One of the first kinds of questions that really interested me was the universality of values. How is it that people from very different moral communities can talk to one another, develop shared values, and have ways of life that are commensurate and compatible when they have very different worldviews? Understanding how values could come to be universal through people working together, talking together, collaborating, theorizing together — that has always interested me.

In my first years of grad school, I was coming at those questions from a philosophy of language place and thinking about linguistic communities. The first academic philosopher that I had read years before was [Ludwig] Wittgenstein, so that sent me down a certain path. I was mostly interested in questions in philosophy of language but with a highly normative bent to it.

Then the US declared war on Iraq in 2003. I found that I just didn’t have the theoretical framework to understand how our leadership in the US could do something so unwise and immoral; unwise because it seemed obviously destined to lead the world down the path of more war and endless conflicts — which it has — and immoral for the obvious reasons. So, I just wasn’t finding much that could help dissolve this confusion that I had about the war. I was very much against it and got involved with antiwar activism and started going to protests, and then very soon I was organizing protests. I went from being somebody who had been to only one or two political protests before the invasion to an organizer.

When I started going to antiwar protests and getting involved in that movement, I met socialists and started talking to them. I was very interested in what they had to say about the role of class, about the role of power, and about materialism. They were talking about materialism in a way that no one had talked about it in my philosophy classes. In seminars, materialism was mainly an abstract metaphysical argument about the fundamental metaphysical stuff of the universe, which is plenty interesting. But what interested socialists was historical materialism. They were talking about how in capitalist society people mostly have idealist worldviews and tend to think that the ideas in our heads are what play the most important role in determining reality; they tend, in different ways, to think that abstract concepts are a motive force of reality. I came to think that what plays the biggest role in shaping these things is the array of material forces, and how human beings are interacting with their world to satisfy their basic needs.

Once that was explained to me, I began to see the idealist character of so much mainstream discourse. In terms of the war, the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, all their interests are very different from mine so there’s no reason for me to identify my interests with theirs or, most importantly, vice versa. I had already moved away from philosophy of language and was working in this area called metaethics. Metaethics is concerned with asking what we are trying to do when we ask ethical questions. Are we aiming to discover abstract, eternal, universal, mind-independent, human-independent facts that are sort of “out there” about morality? Or when we engage in ethical inquiry and ethical practices, are we socially constructing and constituting for ourselves what it is that is moral or immoral?

I settled on the more normative side of these debates and I asked the socialists that I was talking to, “What does Marxism say about ethics?” And they said, “Read [Leon] Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours.” Trotsky argues that the ruling class has their morality and we have our morality, but he left me cold because he seemed to reproduce the same puzzle. It wasn’t enough for me to say, “Great, this is the morality that is in my interests, and that’s the morality in yours and let’s just fight it out,” even though ultimately that is what people must do politically. I needed to reconcile those two things, so I switched gears and decided to write my dissertation on Marx and ethics.

The initial purpose, after writing the dissertation, was converting it into something that could be read by people other than me and my dissertation committee! [Laughter] At one point, I approached the book as an effort to definitively settle the question of Marx and ethics now and for all time — which I fortunately quickly realized is exactly the kind of abstract bloviating Marx seeks to warn us against! The resulting book doesn’t try to be “timeless” in any way, it’s very grounded in the current moment. The book also became less of an academic treatise — although it is that, of course — and more of an intervention, which is what it should be, which is what I want it to be — which is the point of doing anything.

The purpose of the book is to be an intervention both into academic debates, about Marx and ethics specifically, about Marx and Marxist interpretation generally, but also philosophy as a field, the academy, but much more importantly, about those whose lives are affected by political struggle, change, and domination, which is almost everybody. The book became much more of a response to the current moment than I had originally imagined.

One debate about Marx, in terms of the historiography standpoint, is about how to periodize Marx, or whether to periodize him. One very common way of approaching Marx’s work is to say there is an early Marx, who’s interested in philosophy and the concept of alienation and ethical questions, and then after that side of Marx dies, there’s a new version of him around the time of his and [Friedrich] Engels’s production of the texts that get published as A Critique of the German Ideology. And from the ashes rises the late Marx — the late Marx is scientific, and by scientific we mean “no longer interested in philosophy,” “no longer interested in any ethical questions or considerations about essential human nature or alienation.”

One of my arguments in the book is that this periodization is wrong and that Marx is incredibly consistent throughout his writings. Looked at as a whole, what we see throughout Marx’s writing is him gathering more and more resources with which to answer some of the questions of his early work. That should not be mistaken for him losing interest in those questions or swaying from them. This is particularly important if the “scientific Marx” is assumed to be a Marx who is a fatalistic or an economic determinist who believes that human agency and freedom are illusory, that everything is dictated by the laws of history. And that led me to one of the other questions that often comes up with respect to Marx, which is how much of [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel do you have to take on board to make sense of Marx? Or, how Hegelian is Marx and how Hegelian does he remain? One of the core arguments of my book is that he’s quite Hegelian all the way through and this tends to be overlooked.

I think one error is to take these concepts, these various concepts like class, race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and all the various vectors along which a person can be categorized, and line them up and then try imagining that the way they structure our social world is analogous to one another. It’s one of the ways that my perspective differs from the ways that intersectionality theory often gets discussed.

Class is importantly distinct from other social categories because it is the concrete way in which our production of our social world is organized and structured — these various concepts, including class, are all the products of our human activity. They’re all socially and historically produced. They emerge out of our history as human beings. And so if you think that the way that human beings produce their history and produce themselves as social beings is via the social activity of labor, via an activity in which they interact with the world or with one another to satisfy their needs, and if we want to ask why is it that society is like this at this moment, then we should also be asking: How is it that human beings have produced this thing?

Then the question we are asking is what does their productive activity look like? What does labor look like for them?” And, in a capitalist or in any class society, it turns out that the production of that society is structured via class. In a capitalist society, some people own the means of production. Other people own nothing but their labor power, which they sell. We want to start there to explain how it is that that way of organizing our productive labor helps us to explain the rest of our created social reality.

Capitalism causes sexism and racism. It doesn’t mean, however, that in any given circumstance, that class is the one thing that we should be focusing our attention on. At the same time, if your house caught fire, and you know that it was set on fire because your oven is faulty, you don’t get on the internet and buy yourself a new oven while the house burns. Determining the causal priority between two phenomena doesn’t in and of itself dictate anything at all about which phenomenon deserves priority of attention at a particular moment. But if you would like a world where you’re not constantly putting out fires, then at some point you do have to diagnose and fix the root problem.

I consider several ways of unpacking Marx’s “ideology” concept and argue that “ideology” in Marx is best thought of as referring to systems of thought that allow us to make sense of a social world riven with conflict and contradiction — most especially, a social world in which human beings are divided against one another in class struggle. I point out that if the emergence of bourgeois thought was a historical and scientific achievement — and it was — then it’s mistaken to think that “ideology,” even “bourgeois ideology,” is synonymous with complete falsehoods and lies.

Similarly, even working-class theory is “ideological” in a society where it is shaped by the mutual antagonism of capitalist and worker, as it cannot be anything other than consciousness of this antagonism — an antagonism that is itself, in a sense, “false” because it obscures the nature of fully realized human beings in harmony with one another. To say morality is a form of ideology, then, is indeed to say that as a social form, it would pass out of existence along with the resolution of social antagonisms. But for now, the antagonisms remain, and we need moral theory, done from the point of view of working people, to help make sense of how we might finally resolve them.

I think Herbert Marcuse’s notion of a “false reality” which ideology can accurately capture, is useful here. Or Marx’s own simile comparing ideology to a camera obscura in which the world is shown, but upside down, requiring critical theory if we are to glean some sense of the world via our necessarily ideological representations of it. (Indeed, the illustration on my book’s cover is of a camera obscura.)

I appreciate that; thank you. I tried to steer clear of dismissals, which too often exist to flatter an author’s sense of their own cleverness rather than to illuminate a point. About Marx and [Emmanuel] Kant: folks who have engaged with Marx’s work at all have often asked whether his theory could and should be supplemented with Kantian morality. In my book’s treatment of this debate, I point out that this is very far from being an unreasonable guess — Marx and Kant are linked to one another through the German Idealist tradition, which asked, among other things, whether the ideas in one’s mind could be shown to represent some independent reality outside accurately and objectively of one’s mind.

That question is especially pressing for moral thought, which obviously doesn’t have the same kind of correspondence to the external world that, say, thoughts about how many vertebrae a particular snake has might. For Kant, who thought the objectivity and universality of moral facts could be demonstrated through — and only through — pure abstract reason, if reality itself is conceptual and made up of ideas, we can see how it then becomes relatively unproblematic to suggest that pure abstract reason can lead us to thoughts that correspond objectively to an external world existing independently of any of us. If, like Marx, you think that reality is fundamentally material and concrete, the question is harder to resolve.

So, many scholars have thought, well perhaps Marx’s materialism needs to be “enhanced” somehow with Kant’s idealism and applied to moral reasoning. The problem, or at least one major problem, is that Marx’s historical materialism truly is incommensurable with Kant’s idealism, especially when it comes to Kant’s account of the spontaneous free will, which is the proper object of moral judgments. Marx’s theory can’t possibly accommodate the notion of a will that is totally undetermined by material forces external to it. So, if it’s true that Marx would need the addition of Kantian morality to flesh out its own normative commitments, that would actually be so much the worse for Marxist theory. Happily, I don’t think Marxist theory does need this kind of “enhancement,” as I attempt to show in my book!

Angela Davis has long been an inspiration to me; her life is both a testament to the good one can accomplish by adhering to revolutionary principles and to the heavy price one might have to pay to do so. I close my book with a brief retelling of her firing from the University of California [Los Angeles, UCLA] by its McCarthyist Board of Regents, a firing that was urged on by then governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Davis never backed down in that fight, never shrank back from the call to speak out against imperialism and war.

Davis’s struggle is symbolic of that moment but it’s also crucial to consider how much her individual courage existed within a context of mass struggle. She was, of course, a member of the Communist Party, which was the whole pretense for firing her. There were student protests of the Vietnam War and for free speech rights across the country. Many faculty at UCLA, including in the Department of Philosophy there, spoke out in support of her. That Davis was a leftist attacked by reactionary forces in the 1960s was not unique; but the immense response in defense of her was. So, this moment in Davis’s life both shows her own clarity about what was called for in that moment and the necessity of organized mass struggle to bring ethical ideals out of the realm of pure theory and into concrete political practice.