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That is, it is not an injury, or an injustice under the conception of justice adequate to capitalism. As Marx says some lines below: “Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent.” And so the conception of justice appropriate to capitalism is satisfied. Paying workers less than the value of their la- bor-power would be unjust; and this is a far more relevant example of injustice than slavery. It may appear, then, that Marx thinks that capitalism with its free competitive market is perfectly just! Or at least not unjust.

5. Of course, this idea of the capitalist conception of justice as adequate to the capitalist mode of production does not belong to the capitalist conception of justice itself. On this interpretation, it belongs to Marx’s idea of the historical role of conceptions of justice as part of the ideological consciousness of capitalist society. The capitalist conception of justice, as presented in its own terms, speaks of the freedom and equality and the equal rights of man. It is on these principles that the regime of free contract and the system of personal independence rests.

I shall come back later to the idea of ideological consciousness, only commenting here that it is always a form of false consciousness, and one of two kinds: either an illusion or a delusion. But this is getting ahead.

§3. That Marx Condemns Capitalism as Unjust

1. Contrary to the view we have just discussed, other writers (among them Norman Geras and G. A. Cohen)7 hold that Marx does think that capitalism is unjust, and that he says things that strictly imply that it is. Therefore, they argue, he has and uses a conception of right and justice whether he knows that or not.

Among some main points of this second view are these:

(a) Marx’s insistence that the wage relation is an exchange relation, where equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, was made from a partial, provisional point of view, seeing that relation as part of the system of circulation in capitalist society. It was supplemented by an account of the mode of production as a whole that showed it to be not an exchange relation at all, but clearly exploitive: it was simply the capitalist expropriation of unpaid labor.

7. See Cohen’s review of Allen Wood’s Karl Marx in Mind, July 1983.

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(b)Although Marx did engage in polemics against what he saw as moralistic and ineffective criticism, he presented exploitation in his theory of capitalism as wrongful and unjust, often calling it “robbery” and “theft.” These expressions imply that what was being done is wrong and unjust.

(c)By his discussion in the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx ranked the principle of distribution according to need above the principle of distribution according to work of socialism (the first stage of communist society), as well as above the norms of capitalism. In doing this Marx, in effect, assumed an objective, non-historical standard of justice, according to which modes of production and the paired societies may be judged by their approximation to it.

(d)Marx’s apparent statements of moral relativism are actually statements of the fact that certain material conditions are, in fact, necessary if certain principles of justice and fairness, and other important values, are to be realized. Just and fair social institutions presuppose certain background material circumstances and to ignore this fact is to show a lack of realism and understanding.

(e)A concern with distributive questions is not in the pejorative sense reformist, once we have a properly and broadly conceived conception of justice which covers the distribution of basic rights of all kinds, and so includes the rights of property and other fundamental matters. This certainly allows Marx a revolutionary doctrine and in no way inhibits it.

(f ) Also, while Marx did not think that moral criticism founded on justice and other conceptions was sufficient, all the same it had a place in his thought and went along with his analysis of the historical forces for change.

(g)Classifying conceptions of right and justice as juridical is, in general, much too restricted. They can be conceived independently of state institutions of coercion and their systems of law; and indeed, this is done whenever they are used in judging the basic structure of society and its fundamental arrangements.

(h)In fact, the principle, “From each according to their ability, and to each according to their needs,” is of this kind. Actually, it aims at an equal right of self-realization for all, even though Marx imagines it as occurring with the disappearance of the state and its coercive institutions of law.

(i)Finally, the alleged distinction between kinds of values and princi- ples—values and principles of right and justice vs. values and principles of freedom and self-realization—is shown to be completely arbitrary by Marx’s

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principle for a full communist society. This principle does grant a basic equal right of self-realization, if you prefer that language. And surely we can speak of the just distribution of basic freedoms as we can speak of the distribution of anything else. Perhaps Marx supposes other equal basic rights as well, as we shall see.

2. So much then for the more general points briefly stated. Now as before, I give a few details. Contrary to the first view, these writers hold that when we examine, say, how Marx sees the exchange relation between capitalists and workers as it really is beneath the surface appearances of capitalist society, then it is clear that he thinks it is no exchange at all, but a mere pretense—forced labor.8

The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labor-power is itself but a portion of the product of others’ labor appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer [the laborer], but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting between capitalist and laborer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form. . . .

The ever repeated purchase and sale of labor-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this—the capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion of the previously materialized labor of others, and exchanges it for a greater quantity of living labor.9

Marx goes on to say that this process continues in accordance with the laws of property and exchange in capitalist society and is not a violation but an application of those laws. Under these laws it turns out to be the right of the capitalist to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its product. He says (p. 584, at the end of the same paragraph): “The separation of property from labor has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity.” He comments in a footnote to this that the original principle that the laborer could appropriate the product of his

8.In Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 24: “The Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital” (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 583f.

9.Ibid., p. 583.

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own labor has undergone “dialectical reversal.” This has happened beneath the surface appearances of capitalist institutions.

3.This does not sound like a man describing a system of basic institutions that he can approve of and accept as just. So the question arises whether Marx says things that would normally be taken to imply that he thinks the capitalist system unjust. Those who take the view we are now considering maintain that he does, namely, when he speaks of the capitalist appropriation of surplus value in terms of robbery and theft and the like. To say this, they maintain, implies that the capitalist has no right to appropriate the surplus value, and his doing so is therefore wrongful or unjust. We might say instead that it is not the capitalist who is unjust, but the system itself.

Thus, referring in one place to the surplus product as “the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class,” Marx goes on: “Even if the latter uses a portion of the tribute to purchase the additional labor-power at its full price, so that the equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, the whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has stolen from them.”10

This not an isolated passage. There are many others, as when Marx speaks of the annual surplus product as “embezzled from English workers without any equivalent being given in return.” He says that “all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but robbing the soil.” The prospective abolition of capitalist property he describes as “the expropriation of a few usurpers.”11 And so on in numerous other passages.

Elsewhere Marx says that the worker may appear to enter the labor contract voluntarily; the sphere of circulation appears as “a very Eden of the innate rights of man . . . There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Capital, Vol. I, International Publishers ed., p. 176; Tucker, p. 343). But the reality again is different: the free worker makes a voluntary agreement, that is, he “is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for work” (Tucker, p. 376). Again: “capital

10.Geras, Literature of Revolution, p. 17, quoting from Capital, Vol. I (Penguin edition),

p. 728. There are many other such passages in Capital, Vol. I. Thus: I: 638, 728, 743, 761, 874, 875, 885, 889, 895, 930. Vol. II: 31. Grundrisse, 705.

11. Geras, Literature of Revolution, p. 17.

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