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Marx and Engels On The Distributive Justice of Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Derek P.H. Allen
Derek P.H. Allen*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

A difference of opinion exists among some philosophers who have recently inquired whether Marx thinks that capitalism is distributively unjust. What has to be determined is whether in Marx's view the wage worker suffers an injustice in not receiving most or all of the surplus value he creates. Allen Wood argues that this is not Marx's view, and George Brenkert agrees, for quite similar reasons; but Ziyad Husami and Gary Young, on the other hand, argue in reply to Wood, and on overlapping grounds, for the opposite interpretation; Wood, in turn, has defended himself against Husami.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 7: Marx and Morality , 1981 , pp. 221 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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References

1 Wood, A.W., ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs I (1971-2) 224-82,Google Scholar hereafter cited as Wood [1]; ‘Marx on Right and Justice: A Reply to Husami,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 8 (1978-9) 267-95, hereafter cited as Wood [2]. Brenkert, G.G., ‘Freedom and Private Property in Marx,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, 8 (1978-9) 122-47,Google Scholar hereafter cited as Brenkert. Husami, Z.L., 'Marx on Distributive Justice,’ in Philosophy and Public Affairs 8 (1978-9) 27–64,Google Scholar hereafter cited as Husami. Young, G., ‘Justice and Capitalist Production: Marx and Bourgeois Ideology,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1978) 421-54,Google Scholar hereafter cited as Young.

2 Capital, trans. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972) Ill, 339-40.

3 See Wood [1] 255ff. I will follow Wood in taking a mode of production to be an 'organic whole of social life in a given historical epoch’ (Wood [1], p. 251); but I do not claim that this is always what Marx and Engels understand by a mode of production.

4 These ‘ownership relations’ are among the relations of production of capitalism. I borrow the term ‘ownership relations’ from G.A. Cohen: ‘On Some Criticisms of Historical materialism,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 44 (1970) 126; cf. Karl Marx's Theory of History (Oxford: Oxford U. P. 1978) 34-5.

5 The retail transactions of capitalism are also ‘natural consequences’ of its production relations, where these include its ownership relations. For it is a consequence of these relations that products can be acquired only on the basis of exchange, since in capitalism no direct producer is in the first instance the owner of the product he produces, and the owner of a product in the first instance is not its producer.

6 And Wood himself does not think it is, at least in the first of his articles cited here, since he speaks of an exchange's being Just (for Marx), by the rules of exchange, because equal (Wood [1) 262).

7 Capital, trans. E. Aveling & S. Moore (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1970) I, 85.

8 Critique of the Gotha Programme in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels: Selected Works in One Volume (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1968) 324 (hereafter cited as CGP with page references to this edition of Selected Works). I have made a minor change in word order: Selected Works has ‘are measurable only’ after the parenthesis.

9 Capital I, 235. Translation corrected. (Cf. Marx-Engels Werke, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag 1956 ff.) 23, 249. Hereafter cited as MEW.)

10 loc. cit.; translation corrected.

11 Marx argues, however, that the length of the working day, insofar as it falls short of the natural day, is determined, and established in law, as the result of struggle between the workers and the capitalists. See Capital I, Ch. X.

12 See Marx's Theories of Surplus Value, trans. Cohen, J. (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1972) Ill, 476-79.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as TSV III.

13 Capital III, 779; cf. pp. 623, 648; TSV III, 479.

14 Rescher, N., Distributive Justive: A Constructive Critique of the Utilitarian Theory of Distribution (New York: Bobbs-Merril 1966) 56,Google Scholar 58, 62, 83.

15 ‘A Fair Day's Wages For A Fair Day's Work,’ in Articles From ‘The Labour Standard’ (1881) (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1955) 5. Translation changed: cf. MEW 19, 247. There is no reason to doubt that Marx agrees with Engels on this point. Yet according to Brenkert, Justice is (simply) a ‘moral idea’ for Marx (Brenkert, p. 132; cf. p. 143); Wood ventures a ‘suggestion’ to the same effect (Wood [2], pp. 282-3, 286).

16 Grundrisse, trans. Nicolaus, M., (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books 1973) 95.Google Scholar Cf. CGP, 325; Capital Ill, 878-9, 882-4.

17 The commodity exchanges in which capitalism distributes its wealth, in the first instance, to the worker, to the capitalist, and to the landowner, are, of course, a subset of those ‘natural’ to captalism (cf. footnote 5). But the stated distributive principle of capitalism does not have to be modified on this account (so as to require, for example, that commodity exchangers secure the claims they have in the exchanges in which the existing mode of production ‘naturally’ distributes its wealth); for any commodity exchange involves a redistribution of wealth between persons.

18 The commodity … is a commodity only in relation to other commodities’ (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971) 41; cf. 42 ff. Hereafter cited as CPE).

19 See CGP, 323-4.

20 See Capital I, 540; Wages, Price and Profit in Selected Works, ed. cit., 213. Hereafter cited as WPP with page references to Selected Works.

21 See Grundrisse, 322, 324.

22 See Grundrisse, 458; Capital I, 583.

23 Perhaps the 1872 passage does represent Marx's preferred view of how a commodity exchange should be regarded. For he says that in making his revisions of the second German edition of Capital I for the French edition of the book, he was led ‘to simplify some arguments’ and ‘to complete others.’ As a result, the French edition ‘possesses a scientific value independent of the original and should be consulted even by readers familiar with German.’ This, despite the fact that the ‘alterations, introduced from day to day, as the book was published in parts, were not made with equal care and were bound to result in a lack of harmony in style’ (Afterword to the French Edition, in Capital I, 22).

24 See Capital Ill, 190; WPP, 208.

25 See WPP, 223-4.

26 CGP, 324. Translation corrected; cf. MEW 19, 20.

27 Here is Engels on the point: ‘ … the determination of the value of commodities by labour and the free exchange of the products of labour, taking place according to this measure of value between commodity owners with equal rights, these are, as Marx has already proved, the real bases on which the whole political, Juridical and philosophical ideology of the modern bourgeoisie has been built. Once it is recognized that labour is the measure of value of a commodity, the better feelings of the good bourgeois cannot but be deeply wounded by the wickedness of a world which, while recognizing this basic law of Justice in name, still appears at every moment to set it aside without compunction’ (inasmuch as ‘in this bad world commodities are sold sometimes above, sometimes below their value’). Preface to the First German Edition of The Poverty of Philosophy, trans. International Publishers (New York: 1963) 13, 12.

28 See WPP, 213; Capital I, 539-40.

29 For a somewhat different treatment of this point, see my essay ‘Is Marxism a Philosophy?,' in The Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974) 601-2.

30 Capital, trans. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) II, 30.

31 But we sometimes find Marx himself saying that the worker sells labour (e.g., at p. 536 of Capital 1), and this requires a word of explanation. A commodity, on Marx's account, is both a ‘use value,’ or useful object, and an exchange value, that is, a product exchangeable for other products in ratios determined by the quantity of labour ‘socially necessary’ for their production (cf. Capital I, 39). Living labour is not a commodity because it has no exchange value, since labour is valueless. But it is a use value; indeed it is the use value of labour power. And labour power is also an exchange value, so it is a commodity. The object sold in the wage transaction can be called labour, but then it is identified under a description relative to which it is simply a use value. If it is called labour power, however, it is identified under a description relative to which it is an exchange value. As Marx puts it: ‘What the capitalist acquires through exchange is labour capacity: this is the exchange value he pays for. Living labour is the use value which this exchange value has for him’ (Grundrisse, pp. 561-2). The point of substance at issue between Marx and a proponent of the view that labour is sold in the wage transaction concerns the description under which the object sold in the transaction is an exchange value.

32 Young does not appear to see that for Marx the Justice, relative to capitalism, of the capitalist's appropriation of surplus value is based on his having (ex hypothesi) exchanged equivalents for his means of production and labour power. Rather Young thinks that Marx has one standard for the Justice of exchanges - ‘the standard of equivalency’ - and another for the Justice of ‘the extraction of surplus value’ - ‘the modified labour theory of property’ (Young, pp. 431’ 434, 453).

33 Young does not make the point that the capitalist has a right to his surplus value, relative to capitalism. (Cf. footnote 32.)

34 Quoted in Wood [2]276; referred to in Husami 61. MEW 19, 359. Cf. Notes on Adolph Wagner's Textbook of Political Economy, in Karl Marx: Texts on Method, ed. & trans. T. Carver, (New York: Harper & Row 1975) 186.