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Doing Marx Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Gary Young
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Extract

The circumstance that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour power costs only half a day's labor, while on the other hand the very same labor power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what he [the capitalist] pays for that use, this circumstance is without a doubt a piece of good luck for the buyer but by no means an injustice [Unrecht] to the seller [the worker].

[T]he surplus product [is] the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class. Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labor power even at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 7: Marx and Morality , 1981 , pp. 251 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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References

1 Marx, Karl, Capital (New York: 1967) I, 194.Google Scholar

2 Ibid. 582.

3 Derek P.H. Allen, ‘Marx and Engels on the Distributive Justice of Capitalism,’ this volume, 221·50, Wood, Allen W., ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (1971-2) 244-82Google Scholar (cited as Wood [1]); ‘Marx on Right and Justice: A Reply to Husami,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 8 (1978-9) 267-95 (cited as Wood [2]).

4 Husami, Ziyad I., ‘Marx on Distributive Justice,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 8 (1978-9) 27–64.Google Scholar

5 Young, Gary, ‘Justice and Capitalist Production: Marx and Bourgeois Ideology,' Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1978) 421-55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Capital I, 194.

7 See my ‘The Fundamental Contradiction of Capitalist Production,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 5 (1975-6) 196-234, especially 217-26.

8 Marx, Karl, ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production,’ in Capital I (New York: 1977) 1002.Google Scholar

9 Capital I, 176.

10 Ibid. 301-2.

11 Ibid. 585.

12 lbid.196.

13 Marx, Karl, Capital (New York: 1967) Ill, 339-40;Google Scholar ‘Critique of The Gotha Program,' Karl Marx: Political Writings, ed. Fernbach, David (New York: 1974) Ill, 344.Google Scholar

14 Marx, Karl, Grundrisse (New York: 1974) 704-5.Google Scholar Marx says: to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose “powerful effectiveness” is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production … The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, Just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head.

15 Allen, Appendix (3), 248.

16 Capital I, 238-9. Marx says: If the Reglement organique of the Danubian provinces was a positive expression of the greed for surplus-labour which every paragraph legalized, the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist and landlord. Apart from the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France.

17 Allen, Appendix (1), 248.

18 Capital I, 506.

19 Allen, Appendix (2), 248.

20 Capital I, 596; Theories of Surplus Value (Moscow: 1968) II, 29. Allen's comment is at Allen, Appendix (4) and (5).

21 Capital I, 611.

22 Allen, Appendix (7), 249.

23 Capital I, 582.

24 Allen, Appendix (6), 248.

25 Ibid.

26 Wood [2), 278-9.

27 ‘Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner's “Lehrbuch der politischen ökonomie”,' Theoretical Practice, 5 (1972) 43-4.

28 Wood [2], 276-7.

29 Allen, 247

30 Capital I, 582.

31 Ibid. 582-8.

32 Ibid. 715.

33 Ibid. 724.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid. 732. See also pp. 714, 725, 728.

36 Wood [1], 254-60; Allen, 222

37 Allen, 234-7

38 Capital I, 586.

39 Allen, 235-6

40 ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production,’ 1002.

41 Capital I, 567-8. See also the references in note 55 of ‘justice and Capital Production.'

42 Allen, 234

43 Wood [2], 282.

44 ‘Justice and Capitalist Production,’ 446-50.

45 ‘Communist Manifesto,’ in Karl Marx: Political Writings, ed. Fernbach, David (New York: 1973) I, 81-2.Google Scholar

46 Grundrisse, 487-8.

47 ‘Communist Manifesto,’ 85.

48 How is this possible?