The ethical dimensions of Marxist thought /

West is a widely respected philosopher who gives a clear, nontechnical, competent, and convincing interpretation of what has been unclear to Marxists and non-Marxists alike: Marx's theoretical development to a radical historicist rejection of philosophical eternal truths. Marx claims that all ethics and philosophy are mere ideology that present as eternal truth what is merely relative to particular historical conditions. Ideology distorts and hides the reality that the claims to universal truth only serve to perpetuate the reality of the dominance of particular class interests. West shows that Engels, Kautsky, and Lukacs, the leading interpreters of Marxian ethics, all tried to save Marxism from charges of ethical relativism with naturalistic or ontological foundations for a Marxian ethic. They were moderate historicists who did not go as far as Marx. In West's interpretation, Marx accepted as an adequate ethical notion a dynamic convention arrived at collectively, which would result in self-realization of individuals in community. For upper-division undergraduates and graduate students and for Marx scholars. D. C. Lee University of New Mexico