust,, until … War is necessary, worthy, righteous, and so on. The justification for war, as every politician, businessman, media mogul, one by one, lines up to beat the drums of war, explicit in their language is that it is the right thing to do. For "national defence", for "democracy". "War is terrible of course, but we have no choice, the moral question has been decided for us by our enemy". Colloquially, the ends justify the means.

Now this question of do the ends justify the means gives rise to the study of ethics and morality in general. And throughout history, each society has had its own set of norms, its right and wrongs, its principles, that are all seen at the time as, "natural", and "civilised". The same is true in the modern era, although in a secular, postmodernist world, having departed from both religion and pure-philosophy, today's accepted morals are coded simply as "common sense", essentially.

But If we, as Marxist, look beyond the perceived wisdom of "common sense", where should we look? I don;t expect us to delve back into religious texts, but if Marxism is a science, should we look to the pure reason of Immanuel Kant? Or as socialists should we look to the 'overall happiness' system of Utilitarianism?

Well, Karl Marx wrote that "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. The class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." And this allows us to realise that morality is not this objective, static, thing, but it is actually a tool>. Morality has always been and continues to be an ideological function of the class struggle. Morality has a class character, it has a reactionary character. Trotsky points out that Capitalism, as a regime, could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needed the cement of morality, as he puts it.

And this need for moral cement is no truer than in times of war. To shroud the naked and brazen imperialism, the Blair government for example, dreamt up this claim of Saddam Husein's weapons of mass destruction being able to reach us in 45 minutes, and Fleet Street was all too happy to comply. The goal is always to mobilise morality in order to get the backing of the working class. But the ruling class makes it very easy for us in their displays of hypocrisy. How can the British justify marching into Iraq while barbarizing Putin's invasion of Ukraine two decades later? But look how differently the media treated conflicts. morality is deployed long before any tanks, drones, or troops.

So recognising that morality behaves dialectically, where does that leave us? It means that, as Trotsky says, there are no automatic answers. Problems of morality are fused with the problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics: we must appraise our morals via contemporary working class consciousness, lest we risk alienating ourselves from the workers.

And we should recognise, this stance, of viewing morals as subservient and a transient product of the class struggle, does embolden our critics to slander us, and label Marxists as amoral(!)

But we must be militant: we view an act as moral if it is progressive, if it moves us closer to eliminating the contradictions of society, and achieving the liberation of workers and the ending of exploitation of man, by man.

I will finish on this quote from Trotsky, that "To a revolutionary Marxist there can be no contradiction between personal morality and the interests of the party, since the party embodies in his consciousness the very highest tasks and aims of mankind".