> Meanwhile, let me clarify for you: You (and maybe Justin) think
> exploitation exists, but that it has nothing to do with ethics or ethical
> analysis. I think it exists as a provable fact, and that it is also
> thoroughly about ethics. I claim Marx saw it my way, that his purpose was
> to focus ethical analysis on the heart of the matter. You claim he saw it
> your way, which was to jettison ethical analysis altogether.
>
> I find your position to be dunderheaded at best, and Stalinist and/or
> bourgeois at worst. It's a case of throwing out the baby to spite the
> bathwater. Exploitation is as ethically charged as it is real. Anybody who
> denies that is not a Marxist in precisely the sense KM used that phrase.
>
> This is Marxism 101.
Here's a relevant passage from the Critique of the Gotha Program. KM is clearly ridiculing Lasalle's (and Michael D's) emphasis on "the fair distribution of the proceeds of labor":
[quote] I have dealt more at length with the "undiminished" proceeds of labor, on the one hand, and with "equal right" and "fair distribution", on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists.
Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it. [unquote]
It's strange to me that ideas Michael considers essential to Marx--Marxism 101, as he puts it--were in fact directly ridiculed and rejected by Marx in his time as "ideological nonsense".
Miles