Morality and Reason

I want to start with what I think Marx and Engels contributed the most — they identified gender inequality as a question of social status and property interests, not just a matter of men being morally worse than women.

In other words, Marx and Engels can legitimately be called the fathers of modern feminism! Before them, most female thinkers believed that women's oppression and confinement stemmed from men being morally worse. (Sure, you could blame men for blocking women's access to education and development.) But Marx saw that this oppression was actually a product of private property — a consequence of men seizing the means of production. That seizure forced women into economic dependence on men, which produced inequality. And capitalism exploited exactly that dependence, forcing women into long hours of unpaid labor.

This same logic applies to politics today. Trump isn't really sending ICE to Minneapolis to enforce the law! His real goal is to pressure local residents into voting Republican in the midterms. Same thing with his deliberately crude way of speaking — it's calculated to attract a specific voter base. The Epstein case doesn't reveal Epstein, Clinton, Bill, and the rest as uniquely evil individuals — it reveals the judicial system's powerlessness when it faces the elite class.

These examples point to the same thing: we need to resist the impulse to reduce everything to personal morality. Yes, humans are irrational — but that doesn't mean every single human action is irrational. After all, money and power play a huge role in your decision-making, don't they?!