[lbo-talk] Missing the Marx

[Michael Dawson]

> Marx's own formulation seems sufficient here. Workers' labor creates 
> no special claim over the product because workers have already sold 
> their actual product -- their labor power. If I sell Mike B my shirt, 
> then it is up to him to decide what to do with it. If I sell him my 
> labor power it is up to him to decide what to do with that labor 
> power. The only disputable point is the length of time over which that 
> labor power is to be expended. Where rights are equal, force decides. 
> Morality has nothing to do with it. I didn't sell my "power to weave 
> cotton" or "my power to sell brushes" or "my power to generate 
> algorithms." What I sold was my abstract labor power, which is 
> separate from me as a concrete historical person. (As Portia notices, 
> I can't sell my flesh because it isn't
> separable.) So "labor's product" is _not_ the worker's product, it is 
> the product (as Locke claimed) of the capitalist who purchased that 
> labor power.
> 
> Carrol

That's what you take Marx's formulation to be?  If it all has nothing to do
with morality, then what's the basis for workers' claim to surplus-value?
Why is class exploitation wrong?  If capitalists taking surplus-value has no
moral meaning, what's the problem with capitalism?  Perhaps you can say it's
all to be found in the objective badness of the uses to which capitalists
put the surpluses they steal, but then what happens to your theory of
class-struggle in the workplace?  If individual workers have no ethical
claim to the surplus-value they create, then what's the matter with Walmart?