Orginal message Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu Sat, 21 Jul 2007 07:52:47 -0700 **********************************
To elaborate on what I last wrote (J. D.) --
The wage relationship is, as Marx points out, an economic relationship; it does not set out to be a moral relationship, and so an individual wage contract cannot be judged to have succeeded or failed in being just. Capitalist firms recognise this, when, challenged over redundancies they point out that they are "a business, not a charity"; or when the enormous increase in managerial salaries in newly privatised industries is defended against challenges of unfairness in comparison with the rejection of workers' wage demands; the enforced reluctantly honest answer is that it is an economic decision, necessary to get quality personnel -- which has nothing to do with "fairness". Labour-power, or as they would say labour, as long as it is a commodity must obey only the laws of economics.
Capitalists, like every previous ruling class, secure real exploitation and slavery in production, but in their case in a way that covers their tracks -- through universalised bourgeois property rights formally common to employer and worker alike, through the alleged natural freedom and commutative justice of the market, equally enjoyed by capitalist and worker. Treating the question at that formal surface level is therefore playing by their rules and being condemned to lose. The exploitation is legalised and justified by an impressive superstructural system which is to the worker trying to understand the situation in the what the spider's web is to the fly. Marx constantly refers to swindling and trickery as the preferred bourgeois method.
Even when the commodity labour-power fetches its value equivalent (a subsistence wage) as its market-price the total production relationship (exchange and use of labour-power) is commutatively de jure unjust in the human terms of the justice of equal exchange in real life. While the commodity labour-power, the worker's self, is exchanged (in the secondary distribution) for an equivalent, the use of that commodity afterwards (in production) unlike the use of any other commodity, introduces a relationship of unequal "exchange", that is, exploitation -- unrequited extraction of surplus labour.
The first (equal) exchange between the commodity labour-power and wages is analytically separable from the use of the commodity, and that is the source of the confusion of those who claim that it is therefore a complete transaction, and a just one. But it would not take place were the exploitative use of labour-power not counted on as paid for; there are no wages if there is no production for profit. The two "moments" must therefore be judged as part of one complex entity, one production transaction, one relationship of production. As Marx says in the introduction to the Grundrisse
... production, distribution, exchange and consumption are [not] identical, but... they are links of a single whole, different aspects of one unit... A distinct mode of production... determines the specific mode of consumption, distribution, exchange (*and the specific relations of these different phases to one another*...). There is an interaction between the various aspects. Such interaction takes place in any organic entity. (Grundrisse, 99-100, Marx's emphasis).
As Marx put it in Capital,
[W]age labour is the necessary condition for the formation of capital and always remains the necessary premise of capitalist production. That is why, even if the first process -- that of the exchange of money for labour-power or purchase of labour-power -- does not as such form part of the immediate process of production, it does on the other hand form part of the general production of the relationship. (Capital 1006).
Failure to recognise this by the authors of the Gotha programme was one reason for Marx's exasperation with it. It concentrated on the secondary distribution, that of "the full proceeds of labour", to the exclusion of its place in the entirety of the relation of production.
Vulgar socialism... took over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on the question of distribution. But after the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again? (Critique of the Gotha Programme). (SW 325)
The exchange and the use of labour-power are for Marx one organic entity, the exercise of a production relation; hence the whole transaction must be judged as one thing, namely "embezzlement, theft" etc. However, philosophers in the analytic tradition have broken up the organic entity into disjecta membra. They have isolated the moment of the exchange of equivalent commodities and insisted that that be judged in itself as "fair". They do not ask if it is fair to force the worker to act and relate to others only as the owner of a single commodity, namely, his or her own life-activity alienated as labour-power.
The last point entails the primary distributive injustice of ownership in the means of production, which is an inequality of power between people, the undue power of one over the other, the existence of the injustice of domination -- which is necessary to ensure the secondary unfairness of exploitation, as an inequality of "exchange". Of course, the compulsion in question is not essentially a personal relationship between two agents; it is absolutely impersonal, and indeed coerces both classes equally. It is not even the class but the system which is unjust. Challenged on moral grounds, the bourgeois agent (and servant) of the system will neutralise complaints by deflecting it on to the system as a whole.
Ironically, as we have seen, the real life transaction, the real organic entity (market exchange, plus use in production, of labour-power) turns out to be in fact the truth or reality behind the deceptive surface appearance which both the capitalist and the Lassallean labourer accept as veridical, which the capitalist says and the worker thinks is in principle fair -- the alleged market exchange of wages and the day's labour. When the organic entity is judged in terms of human values, it can be condemned as wage slavery, not just as a shortfall of wages, as the Lassalleans see it. It is the injustice of slavery at the basic level of production which makes Marx characterise the superstructural form, equality of market exchange of labour-power and wages, as a mere confidence trick, which gives the capitalist the right to exploit -- recognised in Marx's analysis but not of course in that of the capitalist or of the uninstructed worker.
So Marx does not see the market exchange part of the wage-relationship (abstracted from the unitary "relation of production") as just in any sense. He sees them as inseparable parts -- more or less successfully isolated and ideologically justified by the bourgeoisie as an autonomous economic system -- of a whole relationship of production which includes legal, moral and political dimensions, in their turn more or less successfully isolated and ideologically justified by the bourgeoisie as autonomous separable superstructural realities. The whole can be seen from outside as de jure unjust, as slavery by domination and exploitation, concealed by market confusion.
Those who insist on the justice of the exchange of labour-power and wages do so on the basis of the acceptance of the basic bourgeois property law that it is no business of mine what the buyer does with a commodity once I sell it. But what if the commodity is a stick which I know s/he is buying to beat me with? That is in effect what the sale and subsequent use of labour-power is, and why Marx thinks it de jure wrong that it entitles the buyer to use it, for instance, for a sixteen hour day, as in the early bourgeois system it did, because that was said by capitalists to be economically necessary, and it was politically possible. But Marx did not think there was a "fair" number of hours that it should entitle the capitalist to. He did not think the capitalist was humanly, morally entitles to any part of the system or its core relationship at all. He did not concede any rights de jure, and advocated contesting its de facto legalisation of economic rights with the same kind of force as ultimately lay behind the imposition of the mode of production itself, including "economic force" -- on the worker's side, the strike. In this he militantly opposed Proudhon, Citizen Weston of the IWMA (whose views on that subject or occasion Marx's writing Wages Price and Profit), and Lassalle (with his economic doctrine of "the iron law of wages").
That is why he welcomed so enthusiastically the eight-hour day campaign which was going on while he was writing Capital, and thought of it as a new stage in the consciousness of workers, and insight into the essence of their exploitation as a matter of labour-time as he had already explained it, not only in the 1859 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and in Capital, but in simplified form specifically for members of the IWMA, in the 1865 Wages Price and Profit. These were the kinds of "despotic inroads" (forceful assertion of demands , not appeals to a shared schema of right or fairness) into a "bourgeois right" already described as despotic, which he hoped workers would make through economic and political campaigns to change employers' rights ("the market") in regard to the length of the work-day by legislation.
By pointing out that capitalist relations generated de facto economic and legal rights but not de jure moral rights, and that authentic human relations of production which would be total justice (humanism) required common ownership and democratic relations of production, Marx argues that from a human point of view, which is that of the proletariat, their being forced to live as commodities under reifying economic laws, by a system which denies them independent access to the means needed for their communal existence and for their ability to meet their own and each other's needs, is already unjust even before surplus labour is extracted. Unlike Lassalle Marx was urging not justice as amelioration of the wages system and accommodation to the bourgeoisie on more acceptable terms, but humanism as abolition of the wages system and of the class which imposed it.
Marx recognises that in economics, which is the main form the social relation takes between human beings in capitalist societies, the notion of justice or fairness is simply out of place. His position therefore is not self-contradictory, as Cohen and Geras suggest it is, from since he never says that capitalism is just -- nor even that is not unjust -- in any sense. He would certainly be involved in self-contradiction if he asserted both that capitalism is just, in a univocal sense, and that it is unjust in the same sense. But this is not the case. Allen Wood asserts repeatedly that Marx "insists" that what Wood sometimes calls the exploitation involved in the wage relationship (internal to capitalism), but sometimes simply capitalism, is just by its own criteria -- which Marx is said to endorse as the relevant criteria for the use of the word and the concept.
But Marx makes it clear that it is Proudhon and the Lassalleans, not himself, who see considerations of justice of having anything to do with the goal of capitalist economics. The illusion that capitalism has anything to do with justice is for Marx like the illusion that it is concerned with providing for human need; in both respects the truth is simply that it is not; it is concerned with profit, and it can no more be turned into a concern with justice than it can into a concern for human need.
Those two concerns are indeed much the same thing. Therefore capitalism can be externally judged as a whole in terms of the justice of its arrangements and of its outcome, in the same way as it can be judged in terms of its production for human need, though neither are part of its intention. Capitalist political economy (or economics) which reflects the bourgeois relations between people, is divorced from moral theory including theory of justice, as the original relationship is divorced from moral practice. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx writes
I might ask the political economist: "am I obeying economic laws if I make money by prostituting my body to the lust of another?..."His answer will be: "your acts do not contravene my laws, but you should find out what Cousin Morality and Cousin Religion have to say about it; the morality and religion of my political economy have no objection to make, but..." But who should I believe, then? Political economy or morality?... it is inherent in the very nature of estrangement that each sphere imposes upon me a different and contrary standard: one standard for morality, one for political economy, and so on. This is because each of them is a particular estrangement of man and each is centred upon one particular area of estranged essential activity; each is related in an estranged way to the other. (EW 362, quotation marks added -- JD).
Note that Marx here speaks of economics and morality as being in conflict, unlike many of his would-be followers, who invoke Marx simplistically in support of an a priori theory that morality is a superstructure which is determined by its usefulness, in the sense of endorsement, to economics.
Although the estranged economic relationship is shown as reified, so is the understanding of it as in literal truth only a relationship between things. The fetishism which sees the laws of economics as "natural laws", like those of physics, must be abolished and the "bearers" of economic laws must understand that those laws are reified social relations -- inhuman social relations in fact because the bearers are forced by the mode of production to alienate themselves, to become and behave as commodities.
>From within the system, details such as the size of the wage cannot be
judged morally but must be decided according to the laws of supply and
demand. But from outside the system, the system as a whole can be judged as
an inhuman relationship and seen to be de jure ontologically, distributively
and commutatively unjust. The capitalist has within the system a de facto
right to surplus value, to which s/he also when under attack sometimes adds
a bourgeois ideological moral claim of de jure (modern) natural property
right. But Marx denies the capitalist a human right, not just in particular
to unpaid labour, but in general to the inhuman conditions on which all
bourgeois rights are based -- the commercial/legal and, when such a claim is
judged possible, convenient or necessary, the ideological alleged "moral"
rights -- in which labour-power is a commodity in the first place.
Marx saw it as the proletariat's task to overcome the alienated divisions between the political, the moral and the economic. Overcoming alienation, as the culmination of dialectics, involves rejecting the claim that economics is a science which is, like physics, about immutable natural laws -- such as those of supply and demand -- with no more relation to morality than the law of gravity has; and recognising, on the contrary, that its subject-matter is an economic practice, which should be totally altered and should be unified with a truly human morality based on human need.