I have a couple of old papers on this:
J. Schwartz, What's Wrong With Exploitation, Nous 1995 J. Schwartz, In Defense of Exploitation, Economics and Philosophy, 1995
I can have them PDFed and sent to you or anyone who is is interested.
There are many other writers who take sides on the "debate on Marx and justice," many of whom wrote as I hope I do, very clearly. Here are three or four:
1. Norman Georas, The Debate on Marx and Justice. In Literature and Revolution (defending the theft interpretation)
2. Alan Wood, Marx and Equality, in Analytical Marxism, J. Roamer ed. Camber U P.; also his essay from Phil & Pu bl Affairs 1973, Collected in Marx, Justice, History, ed. Cohen, Nagel & Scanlon, Princeton U P. (attacking the theft interpretation).
3. Nancy Holmstrom, Exploitation, in Exploitation, ed, K. Nielsen and R. Ware, Humanities. (Anti-theft). Lots of other good essays on both sides in this volume.
I don't know whether you will find these full of mystification and of no use to a self-organizing worker. I hope not, even though it is all written by scholars.
Marx's rejection of Proudhon was not personal or political pique, he actually disagreed with P's ideas. He would not have greed with those ideas even if P and he had been able to cooperate. We know this because the whole of his life work was devoted to developing an alternative to the sort of ideas P and many other "popular" radicals put forward, alleging that labor creates all wealth, and is therefore entitled to own the property it creates.
--- Dmytri Kleiner <dk at telekommunisten.net> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > Marx rejects the idea (advanced by Proudhon) that
> > property is theft because he rejects the idea of
> > rights and justice as "bourgeois right."
>
> Only after Proudhon rejected Marx and Engels when
> they tried to recruit
> him into their project because of his aversion to
> their vangardism.
>
> If you can logically refute the proposition that
> Capitalism can not
> exist without theft, please do, quoting Marx or
> whomever you like.
>
> I have never seen this successfully refuted without
> resorting to
> incomprehensible allusions and mystification. Maybe
> useful or
> interesting within the context of academic
> discourse, but not much use
> to self-organizing workers.
>
> I am a simple worker, not a scholar, for me to
> accept an argument it has
> to be made with clear logic, preferably in the
> language of classical
> economics, so that I can directly apply this
> knowledge in the
> organization of mutual capitalization, which I am
> committed to as the
> only feasible revolutionary tactic.
>
> To me that Property is Theft has nothing to do with
> rights, justice or
> anything else one might write a poem about. It has
> to do with the simple
> economics of production. See my earlier comments
> about the mechanics of
> price and the forces that drive it either toward
> cost or toward utility.
>
> [...]
>
> > Moreover, the object of the analysis of capital in
> > Capital is to show how exploitation can occur in
> the
> > normal operations of contracting for the sale and
> > purchase of labor power.
>
> I have never seen a logical explanation of how an
> exploitive class can
> develop in the context of free production. This to
> me seems like an
> illogical proposition which is an object of faith
> for anti-market
> tendencies within Socialism. In my opinion, it is
> bunk.
>
> In my limited knowledge, this seems more a project
> of Engels (i.e.
> anti-duehring) than of Marx, who as you note below
> illustrates his
> understanding that the proletariat did not spring
> out of any market
> conditions, but rather out of the "blood and fire"
> of terror, as
> mentioned, the enclosure laws, anti-combination
> laws, poor laws, and
> other anti-socialist laws backed in the force of the
> State.
>
> > Force of the brute kind is
> > relegated to the discussion of "primitive
> > accumulation" and is analytically distinct from
> the
> > expropriation that occurs in ordinary wage labor.
> It
> > may be necessary for the creation of capitalist
> > productive relations, but it is not part of them.
>
> As I have noted, this is often claimed, though I
> have never see it
> logically defended in a compelling way.
>
> How can any private interest capture surplus value
> in the context of
> free production?
>
> > That is not to say that wage labor is free in the
> > sense of there being no coercion or domination --
> > there is market discipline and managerial
> bossiness.
> > But it quite different from unfree forms of labor
> > where the price of disobedience is beating or
> branding
> > and sending the digs to hunt you down. You want to
> > quit? Be our guest.
>
> Once again, it is not the terror directly applied to
> making workers work
> harder that is the point, as I have said, this is
> neither unique to nor
> essential to Capitalism. It is the terror in
> preventing worker's from
> having independent access to the means of production
> that is the basis
> of the barbarism in Capitalism.
>
>
> --
> Dmytri Kleiner, robotnik
> Telekommunisten, Berlin.
>
> dk at telekommunisten.net
> http://www.telekommunisten.net
> freenode/#telnik
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