Sorry about the line wonkiness in previous post--I tried to clean it up:
> Quoting Michael Dawson <MDawson at pdx.edu>:
>
>
>> 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