For decades, one has been subjected to the moral lectures of petty-bourgeois journalists and academics, whose principal historical occupation has been to discover, in the conduct of the Bolsheviks and above all of Leon Trotsky, proofs of the supposedly sinister essence of Marxist “amoralism.” They have filled libraries with denunciations of revolutionary violence, meditations on the “authoritarian impulse,” and pious reflections on the alleged contempt of Marxists for ethical restraint.
Student youth and workers are instructed to believe that the central moral problem of the modern age lies in the intransigence of those who sought to overthrow capitalism. Yet these same circles, when confronted with the actual barbarism of imperialism, display remarkable forbearance. Their categorical condemnations dissolve into nuance. Their moral fervor wanes, and their hostility to violence becomes exquisitely selective. They find endless reserves of moral outrage—which has not subsided even after the passage of more than a century—over the Russian Revolution of 1917. But they are mute when the United States incinerates a society, when Israel buries children beneath rubble, when torture is systematized, when police execute the poor and the dispossessed in American streets. The class content of morality emerges here with extraordinary clarity.