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’m definitely guilty of this, and i’m probably overthinking things. the human benefit as you say is enormous on its own.
To be clear, I didn’t mean it as a dig at people who do that (and I did it for a long time and still need to stop myself pretty often). I think trying to take what you think is “right” and getting other people on the same page is a reasonable impulse, society and human relationships work better when we reconcile our views, I just think the framework of moral values as things that in any way precede our existence and aren’t socially constructed is seriously mistaken, and we’re better off using frameworks of democracy and class interests to engage in that reconciliation. Nonetheless, it’s an exceedingly common mistake that is baked into a lot of our language, so it makes sense that we’d make that mistake as well and would need to engage in a lot of conscious effort to try to unlearn it.