[lbo-talk] DeLong on Marx and justice

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at berkeley.edu
Mon Jul 23 08:36:41 PDT 2007


Two people work. One saves his income; the other expends it. Eventually the former is able to buy a marvelous piece of equipment and pay the other to work for him. This second worker actually works fewer hours than before for the same level of consumption or works the same number of hours for a higher income; he is now productive enough to produce enough for both.

The saver therefore need not work at all for the same level of consumption. Now Marx's point is that after time the second worker is not being paid out of the savings of the first worker. The first worker now idle, that putatively hard won sum of savings will have been expended after some time through his annual consumption. If we consider the situation from the point of view of economic reproduction--and this is exactly what Brad DeLong (are you still here?) does not do in his interesting example http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/04/lire_le_capital.html --the second worker actually comes to be paid with the fruits of his own labor.

Moreover, having lost in the meantime lost his land and ordinary equipment, the second worker will find that he can only live if he agrees to buy back the fruits of his own labor in the form of the wage through the performance of even more labor gratis for the now the now idle saver.

What was a voluntary and perhaps just transaction has now become an unjust appropriation of labor though there has been no violation of the laws of property which were meant to protect one's claim to one's own labor.

The key here is to examine the situation from the point of view of production in its uninterrupted flow, in its constant renewal. I have been trying to hammer home this point. Brad DeLong does not actually work through chapters 23 and 24 of Capital I.

To seal the case Marx argues that the savings with which the first 'worker' purchased capital and paid wages did not have its origins in thrift but plunder and despoilation.

Capital cannot be shown to be just either in its origin or its reproduction from a certain point of view.

But as I have been arguing Marx is quite skeptical that the concept of justice will allow us to have that point of view, so Marx does not condemn capitalism for its injustice.

But Marx also insists that capitalism be justified on grounds other than its putative justice. In that sense to the extent that Brad's example captures the dynamics of accumulation--for example that it tends to raise wages overall--it could be said to justify capitalism, though this kind of materialism (a materialism of narrow self seeking, a materialism devoid of noble aspiration, the materialist of the Benthamite shopkeeper) tends to miss the actual social relation, which is again for Marx has become over the course of economic reproduction a kind of veiled slavery, no matter the pay be high or low.

Marx is not that kind of materialist. Believe it or not!

Rakesh



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