On 23/07/2007 17:59:59, James Heartfield (heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk)
wrote:
> Doug writes:
> *****************
>
> Well he was often ironic, but he was pretty forthright on this question.
> In particular he mocked the 'fair day's work for a fair day's pay' on the
> grounds that this was the formula that would ensure, not obviate,
> exploitation.
Exactly. In the famous passage from the Critique of the Gotha Programme "What is a 'fair' distribution? ..." Marx is questioning rhetorically the very notion of fairness in connection with economic laws. He is not -- as is suggested by Allen Wood's *mis*quotation of it as "What is a 'fair distribution'?'' (MJH 114, KM 136) -- seeking the correct criterion of fairness for the mechanisms of distribution. Marx never affirms in his own person that the present-day distribution is fair; four times he puts "fair" in quotation marks ("scare quotes"); and he only mentions fairness in rhetorical questions, * a figure of speech* whose intention is clearly ironic, not declarative or literally interrogative.
In so doing he is making the point that talk of a "fair" wage is an ideological glorification of what is purely an economic relation. He is not matter-of-factly endorsing the bourgeois ideology, that this, while an economic relation, is at the same time and for that very reason the highest possible moral relationship of respect, freedom and equality between persons (the bourgeoisie as universal class). Those "scare quotes" are unfortunately omitted not only in Allen Wood's misquotation of this passage in his second article on the subject "Marx on Right and Justice" (in Marx, Justice and History, 114) but also in the later monograph Karl Marx (136) -- though they were not omitted in the first article, "The Marxian Critique of Justice" (MJH 25). The omissions have the misleading effect -- as also does Wood's supplying in Karl Marx (136) his own literal answers to Marx's rhetorical questions -- of making the case that Marx was saying that capitalist distribution was simply and literally fair, whereas Marx was in that passage vehemently rejecting the very idea of a fair wage, the very application of the concept of fairness to something he was at pains all his life to point out belongs to a purely economic category.
Marx's approach is to give an economic analysis of the total capitalist mode of production, showing in the course of the analysis that, contrary to the bourgeois ideological position (accepted by the workers and their intellectual and political leaders) it is not the "internal justice" of a relation of free and equal market agents striking a bargain; that is, not a classless relationship; but a class one, which is like all class relationships essentially and irremediably unequal and in a concealed way exploitative of surplus labour. Then he examines the theories and the demands of those, including the anarchists, whose socialism is dominated by a limited, supposedly eternal but in fact bourgeois, idea of the highest justice as "fairness", as found in equal market exchange -- and shows that the demands of such "bourgeois socialism" as he calls it in the Communist Manifesto are actually already met in the market exchange of labour-power and wages.
In his later work there is thus a continuity with the critique of Proudhon in the Poverty of Philosophy, and with important critical elements in his early writings. These include the critique of crude communism in the EPM in which he condemned the mean-minded, alienated, possessive and levelling motivation of preoccupation with narrow egoistic considerations of justice, and rejected any suggestion of the primacy or foundational function of such a notion. Justice, however, is a value which is found in its fullness as an aspect of the "humanism" which Marx claims can only come about as a characteristic of a whole new mode of production. This would be based on ontological justice, on relations "worthy of [deserved by, due to] human nature" (Capital III), on the basis of human mutual need, and of the common human good, and of the equality of friendship, not the equality of commodity value. He never ceased to subscribe to the humanist ontology of the early writings, and it is in that light that he made his critical evaluation of the economic phenomena he later discovered.
Marx continued to judge capitalism in the light of the concept of the human essence which he elaborated in his early writings. This grounds the concept of justice which is the basis of his later judgments that the entire wages system is not only exploitative, not only fetishised, not only mean, petty, ignoble and dishonourable, but avaricious to a monstrous degree, and uncaring whether it destroys the human race.
Marx therefore does not say that capitalism (or the wage relationship, which is the basis of capitalism as a mode of production, or the distribution of the means of production which as he points out is a necessary part of the wages system) is just in any part -- or in any sense of that word.