This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Marx does not merely disagree with utilitarianism in Capital, he mocks it, calling Bentham a genius of bourgeois stupidity and dismissing his felicific calculus, the project of measuring right action by adding up pleasures and subtracting pains, as an insipid, uninspired, and wordy scholasticism dressed up as science. The target is not utilitarianism's math so much as what Marx takes to be hidden inside it: a supposedly neutral, universal measure of human interest that in practice smuggles in the interests of one particular class, the Victorian shopkeeper, and calls the result human nature. Bentham's method asks what maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain for the greatest number, treating the calculation as though it applied equally and impartially to every person weighing every choice. Marx's objection is that this apparent neutrality is itself an ideological product of a specific economic arrangement: a framework built around individual utility maximizing transactions describes, rather too conveniently, exactly the kind of calculating, self interested actor capitalism needs its participants to be, and then presents that historically specific character as though it were simply what a rational person is, always and everywhere. The critique matters beyond the insult, because it is a template for how Marx treats moral and philosophical theories generally: not as free floating arguments to be assessed strictly on their logical merits, but as products of a particular mode of production, worth asking not only whether they are true but whose interests it serves for them to be believed. Whether that suspicion is itself fair to Bentham, whose own utilitarianism was aimed partly at reforming cruel laws rather than defending shopkeepers, is exactly the kind of argument Marxism, true to its own method, invites rather than forecloses.