The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought

this book explains that so called such as Donnie Trump become total dictators taking all freedom from all the people unless the individual is considered part of the " Spoils System" the select group for the dictator

West has brought Marx to us in a different light, in this deep analysis of a practical philosophy.West shows us that Karl Marx is not the bogyman that most would beleive.

I thought I had a pretty good vocabulary. Was a hard read for me.

For people that really follow the work of Cornel West, it's no surprise that he has Marxist sympathies. This book marks the wrestling of his Marxism with ethical theory. He eventually gave up on being a full-blown Marxist, as he writes in the recently revised preface, because he couldn't square it with his Christianity. One wonder why he doesn't just give up on his Christianity than, or dabble more in liberation theology, or the branch of Marxism Terry Eagleton espouses. Oh well.This book starts with a bang, but slowly peters out, and that's why it gets four stars. West is nothing if not consistently cunning and shrewd in his analysis of Marx's writings from his dissertation, to The German Ideology. In analyzing these writings West informs us that Marx came up with a Radical Historicist point of view, which is necessarily distinct from Moral Relativism because he rejects the ethical objectivity, which Moral Relativism attempts to distinguish itself from. Radical Historicism has no room for ethical or moral ideals (e.g., Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's greatest happiness, etc), but it does leave room for moral action, within the given confines of particular historical situation.This is an interesting point of view to take, but I'm not sure Marx actually takes this view, at least not entirely. While it may be true that this is his position by the end of The German Ideology, West never delves into Capital I-III, or any subsequent works. He does have literally one line from The Gotha Program, and one line from the Grundrisse, but they're hardly definitive. Especially when most Marxists concur that Capital is a definitive moment in Marxism and Marx's method. As Lukács points out.This leads West to reject the ethical positions adopted by Engels and Lukács, because they're too objective regarding a solid foundation: dialectics. West claims Marx never held this view, and it's true he didn't, if one doesn't go beyond The German Ideology...Marx specifically says worker's wages are raised through a "historical moral" struggle. And this struggle has an objective victory/loss, the rise of the wage.Overall interesting read, but West needed to spend more time analyzing more writings.

Sometimes being eloquent doesn’t help