[lbo-talk] Nietzsche again

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Wed Jul 18 23:50:57 PDT 2007


Rakesh Bhandari wrote:

Marx does not seem to have thought that exploitation could be shown to be unjust. ************

Labour power becomes a commodity to be sold to an employer. That is "unjust" because life becomes a thing to be bought and sold. See my previous quotes from CAPITAL volume 3. It's not that the employer buys the labour power below its market price--for that would be "unjust". No, in general the employing class buys the skills and time of workers at their market price. To be sure, a class struggle goes on between buyers and sellers over this price--especially if the workers are organized. The employing class is ALWAYS organized; after all, it's their State. The worker *voluntarily* sells to the employer/buyer, just as the workers go shopping for beans and other food commodities for their market price. But before workes can go shopping for commodities like food, they need cash and they get that from selling their skills and time to the employing class--either that or they dumpster dive and sleep under bridges. Marx points out that the workers are not cheated on their price, and therefore the exchange between the employing class and therefore the working class is treated with "justice for all", in bourgeois market terms. That the wage-labourers under the rule of Capital have no right to the *social product* of their labour is what Marx would see as forming the basis of the "injustice" or as he might put it, "alienation" within the capitalist system.

e.g.: ***************** But now, after our readers have seen the class struggle of the year 1848 develop into colossal political proportions, it is time to examine more closely the economic conditions themselves upon which is founded the existence of the capitalist class and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers.

We shall present the subject in three great divisions:

The Relation of Wage-Labor to Capital, the Slavery of the Worker, the Rule of the Capitalist.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch01.htm

************************************************** While Marx himself may have never used the word "unjust" in relation to capitalist exploitation and how it comes into the world, "dripping with blood", he certainly never claimed that slavery in any form was "just". As for Nietzsche, as far as I've been able to tell from reading his work, he wasn't concerned with political-economy. His project was more concerned with replacing "slave morality" with "master morality". Where he and Marx may actually connect in ways is on the issue of philistinism in bourgeois society, especially amongst the bourgeoisie.

Mike B)

An injury to one is an injury to all http://www.iww.org/

____________________________________________________________________________________ Get the Yahoo! toolbar and be alerted to new email wherever you're surfing. http://new.toolbar.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/index.php



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list