Sunny Hundal has caused a stir by calling right-wingers "evil." For me, this raises a distinction between the Marxist and non-Marxist left: whereas the non-Marxist left often claim a moral superiority over the right - see Comment is Free, passim, if you can bear to - Marxists do not.

For us, the problem isn't that Tories are bad, or liars or stupid. Sure, some are - but a glance at Simon Danczuk, Liam Byrne or Siobhan McDonagh will remind us that Tories hardly have a monopoly here. Instead, for Marxists, immorality is an attribute not so much of individual agents but of the capitalist system itself.

Take, for example, exploitation and bad pay. These, said Marx, don't happen because individual capitalists are evil or greedy, but because competition forces working conditions down:

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society...But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.(Capital vol I ch 10 pt 5)

From this perspective, the problem with Tories isn't that they lack a moral code, but rather the opposite - they put too much weight upon morality, and fail to see that this agency is circumscribed by capitalism itself. Take two examples.

- Jesse Norman wants bosses to be public spirited rather than pure profit maximizers. But this ignores the fact that the firm that pays lots of taxes and decent wages will suffer a competitive disadvantage against those that don't. Depending upon how finely the wheels of competition grind, this might not be possible. It also ignores the fact that the neoliberal ideology that sustains capitalism is performative; it instils in bosses a moral norm against paying taxes or decent wages.

- Tories want the unemployed to look for work, to have a work ethic. But this ignores the fact that, in a world of chronic excess supply of labour, workshyness is a rational response. "Bad ethics" of low expectations and helplessness are an effect, not a cause. What Banerjee and Duflo wrote of the global poor is true, mutatis mutandis, of the UK's poor:

In the same way that the poor may save less than the middle class because they know that their savings will not be enough to reach a consumption goal they are really looking forward to, they may not invest as much (not only money but also emotions and intellectual energy) in their businesses because they already know that they can't make a real difference (Poor Economics, p224)

You might object here that Tories are "evil" in that austerity is doing real damage. True. But this omits two points. First, they are not pursuing austerity because they want to hurt people, but because they believe it will do good; this is an intellectual error, not a moral failing.

Secondly, austerity is not the only - or even main - cause of our woes. Capitalism was ailing well before Osborne became Chancellor. In this sense, talk of "evil" Tories does capitalism a favour, by deflecting attention away from its systemic shortcomings.