joanna bujes wrote:
>
>
> I would like it to be possible to use words like "theft" with reference
> to our experience of wage labor rather than with reference to the
> Marxist cannon.
>
It's not so much that it is in the canon as that Marx happens to be right here. (We have another instance of Che's point that it is not his fault that reality happens to be marxist.)
Or let me put it a bit stronger. It was this point in Marx, his radical historicizing of reality, that drew me to marxism and away from any sort of anarchism. I don't believe this because Marx said it. I believe Marx because he said this. Or to put it more strongly yet, my whole hope for socialism is grounded in seeing capitalism as a historically limited mode of production. But if you call exploitation theft, you have dissolved history into an endless struggle between good people and bad people. And it is fairly obvious that if this is the case, bad people are going to keep on winning. And we are left only with the consolation that we are better people than "they" are.
When you say "I would like it to be possible" to call exploitation "theft," you seem to be retreating in despair precisely to this consolation of "I am better than they are even if I can't do anything about it." I would prefer to have a somewhat more cheerful view of the possible. If all the shares of Sun were turned over to you tomorrow morning you would have to go on exploiting your workers or else you would soon go bankrupt and someone else would exploit them. In other words, calling exploitation theft blinds us to the real nature of capitalist exploitation, and that blindness on our part helps to continue the grip of capitalism on the human species.
Carrol