James wrote:
"This is an example of what Marx calls "obsolete verbal rubbish". Buying and selling labour power is an economic transaction which has no connection with morality. That it is a just and free transaction is lying bourgeois ideology."
Of course James has simply misquoted Marx who uses that expression in the Critique of the Gotha Program to mock the reliance on justice, fairness and right in the formulation of socialist demands!
The very moral basis James wants to give socialism!
There is no lying that the wage relation seems ideally marked by an exchange of equivalents, that capital has a prima facie claim to have paid an equivalent for what he actually purchased, that as he advanced that wage even before the commodities were produced much less sold it is not unjust to pay at a discount for labor power, that the wage relation therefore conforms to our ideals of justice in that both parties had the same legal rights to withdraw from exchange until equal value was offered and that some level of reciprocity was in fact achieved.
Wood's argument is that it's no surprise that the exchange conforms to shared ideals of justice because justice is simply the ideal expression of the basic relations on which a social order depends. We have here a sociology of morals which denies that there are transhistoric or transcendent concepts of morality and denies that even within one society any appeal can be made to impartial authority to arbitrate between competing theories of justice.
For Wood the dominant conception of justice we have is already tailor made to conform the wage relation on average. Our concept of justice weighs heavily equal right, not equal result for example. Still much of everyday economic and political practice actually is unjust by these standards.
Wood denies that Marx bases his critique on alternative concept of justice, on a theory of justice not based on rechtsbegriffe. In fact he argues that Marx does not think there is any need for a special moral or ethical theory to make a case for the working class movement.
I think what is most important though is not that Marx tried to describe a just exchange as an unjust one either on the prevailing or foreign theory of justice.
I don't think Wood is correct that Marx was happy to let stand the description of the average wage relation as a just exchange.
What Marx tried to do was show that the wage relation was not in fact an exchange at all, but that cannot be apprehended from a juridic or moral point of view.
It could only be apprehended from a scientific, systematic dialectic point of view. This is why Marx was a scientist, not a moralist whose Capital (properly appreciated) does not read as the Sunday morning sermonizing Carl thinks it is but a dialectical critique of appearances. I fear that Carl is like that Benthamite shopkeeper who can only imagine that the rest of humanity is moved by the same kind of crass materialism (or in Carl's case moralism) to which he subscribes.
Now there are many ways in which to move goods or services from one person to another. Exchange is one; robbery, inheritance, taxation and welfare payments are others.
Though indeed the wage relation is an exchange of equivalents, it's not a reciprocal exchange and for that reason is not well described as an exchange. It is in fact better described as a conquest relation: the return of some portion of tribute already extracted only the condition that tribute again be produced.
But surely this is exactly what capitalism seems not to be. But for Marx an exchange should be characterized by a transfer and a return of an equivalent.
But that's not what is happening at all. It seems that the the capitalist advances a wage, before the commodities have been produced and sold and then the worker alienates labor power
The wage seems advanced, a gift so to speak which the worker reciprocates by alienating his ability to work to the capitalist.
Now this is where Marx's argument gets tricky.
In fact it is not clearly persuasive at all.
Over time what happens is not the capitalist advances the wage first but that workers produce new value, that the new value( v+s) is appropriated by the capitalists but the capitalists withhold v until the workers agree to produce v+s again.
Wages are no longer advanced out of capitalists' own savings or even plunder for the purposes of an exchange with workers; new value is first appropriated from workers, rightfully with-held and only partially allotted as wages after labor gratis again has been pledged.
Because this is not in substance an exchange, it cannot be a just one. Marx tries to strip the halo of justice and right from capitalism not by questioning the justice of its basic exchanges but questioning whether there is in fact an exchange relation at all or only the fictio juris of one.
James seems to think the exchange is unjust and that there is some concept of justice which would disallow labor power (like say body organs) from ever being exchanged in open, competitive markets, that the alienation of labor power is the alienation of the human essence and therefore cannot be right.
These are not Marx's arguments at least the so called late Marx.
But because Marx's own argument may in fact be weak, Wood was forced to diminish the importance of saying that capitalist institutions are in fact just.
The essential fairness and justice of capitalist institutions is a real problem for social theory. One can 1. deflate the import of their being just and fair, 2. show that they do not conform to prevailing standards of justice and fairness, 3. offer a renegade theory of justice which exposes these institutions as unjust.
Little textual evidence that Marx did 3, as James is suggesting. Wood says that he did 1.
I am saying not that he tried to prove the wage exchange unjust but more radically that it was not an exchange at all, though to make that argument he had to fly above the moral and juridic points of view.
And it's not clear that his radical argument succeeds.
Rakesh