----- Original Message ----- From: "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
No, Michael, there is no Marxist version of the LTOP. If you think the contrary, cite me the texts. Marx expressly declines to confine his discussion of wealth to the sphere of human activity because he doesn't think it's relevant to to that. He does not base sommunism on an ethical claim of justice that the workers are robbed of what they rightfully own because they created it. He does of course think capitalists contribute nothing qua capitalists, but he is not interested in the notion of fairness or justice at all. "That old shit," is what he calls that sort of talk. Reread your CGP, it'll do you good. jks
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Michael D. and B., Justin is spot on regarding this issue. If you send me a snail mail address I'll send you a copy of his excellent 1992 essay in Social Theory and Practice "From Libertarianism to Egalitarianism" article which is *very tightly* argued. It'll spare yu have to plow through all of Cohen's arguments.
KM's rejection of Lockean premises are all over the Grundrisse etc. Further, the self-ownership theory had as much, if not more, to do with smashing the confessional as an instrument of Papal power and the role of the Churh in mediating epsitemic-cum-moral access to Divine will; the *inalienability* of conscience becomes the inalienable right to the consequences [future revenue stream] of one's labor. It makes virtually no provision for the division of labor. See J.B. Schneewind's excellent "The Invention of Autonomy" and Richard Aschraft's "Revolutionary Politics & Locke's Two Treatises of Government" for an excellent rundown of the arguments and context. AFAIK Kant was the first 'German' thinker to confront the self-ownership thesis head on, he claimed it was incoherent [and K. knew his Adam Smith too.]. Every school child knows KM took his cues from K and Hegel on this issue :-).
Thus, for the above and a host of other reasons, the LTOP is not KM's basis for the claim of exploitation because the LTOP is rooted in the self-ownership theory. Further, even Locke's own writing contained a problem for his self-ownership argument, which the Ricardian Socialists seized upon and may be the source of the intertemporal living/dead labor model of cumulative causation that KM uses:
[Section 43] ...It is labour, then, which puts the greatest part of value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth anything; it is to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful products; for all that the straw, bran, bread, of that acre of wheat, is more worth than the product of an acre of as good land which lies waste is all the effect of labour. For it is not barely the ploughman's pains, the reaper's and thresher's toil, and the baker's sweat, is to be counted into the bread we eat; the labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed about the plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils, which are a vast number, requisite to this corn, from its sowing to its being made bread, must all be charged on the account of labour, and received as an effect of that; Nature and the earth furnished only the almost worthless materials as in themselves. It would be a strange catalogue of things that industry provided and made use of about every loaf of bread before it came to our use if we could trace them; iron, wood, leather, bark, timber, stone, bricks, coals, lime, cloth, dyeing- drugs, pitch, tar, masts, ropes, and all the materials made use of in the ship that brought any of the commodities made use of by any of the workmen, to any part of the work, all which it would be almost impossible, at least too long, to reckon up.
This amounts to an early frustration of trying to come up with a macro accounting model of value added and the problems of temporal periodizations of what would constitute an adequate accounting period. Is it a month, a year, a decade, a generation? The *intergenerational obligations* and inheritance issues which Locke raises are even more troublesome for the self-ownership theory which is precisely why, today, there is an enormous amount of vitriol regarding who owns Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, the rents from AIDS drugs, the estate tax etc.
...tbc.........