ABSTRACT
Marx and Engels do indeed make scattered remarks about morality but they do not try to construct a moral theory or, like Nietzsche, to forge a 'new morality' or even write anti-foundationalist treatises on moral philosophy after the fashion of Hume, Westermarck or Dewey. The dramatis personae are some of the relatively major figures in the attempt to develop or revise Marxism after Marx. An acceptance of the perspective on morality the author have portrayed does not entail, or even suggest, a rejection of the reality of moral conceptions, though historical materialism does entail the denial of their causal primacy, particularly where epochal social change is at issue. And if morality is ideological, it cannot be objective, since ideological beliefs cannot be justified. There remain 'relativistic problems' about Marxism vis-a-vis ethics which might show that if historical materialism is true morality totters. .
