Marx denied that he was a moralist. But it can hardly be disputed that anyone who thinks seriously about certain matters which have to do with morals—the nature and causes of wrongdoing and suffering in human society, and how they may be remedied—must come to grips with his arguments. To put the matter bluntly, any responsible intellectual who is not a Marxist must at times ask himself just why he is not; and in what follows, I shall try to explain why I am not. To cope with the whole range of Marx’s writings, one needs to be a specialist; those who are not so may well be, as I am, deeply indebted to David MacLellan for his admirable summary, supported with copious quotations, of the main features of Marx’s thought. For better or for worse, anyway, my Marx will be largely Marx as McLellan presents him.

It is fundamental to Marx’s thought that human relationships, and consequently the whole web of institutions which make up society, are determined by the material circumstances in which men live and work; and consequently that if you change these material circumstances, you will change human ideas and behaviour at large. This thesis is generally labelled ‘historical materialism. Now the word ‘determined’ may be understood here in a relatively strong or a relatively weak sense. If it is taken in a strong sense, the thesis is that, given the material circumstances and the means of production prevalent in a society, its members cannot but behave very much as they do. (It would appear to be incorrect to ascribe to Mans a rigid determinism applying to the details of every individual action.)