>"Fair" seems like a moral category, but Marx was not a moral philosopher
>who developed ideas about what "fair" means (unlike John Rawls or John
>Roemer). Cornell West's dissertation (published by Monthly Review press)
>convinced me that Marx's main moral perspective in later life was to
>contrast (1) what capitalism claimed to be doing with (2) what it actually
>did. That is, rather than putting forth his own standards of morality and
>fairness, he argued that capitalism didn't live up to its own standards. So
>I think it's plausible to say that Marx thought that capitalism didn't
>involve selling products at fair prices -- using the capitalists' own
>(ideological) definition of "fair." But note that he never accepted their
>definition as his own, instead seeing it as reflecting the incomplete and
>warped vision that people get living inside capitalist society.
Marx's mature moral perspective includes more than the rejection of the bourgeois conception of right doesn't it?
It includes the setting out of what is taken to be an objective foundation, i.e. a grounded set of positive ethical principles, on which to base criticism of this conception of right as well as of the conception Marx claims will dominate the early phase of communist society.
One such setting out is found in the following passage from the 1875
Critique of the Gotha Program. The passage also associates the practical
implementation of what Marx claims is the ideal principle of distribution -
>From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! - with
the the realization of the "universally developed individual" for whom
"labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want."
"Hence, equal right here [early communism] is still in principle -- bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.
"In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
Ted Winslow
Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. North York, Ont. CANADA M3J 1P3