You can take a remark about that from those unpublished-by-Marx notes your way if you want to. You can also accept the extremely perverse reading of things like Das Kapital (why all the scorn for bourgeois stories and theorists by KM there, if exploitation is not about ethics?) that your "no ethics" view forces you into.
"Exploitation has nothing to do with ethics." "Work creates no property rights for workers."
Good luck with those amazing positions. Your ability to hold it speaks volumes about why the left is nearly dead in this society.
P.S. How do you and the other ethics-excisers explain a title like "Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality," which ran atop an article Marx actually published? Was Marx stoned? Or is it the great murderer Althusser's "early Marx was Hegel's prisoner" schtick that inspires your astounding misreading?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of cqmv at pdx.edu
> Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 5:32 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Missing the Marx
>
> 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
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