https://socialistworker.org/2012/04/...tify-the-means
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PAUL D’AMATO
DO THE ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS?
April 6, 2012
The real question, as Leon Trotsky wrote, is, "What justifies the ends?"
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IN ONE of many fruitless arguments, I remember my father attacking Marxism for believing that "the ends justify the means." By this, he meant that Marxists have no moral scruples and will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.
Ironically, this was the same person who once told me, with a straight face, that the U.S. had to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki "to save lives."
In fact, every ruling class in the world operates on the assumption that the "ends justifies the means." In every war, these rulers risk the lives of millions of ordinary soldiers on both sides in order to control some market, some bit of land or some slice of power.
The U.S. government imposed a decade of debilitating economic sanctions on Iraq, resulting in the deaths of more than 1 million people--half of them children. The stated aim was to eliminate Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction."
But lraq's military capabilities have been smashed. The real reason for sanctions is to assert U.S. dominance in the Middle East--to show that if any country steps out of line, it will be devastated.
COLUMNIST: PAUL D’AMATO
Paul D'Amato is managing editor of the International Socialist Review and author of The Meaning of Marxism, a lively and accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition he founded. Paul can be contacted at
pdamato@isreview.org.
Asked by a reporter in 1995 if killing half a million Iraqi children was "worth it," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded that "the price, we think, is worth it." She certainly thinks that the end justifies the means.
"The ruling class," wrote Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in his book, Their Morals and Ours, "forces its ends upon society and habituates it to considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality."
It is therefore "immoral" to kill in peacetime but a sacred duty to kill in war. It is impermissible for strikers to use force to stop a scab crossing a picket line but obligatory for a police officer to use force to break up that same picket line.
holy fuck.
i didnt want to agree with all this.
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