James writes:
>The trick Marx exposes has been so successful that it is still
>wreaking havoc on lbo-list.
Well what is the trick? I think we need to be much more careful here.
Keep this quote from Godelier in mind: "... the Marxist view was that-and it was not proper to Marx-that a big part of ideology is a presentation of exploitation as reciprocity. There was a very fantastic idea discovered in the 19th century, that the pharaoh deserved to be given your life and your work because he is a God; so if you breathe, if you have water for your garden, it's because of him and of the rituals he was performing. So the language of exchange, and debt, not exchange only, is the seed, the milieu of caste and class formation. It's not in the logic of direct violence that you understand the violence of caste or class formations, but it's in the milieu of debt, personal and collective indebtedness. You cannot understand the milieu of power and the process of its crystallization without a view of unequal exchange and imaginary reciprocity."
http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol1no2/deconstruct.html
The real trick is not the capitalist pays for labor power rather than labor itself. If that's all Marx had to say about "the trick", then why does he return to exploitation in chapters 23 and 24 of Capital. He had already said what you say about the trick in chapters 5 and 6.
The real trick is that the capitalist seems to advance wages or variable capital and appears as the fount of life. The worker thus appears to be indebted to the capitalist, so indebted that there is no real injustice in having sold his labor power at discount. After all the wage has been advanced, the worker is allowed to live before the commodities are produced, much less sold. The capitalist appears a benefactor to whom reciprocity (if not life) is owed. The Western capitalist is presented by Marx as the heir of the Asiatic despot; so much for cheap criticisms of Marx's Orientalism. The capitalist is lauded for his ritualized asceticism and equanimity in the face of risk.
But if the wage is not in fact advanced but only part of the value which has already been appropriated and allotted only on the condition that labor gratis again be performed--and we can only see this if we consider the impact on classes in the course of economic reproduction--then the worker is in no debt to his putative benefactor.
But again for the individual worker the relation is not this, for the wage he is paid may not be part of the appropriated value he himself produced. The individual worker is not treated unjustly; his wage is in fact advanced by the capitalist. The working class has a claim to unjust treatment but the concept of justice cannot be stretched to accommodate the unjust treatment of a class. There is indeed formal but not substantive justice just as there is formal but not substantive reciprocal exchange.
Having deflated somewhat the capitalist claim to justice, Marx does not then go on to base his critique of capitalism on its injustice.
He does not patiently disentangle the substance of justice from its juridical, case by case, slow frame film form to show that capitalism can unequivocally shown to be unjust. He seeks other motivations for working class demands now that he has disburdened the working class of its apparent debt to the capitalist benefactors. Free of debt, the working class is free of guilt, free therefore to pursue its life affirming aims, even if they may be formally unjust. Marx and Nietzsche indeed.
Do note that my position is weaker than and different from Wood's. I think Marx did try to undermine the bourgeois claims to justice and fairness and that his critique of justice was not from the perspective of a sociology of morals but from the point of view of a scientific understanding of capitalism. That is, he thought ethics an epistemologically inferior outlook, a trap for the scientific consciousness.
>
>When I said Allen Wood misquoted Marx by leaving out quotation marks
>(unintentionally, no doubt) I could point to the evidence. Rakesh cannot. He
>is seriously and very regrettably misusing words. What he probably means is
>that the (properly quoted) words do not apply to his theory.
I don't understand what you think I probably meant.
>But in fact they do. Whether you say the wage exchange is fair or unfair,
>that is "obsolete verbal rubbish" according to Marx, because the whole
>transaction is (bourgeois a-moral) economics, not a moral relationship.
>
>I do not wish to give socialism a basis of fair exchange.
>
>By the way, I am saying the bourgeoisie lies, not Rakesh. But he should
>avoid their ideology. It does wreak havoc.
>
>James
I can't see how I am seriously and regrettably misusing words. All one has to do is quote the passage from the Critique of the Gotha Program in which Marx uses the phrase obsolete verbal rubbish, so I shall do that. You say that Marx used that phrase to insist that wage relation be understood as an amoral relation, that to describe it as a just relationship would be to indulge in obsolote verbal rubbish.
I can't possibly see how the passage bears the interpretation you are forcing upon it:
>In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
>subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and
>therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has
>vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's
>prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
>all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of
>co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the
>narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and
>society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability,
>to each according to his needs!
>I have dealt more at length with the "undiminished" proceeds of
>labor, on the one hand, and with "equal right" and "fair
>distribution", on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to
>attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas,
>ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become
>obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the
>realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the
>Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological
>nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats
>and French socialists.