> Yet the Golden Rule seems realized in the free market, not
> contravened.
In a really really perverse way: the "value" of a human is what it takes to get him or her through the factory gate tomorrow morning. Wouldn't anyone with heart read that and admire the cleverness of the "proof" that labor trades at its value, and be horrified by a system that defines things that way?
I can understand the impulse to avoid a moralizing politics; there's nothing more grating than hearing Helen Caldicott go on about "the children." But you can get carried away with being scientific too.
Doug
The proof is not that labor trades at its value. it's that labor power tends to be paid at its value in a just and free transaction such that worker has no rightful claim to the surplus value embodied in the produced commodities. Marx can only go so far in immanent critique of this claim about the justice and fairness of the institutions. Justice will trap the workers; at best it will equally support both sides in the class struggle which at its most robust is motivated by non moral goods.
This is also not to say that there is no injustice--reneging on pensions promised, with holding of wages, use of child labor, etc.
But the just exchange of labor power is not the answer for reasons Marx gives in a book Carl dare not open.
Rakesh