Taken together with the language of usurpation and robbery, passages like these put beyond doubt Marx’s conviction that the ‘distribution of the conditions of production’ in capitalist society is unjust. Published: 17 April 2013. What Marx foresees in its stead is equality not in the sense of a right to equivalent rewards for equivalent amounts of labour, nor yet in the sense of the right of each person to exactly the same things or to an identical share of social wealth; it is, rather, an equality of self-realization — everyone’s right, equally, to the means of his or her own. Scarcely. And that is exactly what Marx does and does frequently, even if the concept, ‘justice’, is not expressly present to his mind and under his pen when he does it. The need for circumspection here cuts both ways. the common booty’ and ‘the loot of other people’s labour’. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.’ Similarly, twenty-five years on in The Civil War in France, the workers ‘have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.'. Exegetically, however, it is no more legitimate to set aside the first sort of passage for not squaring with the second than it would be to set aside the second sort, therefore the class interests thesis itself, for not squaring with the first. a needs principle rules out the kind of fantastic and extravagant individual requirements hypothesized in the last paragraph. What you think just or equitable is out of the question. In the words of another much-quoted passage: ‘It is nonsense for Gilbart to speak of natural justice in this connection [interest payment on loans—NG]. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni paires familias. ‘limitless’ needs quite another. (iii) What motivates the above polemics, as well as Marx’s denial of any injustice in the wage relation, is perhaps already evident. To prevent misunderstanding, it is worth underlining at the outset that the question being addressed is not that of whether Marx did indeed condemn capitalism, as opposed just to analysing, describing, explaining its nature and tendencies. Equally, there is nothing inherently reformist or idealist, from Marx’s point of view, in criticism of capitalism by appeal to ethical norms or ideals, like justice. It is true, to be sure, that it is on criteria internal to capitalism that his judgement of the equity of the wage relation is based. The element of plain good fortune in the possession of great or exceptional abilities he clearly does not see as meriting any larger reward than is inherent in the very exercise and enjoyment of them. The state here withers away. His concern with distribution in the broad sense, in other words, takes in the very values said to distance him from any preoccupation with justice, so that these do not in truth supply the foundation of a separate and alternative critique of capitalism. This book provides a critical account of the main controversies involving Norman Geras, one of the key modern political thinkers. Their positive legal titles to such ownership are no mystery to him. ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice’, in Marxist Theory ed. But, as is so often the way with it, the dialectic here only muddies the water. But then, by a piece of dialectical wizardry in Chapter 24 of the first volume of Capital, he has these same laws turning into their very opposite. Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about “fair” distribution?’ Shortly afterwards, he refers to such notions as ‘obsolete verbal rubbish’ and ‘ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French Socialists’ — the gist of all of which seems clear enough. I shall mention two such, at any rate, one a consideration of a general kind, the other a more specific doctrinal point. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour'; and ‘the period of time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the period of time for which he is forced to sell it,. On internal textual evidence Marx speaks in these matters both seriously and for himself. It is, if you like, labour that the capitalist owns but not the capitalist’s own labour. Does the accumulation of value and capital which takes place result from labour that is the capitalist’s? Or, expressed from the worker’s point of view, ‘As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him’. And he has in mind particularly needs of individual self-realization. Wood concedes that Marx ‘clearly objects to the prevailing distribution of such entities as effective control over the means of production, leisure time, and the opportunity to acquire education and skills'; but such objection, he claims, cannot be counted a criticism of capitalism as unjust, since to be that it would have to be urged on the basis of ‘disinterested or impartial considerations’ and it is not consistent with what Wood calls the ‘class interests thesis’ that Marx should have urged it on this kind of basis. But it is these two conceptual associations that are, along with the ‘dialectical inversion’ discussed earlier, the source of his confusion. 692: As was made clear at the very beginning, no one here is denying that he condemned capitalism, and he did so in the light precisely of values other than justice: the most commonly mentioned in this connection being freedom; but also self-realization, well-being and community. In the history of western philosophy, Justice is mostly an ethical issue. In any event, the distributive dimension of Marx’s treatment of these values may now be documented. For convenience, I refer hereafter to the two principles involved as, respectively, the contribution principle and the needs principle. ‘But one of the most vital principles of communism, a principle which distinguishes it from all reactionary socialism, is . Here the workers, whose labour is itself the source of the value that commodities contain, will have to work longer than the time which is necessary to reproduce the value of their own labourpower, longer than is necessary to replace the value of the wage they have received. It is obviously not a statement that there can be no higher or lower in this matter on account of each such standard being relative to its appropriate economic structure. It may be true of some of his statements standardly read as relativist ones that they are not. Again, in a letter of 1877, he writes contemptuously of ‘a whole gang of half-mature students and super-wise diplomaed doctors who want to give socialism a “higher, idealistic” orientation, that is to say, to replace its materialistic basis (which demands serious objective study from anyone who tries to use it) by modern mythology with its goddesses of justice, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’. Where an author’s work reveals the clear commitment to a certain intellectual position and we nevertheless find there also some few formulations which seem to contradict that, interpretative charity demands that we should enquire whether the inconsistency is not merely an apparent one or seek some other way of explaining the formulations in question. They are, of course, as Marx knew well, standardly embodied in legal codes, backed up by the apparatus of enforcement that is a part of the state. This point has been well put by Jerry Cohen: ‘since ... Marx did not think that by capitalist criteria the capitalist steals, and since he did think he steals, he must have meant that he steals in some appropriately non-relativist sense. The main body of the essay falls, therefore, into three parts. Of course, Marx himself plainly did not envisage the possibility that a classless society might so combine collective control over the conditions of production with sheer moral arbitrariness in the distribution of welfare. For, insisting that the distribution of means of consumption cannot be viewed as independent of the mode of production, Marx speaks of the mode of production as itself a kind of — more basic — distribution: ‘the distribution of the conditions of production’. Third, I argue that the counter-claim, that his real critique was, instead, one on behalf of freedom and self-actualization, bears within it a fatal logical flaw: probed, this reveals, at the heart of his very critique on behalf of these other values, a concern for distributive justice. Nor are they short of suggested answers. There is at any rate no conscious irony involved — if one does not, in the manner I have criticized, simply presume that there must be, given other things we know. . We are bound, consequently, to conclude in favour of (c), that this is abundance relative to some standard of ‘reasonable’ needs which, large and generous as it may be possible for it to be, still falls short of any fantasy of abundance without limits. For, here the worker has still to give something: not in the sense of selling it, since the sale has already been concluded, but in the sense of personal effort; and this personal effort is the substance of a value that is larger than the value of the wage. There is a subordinate dispute, ‘on this side of the line’ as it were, as to whether they are themselves also moral values or are, rather, values of a different, non-moral sort, but I shall ignore that issue as of secondary significance, in view of the position I take in the last section of this essay on the principal issue of disagreement. And it suggests that their exploitation might be eliminated by alteration and regulation of this sphere, in other words, merely by reforms in the distribution of income. But the means of consumption will not be divided into exactly equivalent individual shares; even equal labour contributions will not, or will not invariably, be matched by such shares being of the same size; some but not all, only those who need them, will have access to expensive drugs or medical treatment; and so forth. As The German Ideology has it, ‘Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence’. Justice, Equality, and Community: An Essay in Marxist Political Theory. Detailed consideration of the remainder of these would involve unwarranted repetition. Of import here is that, and how, Marx ranks these principles relative both to what precedes them historically and to one another. One may mean by it simply to invoke, and not to endorse, some prevailing or conventional standard of rightful ownership. The details of our two antithetical interpretations do at least suggest the possibility of it. One should not deny the elements of confusion and inconsistency in them, a common though not a universal temptation in this debate. Minimum Utopia: Ten Theses | Marx speaks on one occasion, for example, of ‘the contradiction between those who have to work too much and those who are idlers’ and of its projected disappearance with the end of capitalism. A Callinicos, OUP 1989. Alternatively, use our A–Z index Norman Geras. But what tells us that this abstract possibility is a fact — that Marx in reality did mean what he possibly might have meant? The best-known occasion is his polemic, in ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, against the notion of a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour. Karl Marx in 19th Century Philosophy. Thus, referring in one place to the surplus product as ‘the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class’, Marx goes on: ‘Even if the latter uses a portion of that tribute to purchase the additional labour-power at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, the whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has stolen from them.’ That is not a maverick usage on Marx’s part. "’ This disparity is also registered in the later, economic writings. The answer to this question, Marx’s answer, is — tendentially everybody’s. The Holy Family. A communist society as Marx envisages it, indeed, is a society beyond justice. That is, it is possible that, in speaking of the robbery that marked the dawn of capitalist society, Marx meant only to register the violation of pre-existing property rights and not himself to condemn it; to record a wrong by the then prevailing standards rather than injustice by his own. Nevertheless, if he highlighted the robbery that actually occurred, he did so in order to draw attention to capitalism’s unjust historical foundation. Setting a reading intention helps you organise your reading. And the wealth produced under capitalism, he says, is based on the ‘theft of alien labour time’. That standards of right are, for him, sociologically grounded or determined means that the norms people believe in and live by will be powerfully influenced by the nature of their society, their class position in it, and so on. And this is the crux of it all. Have you read this? 5. But it is relevant to remark upon the strength together with the deficiency, all the same. First, I review the texts and arguments put forward by those who deny that Marx condemned capitalism as unjust. But that does not mean either explaining it away or justifying it. When not just one or a few formulations, but a whole body of formulations, arguments, concepts, stands in the way of one of a thinker’s putative intellectual commitments, then an assumption of full consistency is no longer either rational or justified. It cannot show that he did not intact express such a commitment, because he in fact did, as is manifest from the textual evidence assembled above. It is again, not the texts, but the needs of the interpretation that are the real foundation of the argument. Only one writer explicitly — though another perhaps implicitly — treats the assumption of unconditional abundance as a problematic one. And is it not, in fact, the only “fair” distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? It cannot be absolute. Setting a reading intention helps you organise your reading. His critique in the light of freedom and self-actualization, on the contrary, is itself in part a critique in the light of a conception of distributive justice, and though it is so in part only, since there is also an aggregative aspect involved, Marx clearly believing that communism will provide greater freedoms overall than has any preceding social form, the identity is none the less real or important for all that. Still, I give what I hope is an accurate overall map of this dispute, before going on to venture my own judgment on it. At the same time, and despite this, like just about everyone else he was given to the use of moral judgement. For ‘flexible’ needs are one thing, but. The viewpoint I have criticized in this essay may be regarded as a bogus solution to a genuine problem in Marx’s thought. Now according to the Hegelian dialectic, which Marx adop ted as his own «logic,» there must be a negative for every posi tive. On any broader view of distribution, however, Marx is clearly concerned with it: with the distribution of free time, of opportunities for fulfilling activity, of unpleasant or rebarbative work; with the distribution of welfare more generally, of social and economic benefits and burdens. I cite material relevant both to the distribution of advantages and disadvantages in general and to the distribution of freedom and self-development in particular. In this paper I shall argue that there are indeed ambiguities and incoherencies, but that their nature has been misinterpreted and The controversy about Marx and Justice. Each side says, in effect, ‘This point of view is the only one relevant to the question of whether or not capitalism is for him unjust. He contributed to an analysis of the works of Karl Marx in his book Marx and Human Nature and the article "The Controversy About Marx and Justice". It moves from his youthful Trotskyism on to his book on Rosa Luxemburg, then his classic account of Marx and human nature, and his highly regarded discussion of Marx and justice. They are statements not of moral relativism but rather, as we may call this, of moral realism. Some readers will think they detect, in Marx’s way of putting things here, the signs of a definite evaluative attitude to the distributive imbalance he describes, and they will be right to think so. ‘Man is distinguished from all other animals by the limitless and flexible nature of his needs. As such, they have their place within that whole institutional apparatus of state, law, sanctions and so on, by which obligatory modes of conduct are imposed upon the members of a social order. iv above and it is obvious why on the basis of it Marx should have treated the wage contract as not unjust and justice as not a revolutionary notion. In fact, for the most part they do not even attempt one, either ignoring or being unaware of the problem for them here. The two faces by turns reveal their contrasting features across the pages of Capital, complementary aspects of the wage relation: in the sphere of circulation, an equal exchange freely contracted; in the sphere of production, the compulsion to labour some hours without reward. But on the other hand, because as was earlier explained, it takes no account either of differential individual endowment or of differential needs, Marx says also that it possesses ‘defects’ relative to the needs principle which will eventually replace it, so that we must take the needs principle as being a yet superior one. 1979. Even if Marx allowed for justice-talk, meaning the elaboration of conceptions of justice so as to transform society according to such conceptions, it is quite clear that he 2 Ibid., p. 213 3 McBride, “The Concept of Justice in Marx, Engels, and Others” in Ethics, Vol. He does object to any over-restricted focus upon the social division of income, but that is because he sees the latter as more or less a consequence of the relations of production, and it is both politically misguided and theoretically senseless to condemn the necessary effects of a cause which is itself left uncriticized. Much recent literature concentrates on the question of whether Marx’s analysis of capitalism uses moral concepts, especially a concept of justice, or whether it is a non-moral, strictly scientific analysis. Consider, however, how he regards the private ownership of land: ‘From the standpoint of a higher socioeconomic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. The Controversy About Marx and Justice In this essay I review a fast-growing sector of the current literature on Marx and the controversy that has fuelled its growth. Considered from one point of view, the wage relation is an exchange of equivalents and the accumulation of capital due only to the use of what is the capitalist’s. And in so far as these laws allow that labour-power may indeed be sold as a commodity, being itself alienable, they allow ab initio a relation other than, but consistent with, equal exchange in the market, a relation in which the capitalist uses the worker to reap a profit over the wage, while the worker for her or his part simply works, just giving the portion of value that the other just takes. During the last decade or so, the keen interest within moral and political philosophy in the concept of justice has left its … Philosophica 33 (1984) Abstract This article has no associated abstract. On the principle that a good test of any intellectual position is the answers it has to the strongest questions that can be put against it, the view that Marx did not condemn capitalism as unjust must be judged to be uncompelling, for all the passages from his work seemingly in its favour. (i) A first and, on the face of it, compelling piece of evidence against supposing so is that he actually says it is not. Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise from economic ones? Relative to this materialist task, a critique of capitalism in the name of justice represents a retreat — just equipping the would-be revolutionary, determined and passionate as may be, ‘to deliver the keynote address at the next Democratic Convention’. The argument, in particular, that the proposition, ‘Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society’, signifies rather a sober moral realism, seems to me from the details of the proposition’s context to be a cogent one, in any case no less plausible than the common relativist interpretation of these words. that differences of brain and of intellectual ability do not imply any differences whatsoever in the nature of the stomach and of physical needs; therefore the false tenet, based upon existing circumstances, “to each according to his abilities”, must be changed, in so far as it relates to enjoyment in its narrower sense, into the tenet, “to each according to his need”; in other words, a different form of activity, of labour, does not justify inequality, confers no privileges in respect of possession and enjoyment.’ What this passage rejects, it rejects precisely as justifying inequality, and therefore the needs principle which it commends by contrast cannot reasonably be regarded as anything but a standard of equality. The main point of these passages is the theft of surplus labour and surplus value. Nothing, in fact, changes into its opposite in this matter. The question is the more specific one: does Marx condemn capitalism in the light of any principle of justice? 656: Marx and the Category of Individuality in Communist Society D Ashley . ', ii. Note, here, that the problem is not that he affirms both points of view. Either way the reasoning begets a forced and conjectural reading of some passages from Marx’s work, a reading strained against the evidence internal to them. vi. In Marx and Social Justice, George E. McCarthy presents a detailed and comprehensive overview of the ethical, political, and economic foundations of Marx’s theory of social justice in his early and later writings. They simply express it. pumps out a certain specific quantum of surplus labour from the direct producers or workers, surplus labour that it receives without an equivalent and which by its very nature always remains forced labour, however much it might appear as the result of free contractual agreement.’ The supposed justice of the wage relation is comparable, then, to the worker’s freedom in it. Why else should he say of the contribution principle that ‘it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges’, whilst looking forward to the implementation of the needs principle, quite happy therefore to countenance its recognition of unequal need, forgoing with respect to this any such talk of privilege? From Marxist Theory, Ed. It is a spurious resolution. (5) is a quite arbitrary displacement; ‘robbery’ has a meaning distinct from ‘coercion’ and we are given no reason to believe either that Marx was ignorant of the distinction or that he chose to overlook it. The same applies to a single phrase, concerning ‘uninterrupted revolution’, in Lenin’s writings before 1917, a phrase often used to denature the sense of his conception of the Russian revolution up to that year. Third, the passage shows that this tenet was understood by others as a principle of equality and that one of these others, an erstwhile collaborator, openly proposed it as such within a work that was intended to bear Marx’s name. As has just been said, they are mutually consistent parts of one doctrine. It has left it in the shape of the question: did Marx himself condemn capitalism as unjust? We know that this is not what Marx envisaged. Marx, Justice, and The Dialectic Method PHILIP J. KAIN AN INTERESTING CONTROVERSY has recently been provoked by Allen Wood. It is in substance a principle of distributive justice even if its attainment is envisaged together with the death of the state. Type Article Author(s) N Geras Date 1985 Volume 150 Page start 47 Page end 85 Is part of Journal Title New Left review Publisher New … And just as, conversely, he does indeed identify principles of justice that are internal to and functional for the capitalist mode of production, so also does he identify conceptions of freedom and of self-development historically relative in exactly the same way. They are speculative attempts because there is nothing in the robbery passages themselves, or in their context, to confirm that they in fact have the character attributed to them in the explanations suggested. Some see it as significant, moreover, that in his discussion of primitive capitalist accumulation in the concluding part of the first volume of Capital, Marx should have emphasized, amongst other violent and bloody methods, the robbery that marked this process too — robbery of ‘all their own means of production’ from the direct producers, theft of the common lands from the people.” Not right and labour, as in the idyll of political economy, but ‘in actual history . It gives us a mirror-image of the procedure of those who would explain away Marx’s assertions of robbery, just switching from one side of the intellectual profile to the other the values of what he means literally and what he does not; conveniently discounting, exactly as do writers of the opposite viewpoint, what cannot readily be accommodated within the interpretation proffered: in the present case, not the charge of theft but rather the relativizing discourse about justice. First, I endorse the claim, against inadequate attempts to explain such talk of his away, that in characterizing exploitation as robbery, Marx was impugning the justice of it. What counts, therefore, is to identify the actual historical tendencies that make for this sort of transformation and the social forces and movements at work that are capable of consummating it. It is not merely that they are generated by these—that juridical relations and the ‘forms of social consciousness’ corresponding to them ‘originate in the material conditions of life’footnote10—but that, in addition, they are only applicable to and valid for them. Otherwise, one will simply presume complete theoretical coherence where it may be lacking. Those according to whom he sees no injustice in the wage relation privilege the first, that there is an exchange of equivalents. In any case, fourthly and decisively, between the earlier passage from The German Ideology and the text of ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ there is an undeniable internal likeness which confirms that this possibility is a fact. Implicit in his work is a broader conception of justice than the one he actually formulates, notwithstanding the fact that he never himself identifies it as being such. If we now ask how a standard of ‘reasonableness’ vis-à-vis the satisfaction of needs might be maintained without overt conflict, there are again two suggestions that we can safely reject. This is clear from, amongst much else that could be cited, his reference in ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ itself to ‘the all-round development of the individual’ and from the contrast he draws in Capital when he refers to ‘a mode of production in which the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorization, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development.’ The needs principle as Marx construes it is not distinct from the other principle we have seen that he enunciates — namely, the ‘free development’ of each and of all — but rather encompasses it and is not therefore to be understood in any minimalist sense. He refers, in the first volume of Capital, to: ‘those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.’ Or, in the celebrated formula of the Communist Manifesto: ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.'. In so many words he does not, but in effect — this case continues — he does. Well, Marx has it both ways, and that is at least one root of the difficulty. The prospective abolition of capitalist property he describes as ‘the expropriation of a few usurpers’. There are those who have argued energetically that he did not; and as many who are equally insistent that he did — a straightforward enough division, despite some differences of approach on either side of it. The first three suggestions merit some detailed individual comment. For another, the very idea of spontaneity here is open to question. What they receive from the capitalist, Marx goes out of his way to insist, is the full equivalent in value of what they sell and so involves no cheating. If, therefore, the amount of value advanced in wages is not merely found again in the product, but augmented by a surplus-value, this is not because the seller has been defrauded, for he has really received the value of his commodity; it is due solely to the fact that this commodity has been used up by the buyer.’footnote5, (ii) Consistently with this denial that the wage relation is unjust, Marx also rails against socialists who want for their part to appeal to considerations of justice.
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