Maybe I missed where the discussion mentioned this, but I guess James Daly is referring to the debates between Allen Wood and Ziyad I. Husami. They're collected in the book _Marx, Justice, and History_.
"Some of Marx's interpreters," Husami writes therein, "such as Robert C. Tucker and Allen Wood, assert that Marx considers capitalism just. They base this opinion largely on the strength of one passage in which Marx seems to be saying that the appropriation of surplus labor -- that is, the exploitation of labor power -- is 'a piece of good luck for the buyer [of labor power, the capitalist], but by no means an injustice (German: 'unrecht') to the seller [worker].'" Husami responds that "the passage on which [Wood and Tucker] reply is bogus -- it occurs in a context in which Marx is plainly satirizing capitalism."
And so on. _Marx, Justice, and History_ was edited by Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon. The edition I have is from 1980, Princeton U. press. I think Husami effectively demolishes Wood's and any subsequent argument that Marx didn't consider capitalism unjust, or that there wasn't a sense of justice underlying Marx's vision of a future society.
-B.
James Daly wrote:
"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."