Marx on value

[James Devine]

I wrote: >>"Fair" seems like a moral category, but Marx was not a moral
philosopher who developed ideas about what "fair" means ... Cornell West's
dissertation ... 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.<<

Ted Winslow responds: >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.<

You're right. But that doesn't point to Marx's law of value (labor theory
of value) as an ethical theory (except in the way I describe above). The
GOTHA PROGRAM criterion of "From each according to ability, to each
according to needs!" basically says that products will not have value under
communism, i.e., will no longer be commodities. The law of value will no
longer apply. The "lower" principle of "to each according to work" also
conflicts with the law of value (which puts more value on the product of
some people's labor-time than on others). 

Reading through the CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM, it's obvious that Marx's
positive ethical principles are pretty abstract. My feeling is that he saw
utopian schemes as something that others could develop, so he didn't go
into it in detail. His political principles were that the liberation of the
proletariat could only be done by the proletariat itself, so he hoped that
workers would figure all the details out themselves (as they began to do in
the Paris Commune). 

BTW, Marx seemed to develop his views of what communism consisted of from
the actual working-class struggle. I'm pretty sure that Marx didn't coin
the "from each according to ability, to each according to needs!" slogan.
It was in circulation before he wrote GOTHA. Similarly, his description of
how communism would be governed was based on the Paris Commune's actual
practice. He was a materialist, trying to base his theories on the real
world, not on his own ethical conceptions.

Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html