----- Original Message ----- From: "Rakesh Bhandari" <bhandari at berkeley.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 3:41 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Nietzsche again
: James,
: Was Marx as nihilistic towards justice as Nietzsche? You say no. I am
: not as certain. Allen Wood's old arguments are persuasive though
: crucially incomplete.
This is only anecdotal, Rakesh, but I chaired a seminar in our philosophy department introduced by Allen Wood, of which he said publicly -- and very genuinely, I think -- that it was the best discussion of his work he had ever been at. I think that was partly because I opened the discussion by saying "You speak often of the mysterious territory beyond good and evil, but there is nothing mysterious about it -- beyond good and evil is good and bad" etc. etc. Unfortunately I did not keep up the relationship, partly because of the stresses of the political situation here, but I continued to work on the theme of Marx and Justice.
I agree that the first part of Steven Lukes's book is very good -- particularly on freedom. But his discussion of whether capitalism is just, unjust, both or neither, typically for the whole Anglophone debate, misses the point which Marx made: "It suffices to isolate the first process [the market *exchange* of labour power and wages, as opposed to the second, the *use* of labour power as necessary and surplus labour] and to cleave to its formal character. This simple device is no sorcery, but it contains the entire riddle of the vulgar economists" (Capital, volume 1, Penguin, 1002). In other words there are not two relationships between the worker and the capitalist, one of which might be just and the other unjust, but one relationship, the wage relationship, which is the unjust one of the extortion of unrequited labour -- slavery -- secured by the commodification of labour-power.
I agree that it is vitally important that, as you say, in the final analysis the capital out of which wages are paid is the accumulation of surplus value created by previous surplus labour, and that this is a class relationship and I would say a class injustice. But each worker is exploited, and I think Marx's use of words like theft, embezzlement etc. (including trickery!) is a clear moral judgement of injustice. I am not very happy about Althusser's theoretical antihumanism, which makes him get rid of Marx's central concept of alienation. It is one of many moral/ontological arguments Marx makes against capitalism.
That is why I disagree with Carrol's assessment that these are trivial questions. The macho immoralist saying that you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs alienates me, and I think it alienates the majority of the people on whom a socialist revolution depends.
I have posted a version of an article I wrote on Marx and Justice (which I could e-mail to anyone interested), together with chapters 1 to 5 of a book on the subject at:
JamesDalyandFriends at groups.msn.com
There is also material at
http://jamespdaly.blogspot.com
J. D.