Marx’s Forgotten Paradox

Few thinkers have shaped the modern world as profoundly as Karl Marx. His ideas sparked revolutions, inspired liberation movements, and influenced entire schools of thought, from sociology to political philosophy. Yet, there remains a striking paradox at the heart of his legacy: Marx, a man deeply moved by human suffering and exploitation, consistently rejected the language of morality.

Rethinking Marx and Morality: The Paradox of Revolution and Ethics

He denounced moral philosophy as a bourgeois illusion, a tool used by the ruling class to justify oppression. Concepts like “good,” “justice,” and “duty” were not timeless truths but social constructs, born from the material relations of production. He even said that morality itself was a product of class domination, then a true revolutionary could not rely on it.

And yet, across his writings, we hear a profound moral voice. His anger at child labour, his empathy for the working poor, and his condemnation of alienation, all speak of a passionate sense of injustice. Marx may have dismissed morality in theory, but in practice, he was guided by a deep moral conviction: that human beings deserve freedom, dignity, and the chance to live creatively rather than in servitude to capital. This tension between rejecting morality and expressing moral outrage runs through all of Marx’s work. It is not a simple contradiction, but a philosophical puzzle that continues to haunt modern thought. Was Marx’s critique of morality a flaw in his system, one that left his followers with no moral language to defend justice?

When Marx Rejected Morality

Marx’s rejection of morality was not a gesture of cynicism, but a philosophical move rooted in his understanding of history and life. He believed that moral values are shaped by the economic structures and power relations of their time. To speak of “justice” or “goodness” as universal truths was, for Marx, to ignore the material conditions that define what each era calls just or good. In his view, moral language often disguises domination. The bourgeoisie speaks of “freedom” while exploiting workers; it praises “virtue” while building an economy on alienation and inequality. Morality, then, becomes a mask, a way to moralise oppression.

That is why he distanced himself from earlier socialists who built their arguments on moral indignation. Figures like Proudhon or Feuerbach believed that capitalism was immoral, that the answer lay in appealing to human compassion or reason. Marx saw this as naïve idealism. He argued that no system falls because it is unjust, but because it becomes materially unsustainable, when its contradictions erode its own foundations. Even though we are still waiting for that to happen, since the fall of feudalism and the first stage of Proto-capitalism.

Yet this rejection of morality did not make Marx indifferent to suffering. On the contrary, his writings burn with moral energy, a deep awareness of human degradation under capitalism. When he described the worker as “alienated” from his labour, his product, and his own humanity, he was expressing not only an economic analysis but a profound ethical insight. This is the first paradox of Marx’s thought: he denies the existence of moral universals, yet his critique of capitalism depends on an unmistakable moral sensibility, one that demands human liberation from systems that deform our nature. Marx might have dismissed morality as ideology, but what shines through his work is precisely a moral vision: a world in which human beings are free to realise their essence through creative, unalienated life.

Can Ethics Exist in Marx’s World?

It all comes to this question: If Marx rejected morality as ideology, does that mean his vision leaves no room for ethics at all? This question has followed his legacy for generations. Critics often argue that Marx’s materialism, by reducing human action to economic structures, erases the moral dimension of life. But this view misunderstands what Marx really meant. Marx never denied that people make moral choices. What he denied was that those choices exist independently of their material and social conditions. For him, ethics could not stand above history; they had to grow from it. A new society would not simply proclaim moral values; it would live them through its relations of production, through the way people work, share, and create together.

In other words, Marx’s rejection of morality was not a call for amorality, but for a deeper, more concrete form of ethics, one that emerges from collective human practice rather than abstract ideals. This is what he meant by “praxis”: the unity of theory and action, where moral transformation is not preached but enacted in daily life. In this sense, the revolution was not just political or economic. It was ethical. It aimed to restore the conditions in which human beings could overcome alienation and rediscover the meaning of community, solidarity, and creativity. A truly communist society, in Marx’s imagination, would not need external moral commandments. It would be moral by its very nature, because exploitation and domination, the roots of moral corruption, would no longer exist.

This is, of course, an ideal that history has not realised. The regimes that claimed Marx’s legacy often betrayed it most deeply, turning his dream of human liberation into new forms of oppression. But if we return to Marx himself, beyond the distortions of later politics, we find not a thinker without ethics, but one who sought to ground morality in the real movement of human emancipation. In a world where moral rhetoric is often used to justify inequality, war, and profit, Marx’s challenge remains radical: stop moralising the world and start transforming the conditions that make it unjust.

Conclusion: The Moral Pulse of Marxism

Perhaps Marx’s greatest moral insight is that ethics cannot survive in a vacuum, outside of material reality. It must be lived through social relations. You cannot preach justice in a world built on exploitation. You cannot teach compassion in an economy that rewards greed. To change morality, you must first change the material conditions that shape it.

Yet, the question remains: can a world without moral codes, only guided by material equality, truly sustain itself? History suggests that no revolution can endure without some shared moral foundation — a vision of what is good, just, and worthy of human dignity. Marx may have refused to define such values explicitly, but his faith in human potential, in freedom and community, carried within it the seed of a new ethics, one rooted not in divine commandments or bourgeois respectability, but in the collective human struggle for liberation.

Marx wanted to end moral hypocrisy. But perhaps the true task today is to rediscover a materialist morality. One that sees goodness not as a sermon but as a practice, not as a private virtue but as a social condition. Because morality, like history, cannot be abolished, only transformed.

P.S.

This paradox between rejecting morality and expressing a deep moral concern did not end with Marx. It continued to shape the debates of later Marxist thinkers. Some analytical Marxists, or Steven Lukes, sought to resolve it. Others, however, embraced it as an inevitable tension, a sign that Marx’s thought resists simple categorisation between science and ethics. In the end, Marx’s philosophy stands as one that strives to transcend morality yet cannot fully escape it, revealing the enduring struggle between scientific materialism and moral humanism at the heart of thought.

Written and Published by Sergios Saropoulos

All pictures used in the article were taken by Sergios Saropoulos

Sources

• Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Penguin Classics, 1992).
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Progress Publishers, 1968).
• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (Penguin Classics, 1990).
• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (Progress Publishers, 1970).
• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Progress Publishers, 1970).
• Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1985).
• G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton University Press, 2000).
• Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (Routledge, 2004).
• Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (Yale University Press, 2011).v