This was probably a huge milestone for me when I realised it. Marxism does not talk about morality at all, it’s irrelevant to the practice of communism. We can defend communism as a system and (one of) the logical result of the class contradictions in capitalism without ever resorting to morality.
Moral discussions usually end in this way: “what makes you right? Why is your way of seeing things more valid than mine? Morality is relative anyway”. And you’re back to square one, and everything in the discussion that led up to this moment is made irrelevant.
There are in all things an objective truth that sometimes might be hidden away (two people telling their side of the story and making themselves to be the victim, yet there is a third objectively true line up of the events that actually happened), and sometimes in plain sight (2+2=4). Following this principle, we can find out the objective truth of class society (the class struggle), we can find out the underlying mechanics of capitalism (reproduction of capital, the tendency towards monopolies…).
And to me this makes marxism much more compelling and impossible to ignore. People that say “communists are just idealists” or “they don’t actually know history” have, obviously, never engaged with the topic in any way and resort to whatever they vaguely remember from high school history and civics classes.
This is partly why we call marxism scientific communism. This is something that sometimes rubs scientists the wrong way (both professional and self-proclaimed, such as economists) because they are taught metaphysical sciences – that everything is disconnected, that the study of the apple is the field of the botanist and the study of the apple’s molecules is the field of the chemist and they must never cross. So they ask for peer-reviewed studies (which are great, we cannot be marxists and dismiss science) and don’t understand anything beyond hard sciences where we can “easily” observe and demonstrate phenomena. I can’t demonstrate the class struggle entirely. I can observe however that there are signs pointing towards the existence of the class struggle and make a hypothesis based on those observations, test it and see if my hypothesis was right or wrong. If it was wrong, then we adjust our observation. This is why marxism is scientific, it evolves with the times and stays relevant.
It’s also a great disservice to scientists and everyone else that they are not taught philosophy, especially dialectical materialism obviously. People actually often go back to moralistic arguments with me on this one, saying “why is your philosophy the one that should be promoted and not idealism?”. But we are being promoted idealism on the daily currently. As for the reason to teach all children dialectical materialism, we can point to the success of this school of philosophy in answering our current issues and even emergent issues that are relatively new. Answers that offer better solutions than anything idealism or metaphysics can come up with. Idealism carried us part of the way and is now an obsolete tool, and dialectical materialism is objectively better for the reasons above. Idealism is like a hammer, only capable of performing gross, macro operations like shutting crates shut. It does work, but it will not help you perform microscopic, hair-trigger precise surgery to fix an artery. The latter is dialectical materialism: our needs evolve, which lead us to creating tools more fitted for our needs and also changes our ideas. In time, dialectical materialism itself will become the hammer that nailed crates.
Does all of that mean you cannot have morality, then? The contradiction to scientific communism is not moralism, it’s utopian communism. You are absolutely allowed to hold a moral place for marxism in your heart. It’s perfectly fine to feel that the bourgeoisie exploiting you is morally wrong, much like killing someone would be morally wrong, or that capitalism is morally unjustified because of all the problems it brought.
But to convince people, I have found that pointing out the objective truth carries me much further.
I think you’re misunderstanding the point of what @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml is saying. Marxism is not moralistic in the sense that is is not prescriptive. It can only tell you what you ought to do if you presuppose some basic moral values. It is descriptive because as any science, it focuses on explaining the world as it is, where it is going, but does not by itself explain how the world should be. Nothing can, because of what Hume observed with the is-ought problem. You cannot arrive at some moral truth of how something ought to be purely from what something is without presupposing some other “ought”.
None of the points you’ve made contradict anything the OP said. Marxists do study morality as a phenomenon. They observe it, they do not dictate it to us and try to prove moral values with logical syllogisms. Instead, they observe, as materialists, that morality is the result of the material conditions of each time.
None of the quotes provided contradict this either. Each one of these quotes make objective statements about prostitution and what it coincides with. But none of these quotes explicitly say that prostitution is evil. That would rely on moral presuppositions that these things, the destruction of family and solidarity among the sexes, etc. are evil. But by laying out the objective truth, you can conclude that seeing prostitution as acceptable requires you to disregard women and even humanity. And most people, even with different ethical systems, at least see some value in the good of humanity.