You Can't Overcome Ethics

In what sense do we repudiate ethics and morality? In the sense that it is preached by the bourgeoise, who derived ethics from God's commandments. […] We repudiate all morality derived from non-human and non-class concepts. […] We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Our morality is derived from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat […] for the Communist, morality lies entirely in this compact, united discipline and conscious mass struggle against all exploiters. We do not believe in an eternal morality, and we expose all the fables about morality.

Lenin

And the perfect response to this powerful and emotional nonsense is given by Shostakovich:

Don't believe humanists, citizens, don't believe prophets, don't believe luminaries - they'll fool you for a penny. Do your own work, don't hurt people, try to help them. Don't try to save humanity all at once, try saving one person first. It's a lot harder. To help one person without harming another is very difficult. It's unbelievably difficult. That's where the temptation to save all of humanity comes from. And then, inevitably, along the way, you discover that all humanity's happiness hinges on the destruction of a few hundred million people, that's all. A trifle. Nothing but nonsense in the world, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol once said. It's that nonsense I try to depict.

From Testimony

Lenin follows the logic of Marxism. The underlying logic of all Marx's writings is a powerful moral revulsion at crime, injustice and oppression. But he allows himself to be lost in imagined historical forces, necessities and mass movements. In the end his moral vision is fatally corrupted and becomes a tool for the worst of dictators, for the worst elements in all of us.

We must never lose a sense of our own individual moral responsibility - if we do we stop being human.