James D writes:
>
> 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.
One aspect of modern plantation slavery was that the capitalist slaveowner allowed the slave to pay or work (directly or indirectly) for the reproduction of his own life only on the condition that slaveowner could make profitable use of it (for a concise analysis of how racial plantation slavery functioned as the pivot of early capitalism, see John Hobson Eastern Origins of Western Civilization).
There was no formal exchange here in an economic sense. Having the power to allow someone to live only the condition that he make you rich is not well characterized as an economic exchange, though it is an economic relation, a horrific one.
The slave-owner did not exchange value for labor power, sold freely by its possessor. The slave owner simply appropriated labor time. This seems to be a far cry from the relation between capitalist and the formally free wage labor.
This new general relation is legal and just because just is simply a juridical category, a Rechtsbegriff. Husami is simply incorrect that Marx only says in one place that the worker has suffered no injustice (the Critique of the Gotha Program is important here as is the general thrust of the critique of utopian socialism). Perhaps Marx has an ethics of emancipation at odds with the ideology of Recht, as Steven Lukes has importantly argued.
With the generalization of formally free wage labor, all the ideal conditions of free commodity exchange can now be met; hence, in terms of the standards of a courtroom not even Shark or Perry Mason (whose body of work I know very well) could show that there was an injustice on average in the transactions between capitalists and workers.
Where are the dirty tricks? The individual capitalist does not coerce the individual worker. And even if the worker is paid less than the value he creates, he still agreed freely to the wage, and the wage may even be said to represent the value of his labor, properly discounted. It should on average be an equivalent to what the worker does alienate--his labor power.
I know this angers most leftists; it makes Marx seem as if he were a right wing libertarian. But Marx does not think primarily in terms of good and evil, right and wrong. Perhaps one of many reasons he remains a foreigner on the land God has chosen.
Richard Miller is correct, though, that it does not follow from the justice or at least the non-injustice of individual transactions that the system as a whole is just or not unjust. True enough. But it does follow from the juridical understanding of justice, from Recht that the system as a whole cannot be condemned on the grounds that what appears to be an exchange at the individual level is no such thing at the level of the classes. On average individuals have not been treated unjustly; the social institution could not then be unjust. Perhaps it's not just per se, but it's not unjust.
The working class is just a mental abstraction in the liberal and juridical point of view or from the point of methodological individualism; to say that it, rather than the individual workers who compose it, is exploited is tantamount to saying the Fruit is tasty but not any particular fruit is. How could exploitation and injustice be emergent properties, so to speak.
Yet this is just what the dialectical Marx is saying: over the course of economic reproduction the working class has come to bear the costs on both sides in its exchange with the capitalist class. ; the working class suffers as a consequence veiled slavery.
This may also seem ridiculous to many, a trivialization of what plantation slavery was and a self indulgent description of the SUV driving worker today.
But for the purposes of the argument here what matters is the critique of the the juridical point of view.
From that point of view we can only judge individual transactions not scientifically understand the social process as a whole: though the the forms of property law and exchange remain intact, the substance of the transaction has been inverted. Property and voluntary exchange do not protect one's claim to his own labor (or even some of it) but ensure the continuing appropriation of labor.
So the juridical and ethical points of view stupify (we humanities academics have to say that, given the income foregone; at least we can delude ourselves about being smart). Justice operates comfortably in the virtual reality of the sphere of circulation.
From this vantage point, the vista of scientific or dialectical understanding of appearances cannot be had.
Marx was a scientist and partisan, not a moralist. Even if one wants to critique the wage relation as unjust,one first has to understand what it has become despite appearances to the contrary. Moral critique is a fetter. Justice also only produces ideals for the regulation of commodity exchange, essentially juridical ideals which arise out of commodity exchange itself--equality and justice, for example.
Husami leans on this passage from Capital I, chapter 24:
"The means of production, with which the additional labour-power is incorporated, as well as the necessaries with which the labourers are sustained, are nothing but component parts of the surplus product, of the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class. Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labour-power even at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conquerer who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of. If the additional capital employs the person who produced it, this producer must not only continue to augment the value of the original capital, but must buy back the fruits of his previous labour with more labour than they cost."
Of course Husami is correct that seen this way, the wage transaction seems to be an injustice. But the point is that one cannot say of an individual worker that he is in fact buying back the fruits of his own labor with more labor than it cost. The wage paid may not in fact be the fruit of his own previous labor; moreover, he has in fact been paid the monetary equivalent of his commodity in a free and fair wage bargain. It matters not that the 'value of labor'(value added by his labor) may be greater than the value of his labor power, for properly discounted the latter may be equivalent to the former. There is just no injustice here.
And the reason is that justice is inherently a juridic concept, a rechtsbegriff, an ideal arising out of the conflicts among individuals in the exchange of commodities and money and an ideal to which such exchange is to conform. Marx is skeptical that any working class theory of justice can free itself from this juridic concept of justice, the ideology of recht. Yes Marx sees the wage transaction as an injustice once he has redescribed it as class relationship reproduced over time. Then yes the working class can be said only to be buying the fruits of its previous labor with more labor than it cost. But such a perspective will not be allowed by rechtsbegriffe, the concepts of right and justice.
So capitalism cannot be shown to be unjust. But we don't get moral or ethical credit for every action we do on behalf of our self actualization or happiness or well being. And the working class does not a pat on its back or doggie bones from justice or morality to pursue what Wood calls non moral goods.
Perhaps this ethical or moral nihilism opened Marxism to atrocity in its name. But then Marx should be critiqued, not humanized. Or defended for this daring position which does remind one of Nietzsche or Foucault.
Yours truly, Rakesh