[lbo-talk] Marx and Justice

bhandari at berkeley.edu bhandari at berkeley.edu
Wed Jul 25 10:15:26 PDT 2007


Rakesh Bhandari wrote:


> 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.

While stringing together quotations, Ted Winslow replied "These aren't Marx's ontological premises."

Yet nothing you say--or rather quote--speaks against my reading of chapters 23 and 24 of Capital Think of justice as a slow frame film (fewer frames per second than we need to be mislead into seeing it as continuous): justice frames economic reproduction as disjointed pictures of single transactions. We can't see the injustice in this medium. The injustice is suffered not by individuals as individuals in disjointed transactions but by individuals as members of a class over the course of time (see how time enters into Marx's analysis, through time alone relations can come to come to change in their substance). Do you deny that this is what Marx is saying in chapter 24 in particular and that Marx also expresses skepticism in this chapter that the standard of justice actually allows judgement of the wage transaction on an inter-class rather than individual basis?

Rakesh



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