British Bourgeois ‘Morality’¶
Core Argument¶
In British Bourgeois ‘Morality’, the author advances a fundamental Marxist critique of ethics, arguing that morality is not an absolute or transcendent category but a function of living human society, shifting with social progress and serving the interests of the ruling class as a bridle upon the oppressed. Against this, the working class has forged its own revolutionary morality, one that dethrones God and all absolute standards. Within this framework, honesty is defined as conformity of words and deeds before the working class, measured against the supreme end of the social revolution. Deception of enemies is permissible, but lying to the masses about the aims and methods of their own struggle is forbidden.
The chapter situates this argument within the historical and theoretical context of British capitalism, contrasting it with the experience of Russian Marxists, who, unburdened by a powerful bourgeois culture, were able to assimilate the most revolutionary conclusions of European thought. Bourgeois public opinion is dissected as a psychological web protecting bourgeois violence, composed of inherited prejudices and machinery for mobilising patriotic feeling and moral indignation. The more ‘democratic’ a regime, the more its Labour leaders revere this public opinion. Religion serves as the chief resource of this ideological apparatus, functioning as a ‘heavenly policeman’ over exploited humanity. The author insists that this ‘inner policeman’ of bourgeois education and religion must be cast out of labour leaders before the outward policeman of the state can be overthrown.
The 1926 General Strike is presented as the decisive exposure of British democracy’s fraud. The bourgeoisie’s vaunted ‘freedom of the press’ is merely the right to use workers’ labour and bourgeois-owned presses to print material against working-class interests, while workers who refuse to print such slander are condemned. During the strike, the government requisitioned all paper, replacing bourgeois papers with a single government organ. The strike’s own paper failed not from its small size but from its spirit of conciliation and cowardice. In a notable polemic, the author points to the Daily Mail published in Paris on the strike’s first day. Its front page carries a patriotic leader, ‘For King and Country’, and a second article, ‘For the Freedom of the Press’, railing against Moscow and the working class. Yet, directly alongside these articles, the same issue prints dozens of advertisements for Parisian brothels catering to wealthy clients. This ‘moral’ newspaper thus derives its revenue simultaneously from defending King, country, and press freedom and from promoting houses of ill-repute.