ABSTRACT
Marx’s condemnations of capitalism are often based quite explicitly on its failure to provide people with the nonmoral goods listed above, together with the claim that the existing powers of social production could provide them to all members of society if production were organized more rationally and democratically (i.e., socialistically). Marx’s attitude toward social criticism based on appeals to the two sorts of goods varies accordingly. Capitalism can be condemned without any ideological mystification or illusion by showing how it starves, enslaves and alienates people, that is, how it frustrates human self-actualization, prosperity and other nonmoral goods. According to historical materialism, people’s moral beliefs and the motives to adhere to them are part of the ‘ideological superstructure’ of society. The justice of transactions in capitalist production rests on their adequacy and correspondence to the capitalist mode of production.
