Marx and Justice

[Sam Pawlett]

I was summarizing Allen Wood's views not my own. I'm not sure what I
think but I find Wood's argument attractive partly because it is so
counter-intuitive for a Marxian socialist. Wood's argument is a bit too
deterministic. I think one of his aims was to try and dissociate Marx
from being pigeonholed as a utilitarian or a Kantian as philosophers are
wont to do. Here are some more quotations from Wood's 1972 paper.
" The juridical point of view, for Marx, is essentially one-sided, and
to adopt it as the fundamental standpoint from which to judge social
reality is to adopt a distorted conception  of that reality...In Capital
Marx says 'The justice of transactions which go on between agents of
production rests on the fact that these transactions arise as natural
consequences from the relations of production. The juristic forms in
which these transactions appear as voluntary actions of the
participants, as expressions of their common will and as contracts that
may be enforced by the state against a single party, cannot, being mere
forms, determine this content.
They merely express it. This content is just whenever it corresponds to
the mode of production, is adequate to it. It is unjust whenever it
contradicts that mode. Slavery, on the basis of the capitalist mode of
production, is unjust; so is fraud in the quality of commodities.'
...For Marx, the justice or injustice of an action or institution does
not consist in its exemplification of a jurical form or its conformity
to a universal principle. Justice is not determined by the universal
compatibility of human acts and interests, but  by the concrete
requirements of a historically conditioned mode of production. There are
rational assessments of the justice of specific acts and institutions,
based on their concrete function within a specific mode of production.
But these assessments are not founded on abstract or formal principles
of justice, good for all times and places, or an implicit or
hypothetical contracts or agreements used to deterine the justice of
institutions or actions formally and abstractly...The justiceness of the
act or instituion is its concrete fittingness to this situation, in this
productive mode. The justice of an instituion depends on the particular
institution and the particular mode of produciton of which it is
part...If revolutionary institutions mean new laws, new standards of
juridical regulation, new forms of property and distribution, this is
not a sign that 'justice' is finally being done where it was not done
before. It is instead a sign that a new mode of production has been born
from the old one. This new mode of production will not be 'more just'
than the old one, it will only be just its own way...The attempt to
apply post-capitalist juridical standards to capitalist production can
only derive, once again, from the vision of post-capitalist society as a
kind of eternal juridical structure against which the present state of
affairs is to be measured and found wanting....For Marx justice is not
and cannot be a genuinely revolutionary notion."

Sam Pawlett