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His Ideal: A Society of Freely Associated Producers

§1. Are Marx’s Ideas about Justice Consistent?

1. In the last lecture I discussed three things:

(a)Passages in which Marx may appear to say that capitalism is just, or at least not unjust.

(b)Passages in which Marx says things that imply that capitalism is unjust, e.g. by characterizing the appropriation of surplus value with such expressions as “forced labor,” “embezzlement, “concealed theft.”

(c)What Marx would have said (if he had known about it) about the marginal productivity theory of distribution as justifying the resulting distribution under capitalism; after which I suggested that Marx thought that:

(i)the total of human labor of society is the only relevant factor of production from a social point of view—from our point of view: the point of view of all the members of society as freely associated producers. And:

(ii)all members of society—all freely associated producers—equally have a claim to have access to and use society’s means of produc-

tion and natural resources.

2. While the various things Marx says about justice may appear contradictory, I think they can be made consistent as follows:

(a) In regard to the passages in which Marx may appear to say that capitalism is just (by the conception of justice adequate to it in its historical period), we say that he is describing the ideological consciousness of capitalist societies and the juridical conception of justice expressed by the legal system of a capitalist social order. When Marx says that a certain juridical conception of justice is adequate to capitalism and is appropriately adapted to its operating requirements, he does not mean to endorse this conception of justice. He is commenting on the juridical conception of justice ade-

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quate to capitalism: on how this conception of justice works and its social role; and on the way it shapes ideas about justice held by capitalists and workers alike.

(b)If this interpretation of Marx’s view of the juridical conception of justice is correct, then his ideas of justice are consistent. We simply say that in describing capitalist appropriation of surplus labor by such terms as “forced labor,” “embezzlement,” and “concealed theft,” he is expressing his own convictions. He implies that capitalist appropriation is unjust, but he doesn’t expressly say so in so many words, and may not be aware of the full implications of what he says.

(c)In regard to Marx’s view that human labor is the only relevant factor of production from a social point of view, and the further claim that all equally have a claim to access and use of society’s means of production and natural resources, let’s say the following:

(i)This is the conception of justice that underlies Marx’s describing capitalist appropriation as robbery, embezzlement, and the rest, since private property in the means of production violates that equal claim. Moreover,

(ii)This conception of justice is not relative to historical conditions in the way that the different juridical conceptions of justice were adequate to slavery in the ancient world, or to the feudalism of the medieval world, or are adequate to capitalism in the modern world. These conceptions are each relative to historical conditions and are adequate only in their particular historical period. In the same terms Marx condemns all these modes of production and their associated juridical conceptions of justice. The idea that human labor is the only relevant factor of production always holds, and so he rejects all the social forms of prehistory1 as at bottom unjust in the light of this standard.

(iii)The fact that a society of freely associated producers cannot be realized under all historical conditions, and must wait for capitalism to build up the means of production and the accompanying technological know-how, does not make the ideal of such a

1. Marx speaks of the historical process leading up to capitalism (that of divorcing the producer from the means of production) as the “pre-historic stage of capitalism” (Capital, Vol. I, Tucker, pp. 714f ); and of all the processes leading to his desired end stage of a society of freely associated producers as, simply, “prehistory.”

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society a relativist one. It simply means that Marx’s own political conception of justice with its related ideals can only be fully realized under certain conditions; but this is true of all conceptions and ideals.

(iv) By contrast, the juridical conceptions of justice adequate to slavery, feudalism, and capitalism are never valid. Rather, they serve an essential historical and instrumental purpose during a certain period of time. At best the societies to whose modes of production they are adequate can be excused or mitigated, but only insofar as they are necessary stages on the way to a society of freely associated producers at the end of prehistory.

§2. Why Marx Does Not Discuss Ideas of Justice Explicitly

1. It is nevertheless puzzling that, if Marx’s ideas about justice are consistent, he did not discuss them at least enough to remove the ambiguities as to what he believed. Of course, as I have said, he seems never to have thought systematically about justice and regarded many other topics as far more urgent. But there seem to have been other reasons that moved him. I mention several.

(a)One reason is that he opposed the utopian socialists. This connects with Marx’s saying: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Thesis XI on Feuerbach, Tucker, 145; Marx’s italics). This connects also with Marx’s effort in Capital to discern the “laws of motion” of capitalism and to figure out how it really worked, so that when historical conditions were ripe we would know how to act in a realistically informed way.

(b)A second reason for his not discussing his ideas of justice is that Marx opposes reformism and the tendency to focus on issues of distributive justice, that is, on the distribution of income and wealth and on raising wages, as narrowly conceived. Of course, he was not opposed to raising wages as such, and he urges workers to continue their struggle with capitalists to raise them. But he felt they should do so as part of their efforts to further the economic reconstruction of society. In a lecture given in London in 1865 to the General Council of the First International, he says: “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work,’ they

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[the workers] ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system.’”2

(c)Marx thinks the utopian socialists represent the initial attempts of the working class to realize its aims. The underdeveloped condition of that class, and the economic circumstances necessary for its emancipation, made it impossible for the utopian socialists to develop a realistic theoretical conception of the conditions required for the successful achievement of these aims. Instead, these writers suppose that there is some new social science based on a conception of the future that will enable them to create the necessary conditions for emancipation by personal intervention from above, or by moral persuasion. The utopian socialists do not regard the working class as the agent of its own emancipation, as Marx thinks it must be. Rather, they regard the working class simply as the most suffering class. It is not regarded, as Marx regards it, as politically active and as moved by the imperative needs of its social and class situation.

(d)A further point is this: the early phase which the utopian socialists represent is marked by an anarchy of thought and by many diverse conceptions of an ideal future society. This state of anarchy is entirely natural in view of the highly personal and non-historical nature of these doctrines. They are, after all, blueprints for an imagined future, and not the outcome of a realistic theoretical analysis of existing political and economic conditions. These blueprints, Marx thought, were drawn up in ignorance of what he calls the “laws of motion of capitalism,” which laws will bring about in due course the conditions necessary for the complete abolition of classes. In Marx’s view, the anarchism of conceptions of the future to be found in the utopian socialists can only be overcome by an accurate theoretical understanding of present circumstances and of what is possible: such an understanding will make clear what is to be done.3

(e)Another objection Marx had to the utopian socialists is that, in his view, they were attached to their own personal conceptions of the future, and since they thought they could impose these conceptions on society from above, or by moral persuasion, they believed that class struggle and revolutionary action are unnecessary. They sought to appeal to “humanity”

2.Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1935), Ch. XIV, p. 61. [Fifth paragraph from the end.]

3.Cf. Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, 2nd ed., p. 149 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), from Holy Family.

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as deeper and more basic than class. For this reason Marx thought they failed to grasp the class basis of capitalism and the depth of the transformation required to overcome it. From Marx’s standpoint, the utopian socialists are reactionaries in the sense that their doctrines lead them to oppose the only realistic path to emancipation, namely, revolutionary struggle and the organization of the working class as a political force.

Marx believed, then, that the utopian socialists proceeded contrary to the correct procedure, namely, as he said in an early article, that of developing: “new principles to the world out of its own principles. We do not say to the world: ‘Stop fighting; your struggle is of no account. We want to shout the true slogan of the struggle at you.’ (Rather) We only show the world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that the world must acquire, like it or not.”4 Marx’s (explicit) aim, then, is to show the world—that is, the working class as the developing and increasingly active political force—what it is, and not what it ought to be, fighting for. Marx aims to do this by explaining to the working class the meaning of its own experiences and actions in the present historical situation. He wants to elucidate the role that the working class must assume in its own emancipation. Thus, one aim of Capital is to spell out the laws of motion of capitalism as a social system so that the working class’s understanding of its situation and of its historical role can have a realistic scientific basis, as opposed to personal and moral conceptions of the future espoused by doctrinaire visionaries.

(f ) A final consideration is this: Marx is suspicious of mere talk about moral ideals, especially those of justice and liberty, equality and fraternity. He is suspicious of people with ostensibly idealistic reasons for supporting socialism. He thinks that the criticisms of capitalism made on the basis of these ideals are likely to be non-historical and to misunderstand the social and economic conditions necessary to improve matters even from the point of view of these ideals. For example, we are likely to think that justice in distribution can be improved more or less independent from the relations of production. This tempts us to look for the best account of distributive justice to guide us in doing this. But distribution is not independent from the relations of production, which are, Marx thinks, fundamental.5

4.Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., pp. 14f, “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” DeutschFranzösicher Jahrbucher, 1844; see also Marx, Selected Writings, ed. McLellan, 2nd ed., pp. 44–45.

5.On this see Section I of the Critique of the Gotha Program.

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