> "… in my presentation, capital profit is not 'merely a deduction or
> "robbery" on the labourer'. On the contrary, I present the capitalist as the
> necessary functionary of capitalist production and show very extensively
> that he does not only 'deduct' or 'rob', but forces the production of
> surplus value, therefore the deducting only helps to produce; furthermore, I
> show in detail that even if in the exchange of commodities only equivalents
> were exchanged, the capitalist - as soon as he pays the labourer the real
> value of his labour-power - would secure with full rights, i.e. the rights
> corresponding to that mode of production, surplus value."
> (Marx, "Notes on Adolph Wagner," quoted in Gáspár Miklós Tamás: "Telling the
> truth about class")
This is treating capitalist motives (the "unlimited mania for wealth," the "ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth") as "passions," as motives that, though inconsistent with rational motives, supply ""the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large."
This treatment is implicit in the claim that
"he [the capitialist] does not only 'deduct' or 'rob', but forces the production of surplus value, therefore the deducting only helps to produce".
The positive aspect of what is ethically negative is found in the role played by these "passions" in forcing the production of surplus value. "This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces." It's also one of the reasons moralistic as opposed to ethical judgment is invalid.
"The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves—and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]—and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. Accordingly, capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm
Ted