ABSTRACT
For the essence of the Marxist ethic, which both Lenin and Stalin recognized much more clearly than Marx himself, is its futurism. Marxism is neither immoral nor amoral. Even its moral relativism is more apparent than real. Now if one assumes that revolution is the only way out of a situation which will become increasingly intolerable, and that the battlefield morality, like the state itself, will wither away when the time is ripe, this seems to be a perfectly consistent and defensible attitude. The moral inconsistencies in which communists appear to get involved are superficial only, and due to the fact that they have to make allowances for an ‘objective situation’ in which people have certain moral preconceptions. In such a situation, democratic forms of government are obviously impossible, and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which the communists promised would be the most democratic of regimes, turns out to be one of the least.
