Here's more of Marx's argument from the crucial chapter 24 of Capital volume I:
>Only buyer and seller, mutually independent, face each other in
>commodity production. The relations between them cease on the day
>when the term stipulated in the contract they concluded expires. If
>the transaction is repeated, it is repeated as the -result of a new
>agreement which has nothing to do with the previous one and which
>only by chance brings the same seller together again with the same
>buyer.
>If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated
>processes, is to be judged according to its own economic laws, we
>must consider each act of exchange by itself, apart from any
>connexion with the act of exchange preceding it and that following
>it. And since sales and purchases are negotiated solely between
>particular individuals, it is not admissible to seek here for
>relations between whole social classes.
>However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding
>accumulations the capital functioning to-day may have passed
>through, it always preserves its original virginity. So long as the
>laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange the
>mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionised without in
>any way affecting the property rights which correspond to commodity
>production. These same rights remain in force both at the outset,
>when the product belongs to its producer, who, exchanging equivalent
>for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his own labour, and also
>in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an
>ever-increasing degree the property of those who are in a position
>to appropriate continually and ever afresh the unpaid labour of
>others.
I am puzzling over this argument, for if the surplus value produced by worker A rightfully belongs to the capitalist--and Marx certainly says that it does rightfully belong the capitalist--then what is wrong with his using it to employ worker B whose produced surplus value should also rightfully belong to him?
Where is the injustice? Surplus value has its origins in just transactions.
Marx's point seems to be that our codes of justice dictate not only that exchange should be free and things of equivalent value traded but that equivalent labor or (more subjectively or psychologically) equivalent "magnitudes" of toil and trouble or sacrifice should be exchanged.
And it becomes apparent that there is no such justice in the transaction between capitalists and workers as long as we don't look at the relationship at an individual level in a temporally disjointed fashion. In other words to see that there is an unjust appropriative relation between the classes we would have to look at capitalism over time from the perspective of the collective subject of the working class. Then we see that the wages which he advances is actually not costing the capitalist anything. He is able to exchange without cost to himself; more importantly the cost of what he exchanges has already been borne by the working class itself (leaving Senior's abstinence and Marshall's waiting aside). And if that is true, how could capitalism be just?
The same quote again: "the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of the individual capitalist and the individual worker, we view in their totality, the capitalist class and the working-class confronting each other. But in so doing we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity production."
But the laws of commodity production only allow us to take the case of relations between individuals in temporally disjointed segments. Why is that? And even if that is so, why can't capitalism be judged unjust from that point of view? Is Marx correct? These are difficult questions, and I don't think it's been pursued in the secondary literature.
As I said, I think the American debate about Marx's theory of justice just missed the point. A critical judgement depends that we look at the process not from the perspective of production per se but reproduction, production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and it depends on taking the standpoint of a collective subject which in fact has no legal or moral standing and (for many) empirical existence.
Rakesh