Can there be such a thing as a class injustice?
J. D. : Why not? Injustice is not confined to relationships between two individuals. The English have been unjust to the Irish for centuries.
James, I meant literally can there be an injustice to the formally free wage working class whose social relations are organized around money and commodities and via voluntary exchanges and contracts? No doubt a relation of colonial occupation can be understood as unjust from the perspective of a conception of justice rooted in commodity exchange. But once the relations appear to be among egoists and individuals in pursuit of their respective interests through apparently voluntary commodity and monetary transactions, where is the injustice? Or did Marx think justice an inherently bourgeois concept; justice itself does not allow the taking of the standpoint from which relations could appear unjust? It seems to me that Marx's argument is that capitalism could be shown to be unjust though only from "foreign" ground, territory which the very conception of justice disallows us from occupying! I don't think his argument is well made at all! It's confusing. Perhaps he is saying contradictory things; that's why scholars could fight over his words for years on end. I can sense the palpable fear that Marx has ceded too much about the justice of capitalism to the libertarians.
I do think however that the long passage Mike just cited does show why the pill was colored red.
Rakesh