My last word on this, although if there is any demand for it I will post the short discussion I have of Marx's two distributive principles in my paper on equality of opportunity.
Ted responds to my point that the first or lower phase of communist society in the Critique of the Gotha Program isn't the same as the "crude communism" discussed in the Paris Manuscriots written 30 years earlier by saying that they are both ideas of first phases.
Yes, But that doesn't mean they are the same. In particular, the CGP discussion is far more favorable (no crude leveling) and the PM discussion doesn't mention the principle of distribution according to work. It rather suggests that the first phase will be a sort of everyone-gets-the-same-low-income egalitarianism. Therea re other differences, which isn't surprising, given that little as Marx thought about future societies, his ideas must have evolved over time.
Ted says his point is that both ideas represent communism marked by the old bourgeois society and the transition. Of course, but so? I guess Ted means that insofar they are so marked, Marx thinks that they are Bad.
That's one-sided, Ted -- like Hegel, Marx thinks that every phase of social development has its truth that is preserved at the higher level. And what's more, is right for its time. So he doesn't think that capitalism is Bad -- in fact it's progress. It's just that it generates evils that make it unstable. (We wish.)
So the lower phase of communism (in the CGP) is not as wonderful as the higher phase that will occur when the fetters on production are somehow released and abundance makes it possible to distribute according to need.
Ted runs together the talk of thhe "crude" "brutish" nature of crude communism in the PM with the discussion of the limits of the principle of distribution according to work in the GCP, where Marx says that the principle is "one-sided" (not crude or brutish, and as I noted, thsi principle is not mentioned in the PM), and Ted says:
> So the principle isn't "correct" if you mean by this
> a rational
> principle of distributive justice appropriate to
> this first form of
> communism.
That is what I mean by saying Marx holds the principle to be "correct," and _of course_ Marx thinks (in the CGP) it is the rational principle appropriate to the lower phase of communism. It is the realization of bourgeois right made possible only by the abolition of private property. There is no better principle that he mentions this side of the higher phase of communism, which requires abundance.
Ted makes two errors here: he uses the language of the PM with itsa different lower phase to suggest that Marx think that the Work Principle doesn't apply in his different conception of that phase in the CGP, and even worse, Ted, despite his qualification of the idea that according to Marx a "correct" principle is one appropriate to the pahse of social development, really treats "correct" as "correct" tout court. But Marx does not think that principles are correct regardless of the phase of social development, but are appropriate to them or not.
Retributivism:
Ted refers to the translation where Marx says that Hegel's retributive theory has a specious (meaning false) appeal, but that is a mistranslation of Bestechendes, as I explained. That term means attrcative, seductive, or appealing. I double-checked this with a native German-speaker, who agrees with me.
Ted then points to the part where Marx says that retributivism is
a "metaphysical expression for the
> old jus talionis"
and concludes that therefore it:
> can't provide a rational justification for
> punishment in any society
> including the first form of communism.
Well, the text is pretty ambiguous: I don't see the need to go over the stuff I said before about how MArx says this theory is the only thing that even counts a theory of punishment because it respects human dignity and doesn't treat people as objects.
Given that this short ambiguous text of three pages is almost everything he says about retributivism, I am inclined to agree with Murphy that there's no fact of the matter about Marx's view as captured in his writings. You could cosntruct a retributivist Marxian view, as Murphy does, or a nonretributivist view, or maybe argue taht we don't want or need either a practice or theory of punishment under any phase of communism, as a lot of the people on this list seem think.
I will only note that Ted's view that punishment doesn't promote human development
(he says: Retributively
> inflicting suffering isn't positively developmental
> for either children
> or adults)
and therefore cannot be Marx's view presupposes a particular controversial view of Marx -- that the promotion of human development is Marx's supreme value, that he's some sort of (to use the technical philosophical jargon) eudiamonistic consequentialist (how's that for a mouthful!). That is not a silly view and it has been plausibly defended, for example, by Richard Miller.
But it is not my view. I think that Marx's supreme value, like Hegel's is freedom, and this is consistent with, and may require, retributivism as a theory of punishment. I won't argue for this here and don't want to get into that discussion now.
gotta work, later
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