> Hi Doug
> A slave enjoys the right to life, the right to make
> one's living only
> on condition that he perform labor gratis for another. But wouldn't
>
> it reflect a slave morality to rebel against this condition on the
> basis of appeals to transcendent ideals like natural or
> God's
> justice. In robust health, one opposes the relation out of respect
> for one's
> own security, flourishing, happiness and well being, out of
> affirmation of one's own nobility; these are as Allen Wood argues non
> moral goods. Marx and Nietzsche indeed.
> Yours, Rakesh
James replied:
>Saying Guantanamo is against natural justice is not an appeal to a
>transcendent ideal. Driving on the right or on the left is wrong depending
>on what country you're in, but driving dangerously is (in the nature of
>things) always wrong. Why call that transcendental?
>
>Allen Wood's distinction of moral and nonmoral "goods" is quasi-Kantian (and
>also influenced by utilitarianism), not Marxist. You can't get more "noble"
>than Aristotle's magnanimous man -- or more self-respecting than Socrates.
This is a puzzling reply. It does not seem to doubt that the most robust basis for resistance to slavery is not justice but what Wood calls non moral goods. Even if James thinks these are ultimately moral goods, that would not establish the injustice of capitalism can be established or suggest that natural justice is the best, healthiest or most robust motivation for working class resistance.
The question is also not whether detention camps and torture (or the colonial occupation of Ireland) are unjust.
The questions are whether free market exploitation can be shown to be unjust today and whether Marx thought it could be so shown in his own time.
I don't think my posts are being read, so I shall have to repeat myself once again.
Yes having to buy back some quantity of one's own labor with a pledge to perform more labor than that cannot be described as an exchange, much less a just one.
But this condemnation of capitalist injustice comes too easy.
One cannot show the wage relation unjust in terms of disjointed single transactions, for the simple reason that the individual worker may not be buying back the fruits of his own labor through the performance of a greater quantity of labor. In short, the wage paid may not represent the fruits of each worker's own past labor.
And there is no injustice in simply paying labor power a value less than it will create, for what has in fact been purchased has been purchased at value.
The injustice comes in an exchange relation becoming a relation of appropriation; rather than products of each other's labor being exchanged or even equivalents being exchanged--what we mean by exchange-- what is is "exchanged" is some quantity of one's own (abstract) labor for the promise to perform a greater quantity of (abstract) labor than that.
So yes once we look at the relation from a class point of view over the course of economic reproduction the relation can at the least be shown not to be just if not positively unjust.
It has simply gone unnoticed (except by John Torrance) that Marx is making the argument that while no individual worker can say as an individual that she is treated unjustly, she can lay claim to unjust or at least not just treatment as a member of an aggrieved class.
Marx's statements about justice are not contradictory; they are simply different according to the level of analysis.
Injustice is not antinomic; it's not that capitalism is just in exchange but unjust in production. It is simply not just over the course of economic reproduction, many cycles of production and exchange, once we assume the perspective of classes. But capitalism is not unjust at the level of disjointed individual transactions.
However, the very concept of justice disallows us from looking at the wage relation over the course of time in such a collective way; justice does not allow us to ascend unproblematically to a dynamic, class based level of analysis, what Marx would have considered a scientific point of view.
Now perhaps the concept of justice has broader meaning than the essentially juridical one in Marx's time, but this has to be shown. But if it did not have that broader meaning in his time, it is unlikely that he was condemning capitalism for its injustice.
So far the responses to my argument have been exhortative but not analytical.
That is, no one has established against reasonable objections the injustice of the wage transaction considered as disjointed individual exchanges.
No one has argued against Marx's own skepticism that the concept of justice will indeed allow us to judge the wage relation in terms of its effect on class relationships over the course of economic reproduction.
If my arguments prompt someone to make such a clarifying counter-argument, then my argument will have failed but served a good purpose.
What seems clear to me is that Marx wants to strip capitalist institutions of the halo of justice while not predicating his critique on the injustice of capitalism.
It's simply enough to know cast doubt about the justice or fairness of the origins or reproduction of bourgeois institutions. And Marx did this as I argued in my reply to DeLong's critique of Marx. That is, what Marx put in scare quotes are the bourgeois claims to "justice" or "fairness".
To be sure, working class organization depends on an ethics of solidarity, but this is not to say that working class struggle should be driven by the need to achieve or restore natural justice.
At its most robust it is driven by non moral goods, not by ideals of natural justice.
Rakesh