Marx and Justice

[Sam Pawlett]

All this discussion about liberal rights and justice has got me thinking
about the relation between Marxism and justice.Allen Wood developed the
interesting argument that Marx's critique of political economy had
nothing to do with  justice and that capitalism does exploit the working
class but this exploitation is just. Wood explains;
" He(Marx) equally scorned those who concerned themselves with
formulating principles of distributive justice and condemning capitalism
in their name. Marx conceives that justice of economic transactions as
their correspondance to or functionality for the prevailing mode of
production. Given this conception of justice, Marx very consistently
concluded that the inhuman exploitation practiced by capitalism against
the workers is not unjust, and does not violate the worker's rights;
this conclusion constitutes no defense of capitalism, only an attack on
the use of moral conceptions within the proletarian movement. Marx saw
the task of the proletarian movement in his time as one of
self-definition, discipline and self-criticism based on scientific
self-understanding. He left for later stages of the movement the task of
planning the future society which it is the historic mission of the
movement to bring forth."

  To summarize, law and justice are judicial concepts. Judicial concepts
belong to the superstructure which is determined by the mode of
production. A society will thus have a conception of justice that fits
and grows naturally out of its mode of production. Capitalist
exploitation is just in a capitalist mode of production but unjust in a
communist mode of production. It is wrong therefore, to ascribe some
universal form of justice applicable to all  modes of production. A
future communist society will not be 'more just' than capitalism, it
will simply have a conception of justice that fits its mode of
production; a mode of production where capitalist exploitation doesn't
exist.

Wood fleshes out this argument in his book _Karl Marx_ and his article
"Marx and the Critique of Justice" Philosophy and Public Affairs, V1 no.
3 1972.

Any thoughts on this argument?

Sam Pawlett