"Marx’s Ethical Vision": A Conversation with Vanessa Wills (Keywords: Morality; Alienation; Revolution; Freedom; Humanism )

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (OT): There is a deep and abiding ethical impulse under the political commitments that Marxism is associated with: socialism, communism and the fight against capitalism. When you ask people who are swimming in one of those seas what they’re up to and why, they give what sounds to me—as an analytically trained moral philosopher—like moral explanations: they think there’s something wrong with capitalism, something inappropriate about the way the system treats people. Yet, Marxists have often shied away from explicitly ethical thinking about capitalism. There is a sense that there’s some kind of bourgeois affectation going on whenever explicitly moral thought enters into discussion. Your book is written in part as an answer to that perspective. So, what was it in your view that Marxists and non-Marxists felt they were achieving or avoiding by objecting to morality-laden interpretations of Marxism and what would we achieve by leaving that interpretation behind?

Vanessa Wills (VW): From within the Marxist tradition certainly, there’s a worry that taking ethical questions seriously or foregrounding them will be part of a movement away from the scientificity of Marxist theory or the aspects of Marxism that are most operational in giving it its explanatory power and – for those of us who think it does have quite a bit of predictive power – it’s predictive power as well. Marx and Engels consider human development to be knowable using the same techniques that are relevant for other areas of science

The worry there, however, is that if human existence really is knowable for the same reasons that objects in the natural world are – namely that they’re subject to some kind of scientific law that can be ascertained and then applied in order to make predictions – that feels in tension with the idea that human beings are free and that human life is susceptible to moral judgement.

So if one feels forced to choose, then one chooses the scientificity, right? One chooses the economic story that Marxist theory is offering. Part of what I am doing in my book is demonstrating that we don’t actually have to make this choice.  We can do both, and in fact much of Marx’s thought is an attempt to make normative claims that stem from an empirical and scientific accounting of human existence.

OT: Building off of that, could you identify some specific departures where your reconstructed project differs from interpretive convention, the orthodox ways of reading Marx?

VW: One place to start is with the concept of orthodoxy itself. To what extent is the received wisdom – “orthodox Marxism” – actually a reflection of what Marx himself thought?

For example, when we talk about an orthodox Marxist position on race and class, people start enumerating all sorts of positions, like the notion that ideas are mere epiphenomenon of the material base and that therefore we don’t really need to worry too much about ideas themselves; we just bring about the good work of proletariat revolution and the ideas will sort themselves out as a necessary byproduct of that. This way of thinking about the relationship between matter and ideas exists nowhere in Marx’s work.

There is a deep and abiding ethical impulse under the political commitments that Marxism is associated with: socialism, communism and the fight against capitalism

When we think about what is often described as an ‘orthodox’ Marxist position on morality, we hear similar claims being made. We hear it claimed that Marx thought human life was completely beholden to strictly mechanistic and deterministic laws. Or that Marx thought communism was inevitable, not dependent on human choice or agency in bringing it about. Because we don’t have a place where Marx lays out his complete and systematic approach to ethics, my goal is to identify what I take to be the most significant features of Marx’s method and use those in order to present the conception of morality that emerges in the book.

OT: I want to pick up specifically on the point that you raised about the relationship between matter and ideas, which is a common explanation of what Marx must have thought: that ideas don’t matter and matter matters, right? Why do people think that? Because Marx's philosophy is described as materialist thought, it is often counterposed with idealism and the general thinking is that this implies some concern not just for the world as structured by reason and thoughts but by actual physical reality. What people take that to mean – and in turn is a crude rejection of the importance of intellectual and mental life – is that it is all guns, land, and gold at the end of the day.

Among the many reasons to reject this crude view that you offer later in the book is a peculiar thing that Marx says in the 1844 Manuscripts. Namely, there’s this high-level stuff about sense organs –their potentials and their actuality – that we might have thought we were going to leave behind in a view about economies and corn and linen and exchange rates, right? So, what’s all this talk of sense organs and potentialities? Why would a philosopher like Marx who usually talks about dollars and commodities find himself in this kind of metaphysical territory?

VW: One of the themes that appears throughout Marx’s writing is the historicity of human senses. He will speak, for example, of how the human ear becomes something more than just its biological physiology and architecture, that the capacity to hear is historically produced over the course of generations, over the historical development of music, of ways of speaking. The ear’s sensitivity to the nuances of sound, music, and communication of all kinds is not solely given by its bare natural character, but by its social transformation. The same is true for the eyes and for all our senses. Furthermore, he also speaks of a human sense: this activity of perceiving other human beings and understanding them as ourselves, and recognizing that we share our conditions for flourishing and my being able to respond to people being around me in that way.

This is the kind of thing that Marx thinks can only be produced by a species that has taken up the work of consciously transforming itself, so this is one reason why Marx is a proponent of revolution when oftentimes it is easy to read Marx and ask: why is he a revolutionary? Why revolution? Why is it so important, this seizure of power? And even people might assume that revolution means violence and chaos, but for Marx one of the chief qualities of revolutionary activity is that it is human beings taking up the project of approaching their own historical development in a conscious and rational way. It’s about organising with a view in mind of what a better society might be and how we might express and fully realise our capacity for sociality.

So whilst Marx does in fact argue for the abolition of morality, to suggest that this means we don’t need moral thinking now or we don’t need an ethical conception of human beings and human development now is premature. If we think of moral theory as a way of theorising a gap, a space between the world as it is and the world as it should be, then if we imagine that the world might be made as it should be – that we might actually be able to produce that better world and live in it – then that kind of role for morality disappears.

One of the chief qualities of revolutionary activity is that it is human beings taking up the project of approaching their own historical development in a conscious and rational way

OT: Marx’s critique of the standing view of morality has something to do with this human sense that you’re talking about. The view that Marx is objecting to: the famous expositors of this kind of view – of the connection between morality and politics – being Locke and Rousseau. Both of these thinkers are concerned with characterising humans and humanity in some essential way and thus in turn, human activity. So, what do you think Marx understands by “human nature” and why does it lead to him down the path you just explained – towards thinking about revolution and labour rather than to the path which perhaps has more in common with moral and political philosophy, like say a social contract in a Lockean or Rousseauean sense.

VW: It’s not actually that there is a gap per se between the world as it is and the world as it should be, where the world as it should be can only be known through abstract reflection, a sort of ideal conceptual reflection. Rather – and this goes to Marx’s dialectic and his historical materialism – the world as it should be already exists within the current one. So we get these claims from Marx that communism is not an ideal to which reality must adjust itself but rather an already existing movement overcoming the current state of things, and because it is an already existing movement overthrowing the current state of things, it is the kind of thing that we can know through empirical study.

So much of what’s going on in Marx and Engels is based on attempting to understand historically how it is that working people have resisted capitalism, how is it that working people are resisting capitalism now? That is the primary object of study for developing a view about the nature of capitalism itself and the likelihood of ever producing a different society. It is something that he is taking up from the ongoing struggles of oppressed, poor, and working people battling against the ravages of capitalism and seeking their survival. And also finding, in practice and in theory, that the survival of the mass of humanity on the planet requires that they resist capitalism and produce a different kind of society that is based on the fulfilment of human needs.

OT: The concepts of revolution and labour involve a really specific way of thinking about human activity, self-directed human activity, how did we get there rather than the social contract?

VW: As Marx and Engels put it in The Critique of German Ideology, how human beings distinguish themselves from other non-human animals, is precisely in this capacity for transformation, for rational, conscious, goal-directed transformation of themselves, such that human beings are the product of their own creation. This materialist conception of human history just is the recognition that if you want to understand something about human life you have to do history, you have to understand how it is that this thing has come to be as a result of human beings interacting with their natural and social world and that goes not just for things like capitalism itself but also for things that we might consider “natural ineradicable and essential” like human beings are greedy, human beings are competitive, human beings are racist or sexist. We come to see that actually there is a history for each of those things I just named and we can learn that history by asking the question: how is it that human beings have produced themselves as this? How is it that human beings have produced this feature of human social being.

The project of revolutionary change is the project of passing out of our “prehistory.” Marx thinks we are still in the prehistory of producing our own reality, our own social world, but not knowing that that’s what we’re doing, relating to it as though it is just naturally given and not as something that we ourselves have brought into being and could bring into a different way of being, which is just revolution, just the species taking up its own existence as its creative project and choosing to realize itself in full.

OT: Can you comment on Marx’s discussion of the fetishism of commodities in Capital?

VW: It’s one of the places that I look when I shake my head in wonder – as I often do – at the prevalence of the view that Marx abandons the concept of alienation. Because I take it that the whole point of the story we are told in Capital about commodity fetishism is that we exist in a world where it looks as though the commodities do all kinds of things and it looks as though economic life is ticking along under its own power but it turns out that actually what we are seeing is our own alienated productivity, our own alienated activity. This is precisely to suggest that the commodities are attributed with power that they don’t actually have but that is our own externalised power that has turned against us. We aren’t aware that this has happened because we produce in a way that reliably creates this kind of inverted relationship between us and our own products and productive activity.

Marxist theory in general, Marxism in general, is an attempt to theorise the world from a radically human perspective

OT: And maybe the flip side of the point you were making about the possibility of revolution, if we were to change society we might end up in a society where we’re actually doing what we are doing, where we actually know what corn is and what makes corn valuable, that would be part of what it is to produce corn on purpose, as opposed to what we have structurally now under capitalism where corn comes to mean this alien thing because of the circulation of commodities.

VW: Yes absolutely. One way to think of the problem of alienation or the problem of commodity fetishism just is that we are relating to the world in a way that’s mediated by these obscuring and alienating and abstract relations. This is the thing he thinks labour can get us to, to a state of constantly attending to the world while in an active interrelation with it, that’s how it is that we can have an accurate objective account of what and who is around us.

OT: Will you elaborate on the standpoint theoretical distinction between bourgeois morality or ethics, versus proletariat or communism morality, and the historicity of morality?

VW: Think about it in terms of standpoint: it is completely possible and coherent for a capitalist to adopt the standpoint of labour that Marx is describing; equally, it’s not only possible but quite common for working people to have a bourgeois perspective. As a question of standpoint it’s not about imputing a certain perspective to every actually existing member of the working class or every actually existing member of the capitalist class but rather imputing a perspective that belongs to the position of a class as a whole with respect to the work of producing and reproducing society. The idea that labour is supposed to be potentially emancipating and clarifying is precisely because it is the standpoint of the portion of society that is engaged in the everyday work of actually doing the things that sustain it and make it the society that it is. This means this body of people could also potentially make it a better society.

OT: How do you work against or refute the anti-humanism of so much contemporary Marxism and critical theory?

VW: Marxist theory in general, Marxism in general, is an attempt to theorise the world from a radically human perspective. When we come back to that question of the knowability of the world or the limits and possibilities of science we can’t escape our human subjectivity and that the only perspective we can have on the world is one that is shaped in all sorts of ways by the vicissitudes and idiosyncrasies of being human.  I don't attempt to supersede or move beyond or transcend that human perspective on the world and on one and other.

I don’t have an argument for why someone should care about what happens to humanity aside from the idea that I think that any of us who wish for human survival, none of that can happen without taking up human survival more generally as our aim. This is again, for Marx, what is distinctive for working people: that the masses of working, oppressed, poor, and exploited people on the globe cannot safeguard their own survival without working for human survival in general. But I do take human survival as an unqualified good as a human person and I really don’t have anything to offer anyone that is confused about that other than a hug.

OT: Finally, what should we say about Marx’s ethical views on emancipation?

VW: I think Marx is advocating for human beings to intervene in their own historical social development to emancipate themselves from shackles of their own making. Taking up such a project involves the unleashing and unfettering of their own creative potential, their own productive capacities. This is a project of freedom, what it is for human beings to develop a society so they can appear in reality in a way that corresponds with their essence as rationally productive beings who create their own conditions of existence. 

Marx wrote open letters during the American Civil War, including to Abraham Lincoln and to the American white working class as we call it, arguing for the importance of emancipation of chattel slaves. You see him talking about this issue in The Jewish Question as well, about the importance for supporting political emancipation as a larger project of supporting human emancipation generally.

Vanessa Wills is a political philosopher, ethicist, educator, and activist based in Washington, DC, where she is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University. Her 2024 monograph, Marx’s Ethical Vision, is published by Oxford University Press.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles. He has published in academic journals ranging from Public Affairs Quarterly, One Earth, Philosophical Papers, and the American Philosophical Association newsletter Philosophy and the Black Experience.

First published online on 9th November 2025

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