Rakesh -- I think we all agree that Marx did not hold the Lockean labour entitlement theory, and nor do any of us.
The article in reply to Wood by Husami is far closer to Marx than Wood is. Essentially Husami is saying that the comic irony in the story of Moneybags and the worker emphasises the dirty trick with which M. buys W's commodity at its market value (rhetorically called a fair price), which is the equivalent of the amount of labour it took to make the commodity, then uses his new property to coerce W. to work for him without pay -- the essence of slavery. When W. says that is not fair, he replies "This is a business, not a charity! I paid for my property in the market and I'll use it as long as I like." There is a system in which production, exchange, distribution and consumption are interrelated, and none of them has anything to do with morality.
>From my review of a book on Marxism and Christianity:
Chapter 2, on Marxism, begins with the consideration that Marxism might be "old hat". It therefore points to the existence of the murder of children for the organ transplant market. Under the influence of Althusser, I suspect, such humanist digressions are soon abandoned in favour of "science". A theoretical section follows. It begins, somewhat eerily: "To the question 'why should we work for socialism?', Marxism can only answer 'to resolve the contradictions of capitalism'... The term contradiction here... [refers to]... intolerable malfunctions in a system" (p 13). If Marxism is not "old hat", it is in spite of such statements.... Marx's motivation for socialism, on the contrary, came from witnessing the struggles of the Silesian weavers.
The revolutionary worker thinks like Robin Hood did: "The Sheriff of Nottingham has the law on his side, he has in law a right to raise taxes. But he has no right to oppress and exploit us -- that is not justice." In the name of natural justice, he becomes an out-law.
In the EPM Marx protested the fact that economics and "cousin morality" were completely separated -- as a form of alienation. In On the Jewish Question he called on humanity to unite [moral] politics and economics. A value free science of economics is bourgeois ideology. Fact and value are not divorced in a human approach.
Marx is Aristotelian, not Humean. Scott Meikle writes:
Marx
can be identified as an Enlightenment thinker only with the serious qualification (so serious that it casts doubt on the identification itself) that in the analytical foundation of his thought he is a very traditional European thinker, and draws for his philosophical resources in evaluating enlightenment modernity, capitalism, and economics, on the same pre-modern tradition of Aristotelianism in philosophy which the Anglophone moderns from Hobbes onwards were so passionately committed to ploughing up. It is a paradox that the most revolutionary thing about Marx is what is most traditional about him.
****************
> From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu>
> Date: 2007/07/20 Fri PM 03:20:40 GMT
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Nietzsche again
>
> Yet Docile Body (great name) Marx spared no sarcasm in his response
> to those who argued for wage gains in the name of justice and
> fairness. As if there was a just size for the provision lot granted a
> slave. The Andies have suggested that Marx's emphasis on human
> flourishing is not necessarily "ethical" in character, and may well
> have grounded his politics. What do we mean by ethics?
>
> You say that Marx is ironic when he says that the worker is not
> treated unjustly. But perhaps his target here is justice itself? And
> the annals are written in blood and fire--not sure that this an
> ethical judgement rather than an unblinkered chronicle. In other
> words, to those who would morally justify capitalism due its origins
> in putatively just transactions, Marx reintroduces the real history
> of capitalism. Is this itself an ethical judgement? Or a critique of
> an ethical defense of capitalism
>
> I think Marx says plenty that suggests he was an ethical nihilist,
> and he says plenty that suggests the opposite as you eloquently
> suggest. His ethics seem confusing and perhaps confused.
>
> Yours, Rakesh
>
>
> Rakesh and others,
>
> The 10 Point Program at the end of The Communist
> Manifesto proposes to address some ills of society.
> Marx & Engels wrote it.
>
> Did Marx do this ethics-free? Like, hey, why the hell
> not have "Free education for all children in public
> schools [a]nd abolition of children's factory labor in
> its present form"? (Point 10 of the Ten Point Program
> ). No ethics -- just do it for the hell of it. Why
> not?
>
> When Marx says that surplus value does not rightfully
> belong to the worker, he's talking about our current
> juridical/economic system, where in fact it doesn't.
> Often he's speaking with bitter irony when he says the
> worker is not treated unjustly - indeed, from the
> standpoint of bourgeois morality, the worker isn't.
> Joe Proletarian is free, free, free! And so Marx
> recognizes that viewpoint, pays cynical homage to it,
> even when spelling out the absolute hell workers
> endure every day of their life. The annals of working
> class suffering are written in blood and fire -- Marx
> said something like that, too. All ethics-free, I
> suppose.
>
> -B.
>
>
>
> Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
> "But Marx says the surplus value does not rightfully
> belong to the worker. [...] So I think if you want to
> construct an ethics, you'll have to work against Marx,
> the Nietzschean like nihilist. Or at least the ethics
> which are implied in Marx's critique is so deeply
> buried that its recovery will have to be much more
> than an interpretation of him."
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