> But note the logic of the position. In a genuinely
> democratic and classless society, the laws would be
> made by the ordinary citizens,a nd would be their own
> acts, and so the necessary condition for retributivism
> would be satisfied -- even if it would be far less
> needed than under capitalism.
>
> There is an analogy here with Marx's discussion in the
> Critique of the Gotha Progarm of the bourgeois
> principle, To Each According To His Work, which he
> thinks cannot be realized under capitslim, but only in
> the first phase of communism. Naturally Marx says
> there that in the higher pahase of communism, the
> narrow horizons of bourgeois right will be transcended
> and we will ultimately be able to look at each
> individual in his multi-sidededness rather than merely
> as a worker (the parallel to merely as a free actor in
> the abstract here), thus realing the principle To Each
> According To His Need.
>
> In that happy world, no doubt, there would be no need
> for punishment, or so litle that it would not merit a
> theory. But in the meantime, just as under the first
> phase of communism the bourgeois principle of
> distribution of wealth could be realized, so under
> that phase of communism, the bourgeois but only
> correct -- retributivist-- theory of punsihment could
> also be realized.
The "bourgeois principle of distribution" isn't a "correct" principle applicable in "crude communism." It's a "defect," a "bourgeois limitation" that "constantly stigmatizes" the understanding of "equal right" in that context.
> In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly
> stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is
> proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the
> fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
>
> But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and
> supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time;
> and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or
> intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This
> equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no
> class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone
> else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus
> productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right
> of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very
> nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but
> unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if
> they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard
> insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken
> from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are
> regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything
> else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not;
> one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with
> an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social
> consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will
> be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right,
> instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
>
> But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist
> society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs
> from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic
> structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
Similarly, the "greed" disguised as "general envy" and the "communal lust" that Marx, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, claims will characterize "crude communism" are not "correct" in that context.
These are all manifestations "of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community system."
> communism is:
>
> (1) In its first form only a generalisation and consummation of it (of
> this relation). As such it appears in a two-fold form: on the one
> hand, the dominion of material property bulks so large that it wants
> to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all
> as private property. It wants to disregard talent, etc., in an
> arbitrary manner. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is
> direct, physical possession. The category of the worker is not done
> away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private
> property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of
> things.
>
> Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to
> private property finds expression in the brutish form of opposing to
> marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the
> community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and
> common property. It may be said that this idea of the community of
> women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude and
> thoughtless communism.[30] Just as woman passes from marriage to
> general prostitution, [Prostitution is only a specific expression of
> the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a
> relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one
> who prostitutes — and the latter’s abomination is still greater — the
> capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. — Note by Marx [31]] so
> the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective substance)
> passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of
> private property to a state of universal prostitution with the
> community. This type of communism — since it negates the personality
> of man in every sphere — is but the logical expression of private
> property, which is this negation.
>
> General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which
> greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way.
> The thought of every piece of private property as such is at least
> turned against wealthier private property in the form of envy and the
> urge to reduce things to a common level, so that this envy and urge
> even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only
> the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding
> from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard.
>
> How little this annulment of private property is really an
> appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire
> world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural
> simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not
> only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even
> reached it.
>
> The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages
> paid out by communal capital — by the community as the universal
> capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined
> universality — labour as the category in which every person is placed,
> and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the
> community.
>
> In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust
> is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself,
> for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain
> and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the
> manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is
> conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to
> person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural
> species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his
> relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his
> relation to nature — his own natural destination. In this
> relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an
> observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become
> nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence
> of man.
>
> From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of
> development. From the character of this relationship follows how much
> man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to
> comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural
> relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the
> extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the
> extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence
> — the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him.
> This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has
> become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person
> as a person has become for him a need — the extent to which he in his
> individual existence is at the same time a social being.
>
> The first positive annulment of private property — crude communism —
> is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property,
> which wants to set itself up as the positive community system.
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>
Ted