Marx never has a good word to say about talk of justice or fairness., He calls it "shit." He apologizes for having to bend to talking that way in a public contezt. He says that what's fair is relative to the mode of production. He is at best a relativbista nd at worst a skeptic about justice. His own objection to exploitation i not that it is unfair but that it limits freedom. You may want to lean hard on his occasional use of the language of "theft," as Geras does, which suggests a commitment to justice, byt in that case you have to throw out Marx's explicit and repeatedly stated objections to justice talk. You have to give up one or the other. You cannot have both. I prefer to take Marx at his explicit word.
That doesn't mean I agree with him. I myself think exploitation is unjust. (I have written on that too.) But I reject the LTOP, so I do not think it is unjust because it deprives the workers of what is theirs in virtue of having produced it. Rather I think it involves unjust inequalities and an unacceptable distribution of benefits and burdens. My own version of the justice claim is a bit more like Peffer's RAwlsian idea that capitalist inequalities do not benefit the least well off, although I disagree with Peffer than Rawls' theory of justice is right or that it is Marx's.
Now, you ask, in virtue of what do the workers have a claim to the priduct they produce? Marx has a simple answer: nothing. He rejects all talk of entitlements, proprty rights, fairness and justice. He thinks it would be good if the workers owned the means of production and the social product, of course, because that would enhance freedom. But that is a far cry from saying they have a right to it because they produced it -- a theory that Marx expressly and unequivocally rejects at the start of the CGP.
You point to the force and fraud stuff, but you fail to note that Marx does not object that force and fraud are unfair, nor does he say that they are the normal way that capitalist society works., In fact he sticks the primitive accumulation stuff at the end of CI after he has explained the normal operation of exploitation through ordimnary imposition of unfreedom.
Glad you read my paper, Sorry that you find my work incomprensinsible sophistry. This was, howefer, a widely shared recation. I didn't get tenure and now practice law where I defend large corporation against each other. I am sure this is a more socially useful deployment of my talents than my obviously incompetent Marx scholarship. So you must be right. Nancy got canned too (at Wisconsin), but she was able to get a tenured job at Rutgers Newark. Jeff Reiman and Allen Wood got tenure at decent places, Wood at Cornell, maybe you should read their versions and you won't have to deal with an idiot like me who can't understand the simplest words on the printed page,
Thick-headedly,
jks
--- Michael Dawson <MDawson at pdx.edu> wrote:
> > Carrol is right.
>
> Carrol is laughably wrong, as you are, too,
> apparently.
>
>
> > Marx is saying from the point of view
> > of justice, everything is square with the exchange
> of
> > wages for labor power.
>
> I can't believe you can read Marx this way. Saying
> this misses his entire
> point!
>
>
> > There is exploitation, but it
> > si not based on unequal exchange.
>
> Of course it is based on equal exchange! But behind
> the equal exchange is
> injustice. How in hell can you miss this point?
> Jesus! It's simply a
> matter of reading the book.
>
> Here's the argument: Capitalist buy and workers
> sell workers' labor-power.
> The fact that capitalists are able to buy and
> workers must sell this unique
> commodity is a result of unfair power relationships.
> The continuation of
> this arrangement perpetuates the unfairness and
> harm, since only capitalists
> get to own the surpluses that only labor-power
> sellers produce. It's a form
> of theft that occurs within perfectly legal,
> purportedly fair exchanges.
>
>
> > The worker is not
> > entitled to the SV he produces merely because he
> > produces it.
>
> Astounding claim for a socialist! What, then gives
> a worker a claim to have
> a say over surplus wealth? What's wrong with
> Walmart, from your
> perspective?
>
>
> > In fact, value doesn't really exist until
> > it is realized, so if there any entitlement these
> show
> > up in the sphere of circulation.
>
> What? So production doesn't matter? That might be
> your argument, but it
> ain't Karl Marx's!
>
>
> > Of course there is
> > explaoitation, but what is wrong with it is
> something
> > else.
> > Marx is crystal clear and absolutely unambiguous
> about
> > what it is. It is the deprivation of freeom that
> goes
> > into conditions of production under wage labor:
> the
> > worker is coerced because he lacks means of
> production
> > and so must work for the capitalist class; he is
> > dominated in the process of production, where the
> > factory system is a sort of enslavement by the
> hour,
> > and he is alienated multiply but most crucially
> from,
> > himself, so he cannot determine he own activity
> and
> > enjoy what Marx calld "real freedom." As for
> justice
> > and fairness, Marx is transpaarent (whough in my
> view
> > mistaken) that justice is relative to the mode of
> > production.
>
> Marx is not crystal clear on this. This is your
> weird perversion of what
> Marx says on the printed page, which is that
> economic exploitation is
> primary to the functioning of class societies, all
> of which deploy forces
> and frauid to deprive the underlying population of
> freedom. You are fixated
> on Marx's general theory of freedom and oppression.
> That is valid, but
> there's more to the argument than that.
>
>
> > This is a very short statement of the argument of
> my
> > What's Wrong With Exploitation. Nous 1995. I can't
> > believe it's been a decade since I wrote that.
>
> I read that paper, and found it to be nearly
> incomprehensible sophistry, and
> inadequately attentive to Marx, considering you
> claim to supercede Marx.
> People give gifts that become property for the
> recipient, so the labor
> theory of value is false? The labor theory of value
> is designed to explain
> the origins of new wealth, not all conceivable cases
> of property ownership.
> At core, it is an ethical category, designed to
> highlight the fact that
> class exploitation deprives primary producers of
> their basic rights. One
> can attack any theory, if one stretches it beyond
> its intended explanatory
> sphere.
>
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