>>> James Devine writes
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). ______________
Charles : However, the first phrase is "from each according to ability (, to each according to work)." The implication may be that those with more ability or "skill" will do "more" work. In _Capital_ different levels of skill add different amounts of value per time under capitalism. So, the first phase of communism may not be different in this regard. ___________
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. ___________
Charles: I don't disagree with this. However, I wonder often if in the Marxist emphasis on unity of theory and practice, practice IS Marxist ethics. Thus, _What Is To Be Done_ is an ethics book. Marx's dictum that the thing is to change the world is an ethical charge.
Charles Brown
Detroit
Workers of the West, it's our turn.