: Bob: How does taking hostages and murdering people end up being good? How come when Stalin did it, it's bad?
It sounds like utilitarianism....Not wuite- whilst it is a 'means justify ends' ethics, its more a case of appealing to historical necessity, and historical dialectics and all sorts- I'd suggest reading hegel's 'Reason in History' would give you more of an idea of Bolshevik motivations and ethics than anything by Marx.
Marx though morality was just something that a given society made up to justify and control its own existence, but obviously, he did valorize human freedom as a supreme good, so tehre is an implicit ethic in tehre somewhere...
None.