Andie Nachgeboren:
I think a lot of self-styled Marxists, and I don't count myself among them (that is, I don't claim to be a Marxist, and I don't accept crucial details of Marx's analysis -- but I think he was right about the problem he posed), are really Proudhonists who maintain doctrines that Marx impatiently rejected and considered himself to have refuted, that property is theft, that labor produces all wealth, that justice or right requires that property belong to its producers, that the wealth of the wealthy derives most centrally from the exercise of brute force. Each of the points is not merely dismissed but excoriated by Marx repeatedly and at great length in many different writings, and his masterwork, Capital, is devoted to an alternative account of how capital really operates.
******************** Not theft: extortion. Marx: "They are like the annually consumable fruits of a perennial tree, or rather three trees; they form the annual incomes of three classes, capitalist, landowner and labourer, revenues distributed by the functioning capitalist in his capacity as direct *extorter* of surplus-labour and employer of labour in general."
Who produces wealth and what should be done to achieve freedom/free-time aka "justice" for the merely moralist left.
Marx: "The actual *wealth* of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of *surplus-labour*, but upon its *productivity* and the more or less copious conditions of production under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. *Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.*
The exercise of brute force:
Marx:
We saw also that capital — and the capitalist is merely capital personified and functions in the process of production solely as the agent of capital — in its corresponding social process of production, pumps a definite quantity of surplus-labour out of the direct producers, or labourers; capital obtains this surplus-labour without an equivalent, and in essence it always remains *forced* labour — no matter how much it may seem to result from free contractual agreement. This surplus-labour appears as surplus-value, and this surplus-value exists as a surplus-product. Surplus-labour in general, as labour performed over and above the given requirements, must always remain. In the capitalist as well as in the slave system, etc., it merely assumes an antagonistic form and is supplemented by complete idleness of a stratum of society.
all from CAPITAL VOLUME III, chapter on the "Trinity Forumula". http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm
OBU, Mike B)
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