Karl Marx the Moral Philosopher

Vanessa Wills

One of the first kinds of questions that really interested me was the universality of values. How is it that people from very different moral communities can talk to one another, develop shared values, and have ways of life that are commensurate and compatible when they have very different worldviews? Understanding how values could come to be universal through people working together, talking together, collaborating, theorizing together — that has always interested me.

In my first years of grad school, I was coming at those questions from a philosophy of language place and thinking about linguistic communities. The first academic philosopher that I had read years before was [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, so that sent me down a certain path. I was mostly interested in questions in philosophy of language but with a highly normative bent to it.

Then the US declared war on Iraq in 2003. I found that I just didn’t have the theoretical framework to understand how our leadership in the US could do something so unwise and immoral; unwise because it seemed obviously destined to lead the world down the path of more war and endless conflicts — which it has — and immoral for the obvious reasons. So, I just wasn’t finding much that could help dissolve this confusion that I had about the war. I was very much against it and got involved with antiwar activism and started going to protests, and then very soon I was organizing protests. I went from being somebody who had been to only one or two political protests before the invasion to an organizer.

When I started going to antiwar protests and getting involved in that movement, I met socialists and started talking to them. I was very interested in what they had to say about the role of class, about the role of power, and about materialism. They were talking about materialism in a way that no one had…