marx ii

His Conception of Right and Justice

§1. A Paradox in Marx’s Views of Justice

1. Let me begin with some discussion about Marx’s ideas about exploitation: Marx’s definition of exploitation in his labor theory of value is a purely descriptive definition: it is given by the ratio of surplus (or unpaid) labor over necessary labor, or s/v. But this cannot be all there is to the concept of exploitation. The reason is that a just socialist society, like any other society, needs a social surplus, let’s assume, to provide for public goods such as public health, education and welfare, environmental protection, and much else. This means that people must work for more time than it takes to produce the goods they receive as wages. This is true in any society one cares to live in. Thus, while the ratio s/v is defined as the rate of exploitation, and while this is a purely descriptive definition, there must be more to exploitation than this. For certainly, exploitation is a moral concept, and implicitly appeals to principles of justice of some kind. Otherwise, it would not have the interest for us that it does.

For Marx it is the institutional background within which the ratio s/v occurs that makes this ratio a measure of exploitation. Whether s/v is exploitation depends on the nature of the basic structure that gives rise to it, and on who has the institutional control of s. Marx must have a way of judging that structure as just or unjust. In the next lecture, I remark that he views exploitation as arising once the basic structure rests on a basic inequality in alienable productive assets owned by the two main classes of capitalist society. In the capitalist case, surplus labor is in no way controlled by workers collectively, say through their democratic votes, nor is it in general to their good; whereas in socialist society the total of non-consumption goods (which replaces s in the socialist case) is both. We must look at the basic structure of society to see how what is produced by s is used. If it is

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used for such things as the average worker’s public health, education, and welfare, it is no longer treated as surplus labor.1

The upshot is that the concept of exploitation presupposes a conception of right and justice in the light of which basic structures are judged. Or if not a conception of right and justice, certainly some kind of normative view is required. This raises the question: What kind of normative view did Marx hold? There has been considerable controversy about this among students of Marx, whether they are Marxists or not. For example, did he condemn capitalism as unjust? There are those who think he did, and those who think he did not.

Of course, both sides take for granted that he condemned capitalism. This is obvious and leaps off the pages of Capital. The question concerns the particular values in terms of which he did so: whether those values include a conception of right and justice, or are expressed in terms of other values, for example, those of freedom, self-realization, and humanity.

2. The answer I suggest (and here I follow Norman Geras and G. A. Cohen) is that Marx did condemn capitalism as unjust. On the other hand, he did not see himself as doing so.2 What explains this seeming paradox is that Marx’s explicit comments about justice interpret the concept in a narrow way, and this in two respects:

(a)He thinks of justice as the prevailing legal and judicial norms internal to the social and economic order; and when appropriate, those norms are adequate to that order’s fulfilling its historical role.

(b)Marx also thinks of justice as relating to exchanges in the market and beyond that to the distribution of income and of consumption goods that results. In this aspect justice is commutative and distributive justice, both narrowly construed.

But once we think of a conception of political justice in a broad fashion as applying to the basic structure of society and thus to the institutions of background justice, then Marx might have had, at least implicitly, a conception of political justice in the broad sense. If this proves to be the case, it may remove the paradox. Whether he does have such a political conception turns, as I have said, on the specific values he appeals to in condemning capitalism.

1.See Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 440, from Capital, Vol. 3.

2.See Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” in Literature of Revolution: Essays on Marxism (London: Verso, 1986), p. 36.

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His Conception of Right and Justice

3. I shall proceed as follows: I first sketch some reasons for saying Marx does not condemn capitalism as unjust. And then I sketch some reasons for saying he does, at least implicitly. By this I mean that what he says implies that capitalism is unjust although he does not say so in so many words.

Later I will sketch his conception of a full communist society—the ideal in light of which he judges capitalism and all preceding historical forms of society—to see whether that ideal contains elements that make it include a conception of political justice and in what sense, if any, it is a society beyond justice.

It must be admitted, however, that this question may not be conclusively decidable. Marx did not think carefully or systematically about it. While he was a scholar by nature and temperament, given his aims, he didn’t believe it was important to do so. Other things he thought more urgent. In this he may have been quite mistaken, since his seemingly dismissive attitude to ideas of right and justice may have had serious long-run consequences for socialism. Who knows? But leaving that aside, the result is that we have to piece together what he says, and ask ourselves what overall view best accounts for and connects the more significant and clearly formulated aspects of his thought.

§2. Justice as a Juridical Conception

1. I begin with the view suggested by Allen Wood and others.3 The main thoughts seem to be these, and then I will give a few details.

(a)Marx holds in Capital that the wage relation, as an exchange of equivalent values (labor power for wages) involves no injustice to the worker.

(b)In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx attacks socialist ideas of fair or just distribution as seriously in error and moving the wrong way.

(c)Marx regards norms of right and justice as internal to—that is, as essential elements of—specific modes of production; and in this sense, they are relative to the particular historical period in which they are in force.

(d)Marx thinks of morality in general as ideological and thus as belonging to the superstructure of society; morality, and with it justice, changes

3. Allen Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 1981).

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when that superstructure adjusts to the historical sequence of specific modes of production.

(e) To insist that Marx has a concern for justice is mistakenly to cast his views in a narrow, reformist direction of distributive concerns, such as wage levels and differences of income; whereas his aims were clearly more fundamental and more revolutionary, concerned as they were with the transformation of the private property and wage system itself.

(f ) Also, to say that Marx was concerned with justice is to detract from his main effort, which was to uncover the real, active historical forces that were, he thought, leading to the overthrow and collapse of capitalism. To say this would substitute instead moral arguments of various kinds, which Marx viewed as idealistic, and of which he was highly suspicious.

(g)Besides, he thought that justice, since it was a juridical value, could not be put into effect in a full communist society, which Marx is alleged to have conceived as without juridical institutions of law and the state.

(h)Marx conceived of full communist society as one beyond the circumstances of scarcity and conflict. It is these circumstances that render the norms of justice necessary, all of which looks forward to the higher distributive standard: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”4

(i)Marx did, of course, condemn capitalism, but he did so in the name of other values, such as freedom and self-realization.

2. Now for a few details about this first view. Wood, for example, thinks that Marx does not criticize capitalism as unjust, and that he even appears to say that it is just.5 His explanation for this is the following:

Marx thinks of a conception of justice as a political and juridical conception that goes with the institutional separation between the state and society. This institutional separation presupposes the need for the state, and hence the existence of a dominating class and a dominated class. When such a state exists, exploitation (in Marx’s sense) also exists. Political and legal institutions belong to what Marx sometimes calls the superstructure: these institutions have a regulatory role and are adjusted to the requirements of the mode and relations of production. Each social form, each kind of political organization and its associated mode of production, has a

4.See Critique of the Gotha Program, I, Tucker, p. 531.

5.Wood, Karl Marx.

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distinctive conception of justice that is adequate for it as a social system. When these institutions are properly adjusted to the underlying mode of production, they serve its operative requirements in an effective way.

So, for Marx, the properly adjusted institutions of the superstructure include a conception of justice which serves the historical role of the underlying economic mode of production. Capitalism, like any other historical mode of production, has a properly adjusted superstructure and a conception of justice adequate to it. This conception is the one that best serves capitalism’s historical role of building up the means of production at a rapid rate compared to earlier social forms. But then: “The modern laborer

. . . instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of its own class. He becomes a pauper” (Communist Manifesto, Tucker, p. 483).

Thus, capitalism’s fulfillment of its role is what makes possible the full communist society of the not too distant future. Indeed, in the Communist Manifesto, the capitalist as the personification of capital is the great hero of history who transforms the world and prepares the way for the “victory of the proletariat” and the society Marx envisions.6

3. Thus, on this view, capitalism, especially in its high period, the period when it is effectively carrying out its historical role of building up the means of production, is not unjust. There is a conception of justice appropriate to it, and by this conception, it is just so long as its norms are respected. Other conceptions of justice are simply irrelevant; they may apply to other economic modes of production that have existed in previous times, or that will exist the future, but they do not apply in the particular historical conditions of capitalism.

There is no conception of justice, then, that is always applicable or that applies to all social forms. In this sense there are for Marx no universally valid principles of justice. Whether a conception of justice applies to a particular political and social system is settled by whether it is adequate to the existing mode of production in view of its historical role.

One passage in Capital, Vol. III, suggests this kind of view. Marx writes:

To speak here of natural justice, as Gilbart does, . . . is nonsense. The justice of the transactions between agents of production rests on the fact that these [transactions] arise as natural consequences out of the

6. See “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Section I, Tucker, pp. 473–483.

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production relationships. The juristic forms in which these economic transactions appear as willful [voluntary] acts of the parties concerned, as expressions of their common will and as contracts that may be enforced by law against some individual party, cannot, being mere forms, determine this content. They [these juristic forms] merely express it. This content is just whenever it corresponds, is appropriate, to the mode of production. It is unjust whenever it contradicts that mode. Slavery, on the basis of the capitalist production, is unjust; likewise fraud in the quality of commodities. (Capital, Vol. III, International Publishers edition, pp. 339–340. Chapter 21, ¶5; italics added)

This passage occurs when Marx is discussing interest-bearing capital. In a footnote to it he quotes Gilbart, The History and Principles of Banking (London, 1834), as saying: “That a man who borrows money with a view of making a profit by it, should give some portion of his profit to the lender, is a self-evident principle of natural justice.” Marx replies that the payment of interest is not a matter of a self-evident principle of natural justice. The payment of interest arises as the natural consequence of the supply and demand for funds on the money market, as this market exists within the framework of capitalism. A loan is a valid contract, and the legal system under capitalism will enforce it.

4. This passage is not by itself an account of a conception of justice under capitalism, but it does suggest several points. First, there is the distinction Marx makes between juridical forms—for example, the juridical form of a (valid) contract (as, say, an agreement to make a loan, or a purchase)— and the content of these forms. The same juridical forms may be found in many different legal systems and may apply to economic transactions under widely different modes of production. I assume that the content of the juridical form of contract, say, refers to the specific kinds of contracts that can be legally made and that will be enforced. Thus, under capitalism, a contract into slavery, or for the buying and selling of slaves, is void, and therefore unjust under the capitalist conception of justice. I assume also that the content of the juridical form of contract covers the various conditions under which valid agreements are made. Thus, under capitalism, fraud and deception in reaching agreement is ruled out as unjust, as is everything else plainly incompatible with a regime of free contract.

Second, it seems that whether slavery or fraud, etc., is unjust under

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some mode of production is settled by whether or not permitting slavery and fraudulent practices specifies a content for the law of contracts which is most adequate to the existing mode of production, and is well adapted to the operation of this mode in fulfilling its historical role. Recall that this role is the rapid accumulation of (real) capital and the development of the technology to use it in innovative ways.

Hence, the juridical form of the law of contract under capitalism is most adequate when its content is adjusted so as to enable this mode of production to accumulate capital in the most effective way. Slavery is incompatible with this, and so with the requirements of capitalism as a mode of production. As a system of personal dependence, it is unjust under a capitalist conception of justice. One essential feature of capitalism is a system of free competitive markets, including a free market for the hire of free labor-power.

In this connection, it is said to be Marx’s view that the competitive wage relation, as an essential feature of capitalism, is not unjust, provided that the workers are paid the full value of their labor-power, that is, the equivalent of the socially necessary labor time that it takes to produce and to reproduce the workers’ labor-power. In discussing the labor contract in Capital, Marx says:

What really influenced him [the capitalist] was the specific use-value which this commodity [labor-power] possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself [Marx’s italics]. This is the special service that the capitalist expects from labor-power, and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the “eternal laws” of the exchange of commodities. The seller of labor-power, like the seller of any other commodity, realizes its exchange value, and parts with its use-value. . . . The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labor-power; his, therefore, is the use of it for a day; a day’s labor belongs to him. The circumstance, that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labor-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 pays for that use, this circumstance is, without doubt, a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injury to the seller. (Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 7, §2, ¶21; or see Tucker, 357–358)

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