andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> It will occur to you that this raises problems about
> how to tell which is the correct justice. I have a
> theory about this, never mind that now.
>
> The point is that however you tell which is right,
> violating the correct compromise about the proper
> distribution of bebefits and burderns is not theft.
> But it is, in my account, unjust.
It occurs to me, reading this, that there is a sort of consonance between the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," and Marx's reply to the journalist's question, "What is?" -- "Struggle." Within a relatively stable capitalist society (such as the U.S.) calling standard capitalist exploitation "theft" (a) ignores the necessary details of the complex struggle to end that exploitation and (b) does not show a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. And both echo Engles in his preface to the German Edition of _Poverty of Philosophy_:
The above application of the Ricardian theory that the entire social product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the sole real producers, leads directly to communism. But, as Marx indeed indicates in the above-quoted passage, it is incorrect in formal economic terms, for it is simply an application of morality to economics. According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact. But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness. This is not the place to deal more closely with the significance and history of the theory of surplus value.
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, p. 9) Carrol