I have written this paper on the basis of the hunch that there is something very misleading about the relationship, as Marx sometimes describes it, between the scientific analysis of society and morality. I have the hunch, also, that many of Marx’s followers have been misled in the way one would expect them to be, given his false clues. I should say, however, that this suspicion of confusion concerns more what Marx and his followers call by the name ‘morality’ than what they offer as a method and a substance for the analysis of society. This misleading confusion is that Marx and subsequent Marxists more or less explicitly define their stance as scientists by way of contrast with the status the moralist or moral theorist is, on their view, supposed to have. I shall not discuss in any detail the various ways in which this false contrast has been made out. Rather I shall mention some guiding lines of thought which lead to it.

The hypothesis which I will offer as an alternative to this contrast is simply that it would best serve both clarity and the history of moral thought if we were to agree on the following proposition: Marxism, as the science of society is, if a true science, nothing but morality and morality nothing but Marxism. Hence, the judgments about how to act which may be based on the results of that science, if true, are moral judgments. If, however, the science has produced more than trivially false results it is nothing but vice to act, or want to act on the judgments about acting which are entailed by them. The question, therefore, whether Marxism is or is not identical with morality is, to my mind, an empirical question, to be settled one way or the other by reference to the very same facts which show it to offer either crucially true or else false statements about contemporary society.