I struggle with ethics and Marxism. The framework of virtue ethics makes the most sense when thinking about the values of a post-capitalist society, but it's impossible as a Marxist to know what that ethics would be as it's contingent on new and unknown circumstances. 1/4

I agree with some traditionalists (not capitalist or fascist ones) that modernity involved a seismic breakdown of premodern virtues; like Marx, I don't think that's wholly bad, but I do think it has bad aspects. How we relate to 'bourgeois morality' is not at all simple. 2/4

On ethics the Marxist project, which necessarily does not base itself on moral concerns (even if it also does not preclude them), is faced with a series of aporia in a project to create a basis for a new society with a new (certainly not static) virtue ethics. 3/4

We must appeal to the contingency of human flourishing, the faultlines of all class societies and especially capitalism, to speculative notions of what is possible within the scope of a new and human history. We are shipbuilding the very vessel in which we are also sailing. 4/4