Marxist/Leninist Ethics

SUMMARY

Communist or class morality can be understood best within the context of dialectical and historical materialism. Marxists see their ethics proceeding out of the movement in history that will ultimately assure the destruction of all classes or forces opposing the classless or communist society. Each act is considered ethically good if it assists the flow of history toward a communist end. Killing, raping, stealing, and lying are not outside the boundaries of communist morality if they help produce the classless communist society. Marxist/Leninists believe that killing evolving human beings infected with the concepts of God and bourgeois capitalism is as morally justified as a farmer killing a cow afflicted with hoof-and-mouth disease. The killing fields of Cambodia, the Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union were the practical results of class morality. The mass murders in China came under the banner of class morality. "From the viewpoint of communist morality," says V. N. Kolbanovskiy, "that is moral which promotes the destruction of the old, exploiting society, and the construction of the new, communist society. Everything that hinders this development is immoral or amoral. To be a moral man, in our understanding means to devote all his forces and energy to the cause of the struggle for a new communist society."¹
      By definition, therefore, whatever advances the cause of communism is morally good; whatever hinders its advance in human and social evolution is morally evil. If the rest of the world looks on such activity as wicked or evil, the world’s condemnation is a small price to pay to advance the flow of history toward a synthesis resulting in the creation of the new moral man—a man untainted by belief in a mythological God or exploitative capitalism.
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¹V. N. Kolbanovskiy, Communist Morality (Moscow: 1951), p. 20.