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The Possibility of a Marxian Theory of Justice*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jeffrey H. Reiman
Jeffrey H. Reiman*
Affiliation:
The American University
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Extract

I have argued elsewhere1 that Rawl's method (i.e., the original position and so forth, as distinct from the principles that Rawls derives by using the method) provides us with the proper way to determine whether the structure of any society is exploitative. The argument trimmed to the bare bones is this. Since exploitation is the suppression of some peoples’ interests for the benefit of others, an argument that a set of social relations would be unanimously agreed to by rational individuals concerned to secure maximum opportunity to control their lives and possessed of correct knowledge of the nature of social reality and free of interests or attitudes deriving from the society they occupy or the position they occupy in it, is an argument that those social relations are not exploitative. If we take ideology to be false beliefs or interests or attitudes arising from society which lead people to think that their society is rational for all to accept when it would not be rational in the absence of such beliefs or interests or attitudes, then we can see that Rawls has constructed a method for arguing around ideology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 7: Marx and Morality , 1981 , pp. 307 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Philosophical Meetings, Boston, December 28, 1980.

References

1 ‘A Marxian Reading of Rawls’, paper presented at the American Philosophical Association meetings, New York City, December 29, 1979. In that paper, after arguing that Rawls’ method is an appropriate way to determine whether the structure of any society is exploitative, I try to show that in his own use of the method to derive principles of Justice, Rawls falls victim to ideology: in particular, he accepts as a feature of all societies, the division between the political and the economic realms which is uniquely characteristic of capitalist societies and reproduces this division in the principles of Justice. One effect of this is to channel the robust interest in autonomy of the parties in the original position into the narrow track of political liberties, e.g., the right to vote, hold office, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and the like.

2 Rawls writes that ‘justice as fairness, like other contract views, consists of two parts: (1) an interpretation of the initial situation and of the problem of choice posed there, and (2) a set of principles which, it is argued, would be agreed to. One may accept the first part of the theory (or some variant thereof), but not the other, and conversely.’ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. P. 1971) 15. A Theory of Justice will be cited hereafter as T﹜.

3 Michael Teitelman, ‘On the Theory of The Practice of The Theory of Justice,' Journal of Chinese Philosophy 5 (1978) 235

4 Allan Wood, ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1971-2) 244-282; and ‘Marx on Right and Justice: A Reply to Husami,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 8 (1978-9) 267-95

5 Karl Marx, Capital, volume I (New York: International Publishers 1967) 715

6 An easy way to see this is the following: In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974), Robert Nozick has formulated capitalism's own standard of Justice in the most unabashed terms. Nozick holds that this amounts to three principles: the principle of Justice in acquisition, the principle of Justice in transfer, and the principle of rectification of violations of the first two principles. Such violations include theft by the use of force or fraud (pp. 150-153). Thus if Marx's description of the original (i.e., the so-called primitive) accumulation of capital is accepted it amounts to a violation of the principle of Justice in acquisition, and actual capitalism (as opposed to an ideal form that might arise some other way) is unjust by capitalism's own standard.

7 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press 1979). Habermas writes that ‘the mechanism of legitimating domination can be grasped in bourgeois ideologies because there, for the first time, universalistic value systems incompatible with class structures were made unreservedly explicit and were argumentatively grounded.' (p. 124)

8 See, for example, Iris Marion Young, ‘Toward a Critical Theory of Justice,' unpublished paper, p. 5.

9 Karl Marx, A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy ﹛New York: International Publishers 1970) 201-202

10 Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls ﹛Princeton: Princeton U. P. 1977) 207

11 Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: Norton 1970) 42-53

12 Incidentally, I think that Nozick is quite right to point to considerations of this sort as a starting point for a theory of Justice. See Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 42-5. What he does from that starting point is, I think, quite incorrect. See my ‘The Fallacy of Libertarian Capitalism,’ Ethics, 92 (1981-2).

13 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, in Robert Tucker ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, first edition (New York: Norton 1972) 386-388

14 Phillip H. Scribner, The Critique of Subjectivism (unpublished manuscript) part IV, chapter Ill

15 Actually, this absence of physical theory of language profoundly weakens Habermas’ position in at least two ways. First, he is driven away from science to hermeneutics for an understanding of language. This leaves him no coherent way of understanding the relation between a Marxian science of modes of production and a hermeneutic of normative structures, because in principle this relation cannot be grasped either by science or hermeneutics. Given his tradition, Habermas can turn such incoherence to his own account by labelling it a 'dialectic,’ but incoherence it remains nonetheless. Secondly, without a physical theory of language, Habermas can have no theory of the function of language beyond simply that of communicating. As a result, though he sees that language entails the positing of uncoerced concensus as the implied basis of communication, and though he sees that this is somehow linked to the moral point of view, he is unable to provide the link. The reason is that morality is not simply a matter of communication, per se, but of communication between physical creatures about how to satisfy their desires and avoid harm and frustration, etc. It is this that gives language its moral content. But to see this, Habermas would have to re-situate language within the world of natural science and thus break down the barrier between hermeneutics and science that is the hallmark of his view. Without this, the most Habermas can do is note that language looks like the moral point of view, but he cannot say what is moral about it.

16 ‘Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society … exactly what he gives to it.. .. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds), and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of labour. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receives back in another.' Marx, Gotha, 386-7

17 ‘But one man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It … tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges.’ Marx, Gotha, 387

18 Wood, ‘Marx on Right and Justice,’ 292; emphasis mine