MARX and JUSTICE

James Daly

Marx's implicit theory of justice should not be interpreted in terms of the two dominant Cartesian distortions of morality, utilitarianism and Kantianism, in terms of modern (eg Rawlsian) natural law (or rather natural rights), or in terms of immoralism or a-moralism. It is rather a synthesis of three elements; of the traditional natural law, based on the Aristotelian concept of nature as the potential for perfection or ideal fulfilment, happiness as eudaemonia (radically different from the Hobbesian reductionist concept of nature as atomistic mechanical repetition); of the tradition of dialectics in its German idealist form; and of Feuerbach's humanism. Marx is not only explicitly returning to Aristotle's condemnation in terms of the natural good for human beings of chrematistike, the use of money with the sole aim of making more money, and of pleonexia, unlimited acquisitiveness. He is also recovering the Platonic, Senecan and Isidorean basic human value -- and right -- of communism, shared by Thomas Aquinas. For Marx capitalism is an inhumanly unjust system and its unjust "rights" are not (genuine) rights at all but despotic powers; just as unjust "laws" are not only not moral (as those in the tradition of nominalism, empiricism and legal positivism could agree), but are not essentially legal -- are not law at all but are acts of violence.

The distortion of this last by Kautsky and Plekhanov into a metaphysical determinism, culminating in "Dialectical" and "Historical" Materialism, eliminated the essence of Marx's thought -- humanism as the Feuerbachian "I - thou" relationship, with a corresponding critique of alienation and fetishism -- and created the problem of "Marx and justice". Marx's concept of justice can be seen at work in his critique of Lassallean and Ricardian socialism and anarchism, both of their mistaken pursuit of justice in badly misunderstood economic questions, and of their failure to rise above narrow egoistic bourgeois categories of justice, to the broad ontological vistas of justice which Marx called humanism, and which he claimed their economic situation made visible and attainable.

The distortion of this last by Kautsky and Plekhanov into a metaphysical determinism, culminating in "Dialectical" and "Historical" Materialism, eliminated the essence of Marx's thought -- humanism as the Feuerbachian "I - Thou" relationship, with a corresponding critique of alienation and fetishism -- and created the problem of "Marx and justice". Marx's concept of justice can be seen at work in his critique of Lassallean and Ricardian socialism and anarchism, both of their mistaken pursuit of justice in badly misunderstood economic questions, and of their failure to rise above narrow egoistic bourgeois categories of justice, to the broad ontological vistas of justice which Marx called humanism, and which he claimed their economic situation made visible and attainable.

But most of all Marx was objecting to a combination of all these and other factors in the bourgeois notion of justice or "rights" which he attacked in "On The Jewish Question" as "the rights of separation", the universalised rights of alienated, egoistic, possessive individualist bourgeois "Man", of which the flagship, as in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, was the modern right of private property, differences in the amount of which, varying from a coal mine to nothing but one's labour power, did not count as grounds for different treatment in the impersonal market to which every human relationship was being reduced. His main concern was that these selfish values, which so obviously favoured the rich and powerful, not only were confusing the would-be revolutionary bourgeois Young Hegelians and leading them to condemn the workers' social struggles, but had already corrupted and thus debilitated the working-class itself. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx condemned the mean petty envious levelling of the "crude communists" for its confinement to possessive Having, instead of opening up to to self-realising Being. The rejection in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of "vulgar [i.e. Benthamising] socialism's" demand for rights, was part of the same call for the transcendence of "the muck of ages" needed for the working-class to "fit itself to found society anew". Proletarian revolution would require a transcendence of the merely book-keeping justice of the possessive individualism of "bourgeois right", and a dialectical ascent to the ontological justice of the fulfilment of the human essence in communal humanism. It is significant that bourgeois right echoes the unthinking mercantile definition of justice by Cephalus in The Republic; he, like most merchants in Athens was a metic, a non-citizen immigrant from another city-state, thus not belonging to the Athenian community.

However, there is a peculiar complication and confusion of the question of justice for Marx, and hence for his interpreters ever since. This is due to the class situation in which it was presented (and was myopically accepted by workers) as a question of economic detail, of distribution, leaving unquestioned the entire system of production, including exchange and consumption, of which it was a part. The material part of that class situation was the spread of laissez-faire capitalism, under which the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The intellectual part was the bourgeois attempt to explain, justify -- or even better deny -- this fact, in the terms of political economy, an alleged natural science which was supposed to show that there are eternal laws of economics, such as those of supply and demand, which, like the laws of physics, are outside human control. This was done at first in terms of the labour theory of value, which, when combined with the belief that labour is a commodity, made the problem of the origin of profit insoluble even for Ricardo. The political part of the situation, finally, was that workers, under the influence of a Ricardian labour theory of value, demanded justice (their "rights") within the system, but in the form of the full value of their labour (thereby implying that they had been cheated in the market), or of the return to workers of the full proceeds of their labour (which is of course impossible under capitalism). At that point, as a result of this subversive if confused use of the labour theory of value, bourgeois proponents of political economy changed over from a Lockean labour-oriented theory of value, which Marx regarded as basically scientific, to a Benthamite merchant-oriented psychological theory of value, producing a pseudo-science which Marx called "vulgar political economy".

In 1859 Marx's Critique explained capital accumulation in terms of the commodity labour power, thereby exposing the total misunderstanding of capitalist economics underlying these demands for justice, thus showing them to be absurdities. In 1865 Marx explained his theory very simply in Wages, Price and Profit, an educational pamphlet written for the International Working Men's Association. Even Capital I was written in as popular a style as was possible, to make the real relationship between wages and capital accessible to workers. However, in 1875 the exasperated Marx found that the Lassallean authors of the Gotha programme had not understood what he had been saying, and were still making the same absurd demands for justice within the wages system as had been made in the 1840's, at the same time couching them in Benthamite categories, thus producing what Marx called "vulgar socialism". This he thought both scientifically (intellectually) and humanly (ontologically, including morally) degrading. He also thought these reformist demands were a recipe for disaster in the class struggle, since they did not challenge the bourgeois system as a whole in a revolutionary way, but accepted bourgeois domination and exploitation in principle and in practice. As he said in Wages, Price and Profit about current trade union struggles, their function could only be to help the system by keeping the price of labour power up to its value (to secure a living, as opposed to a starvation, wage). The communist workers whom Marx met in Paris understood, as Marx did, that fully human relations between human beings (in which a wide and hierarchical range of considerations of justice must play a vital part) requires the abolition of the wages system, which from the humanism of their class standpoint they could see was totally alienating of the human being, as well as being the most inhuman example of the general injustice of class domination and exploitation.

But what is the value of labour? What is a fair wage? Put this way the problems are insoluble, both theoretically and practically.

After many years of research, especially into "theories of surplus value", Marx eventually solved the theoretical problem by abandoning the misleading terms in which it had been set, and by demonstrating that they amounted to the double-take of a confidence trick. In the first place, in his analysis the commodity being bought and sold in the capitalist "labour" market -- but unbeknown to the labourer is -- is not labour, but labour-power (this is Marx's technical term, meaning simply the ability to work). At the level of the market there is therefore, in Marx's analysis, an exchange of two commodities of equivalent value, but they are not labour and wages. They are labour power (a human being's ability to work) and wages. For a wage is the equivalent of the value of labour power, which, just like the value of any other commodity, is the value it takes to produce it; in this case that is the cost of subsistence, the value it takes to produce, or to reproduce and replace, a human being with the ability to work; the value found in a subsistence wage.

But even if the workers could penetrate the illusory appearance that wages are exchanged for labour, not labour-power, they would face another sleight of hand; that is, the pretence that the exchange of labour power and wages is a normal market exchange of commodities like any other. Quite apart from its unique ontological nature, in that its use is the expenditure of the worker's "life-activity" or being, the commodity labour-power is also unique in capitalist economic terms. It has a unique use value, which is only revealed at a deeper level of the bourgeois mode of production than that of the market; that is, at the level of production, where what Marx calls "the immediate process of production" takes place. This is the level at which the commodity labour-power, just bought, is used by the capitalist as abstract labour, to create profit. In commercially successful cases the "socially necessary" labour (i.e. labour that is averagely productive, in competition with other labours) creates more value in the commodities sold than labour-power's own value (what it cost the capitalist, its market price, on average its value, a subsistence wage). The difference -- that surplus of value over the wage value, which is realised when the commodity is sold -- is the source of the capitalist's profit. Since surplus value is the product of the use of labour-power, it is now the property of the buyer of labour power, the capitalist. The latter appropriates it as profit, interest and rent, by the same right as that by which the buyer of a car appropriates the proceeds of its use as a taxi. The erstwhile owner of labour-power has no more right to a say over how hard or for how long it is used than the previous owner of a car has over whether or how it may be used as a taxi by the present owner. That is what it means for the human essence, the potential ability to produce spontaneously, intelligently, aesthetically, creatively and socially, to be alienated (sold) instead, as the commodity labour power.

There is no human relationship involved in such capitalist processes. Any individuals involved in capitalist economic relationships are, as such, merely "bearers of economic categories" (but it must be noted that Marx's whole message could be said to be precisely that that does not mean that they are so as human beings). Economic relationships as such are not moral ones. Wage relationships are impersonally structured by the economic system, involving no personal malice or injustice. Nevertheless the Ricardian socialists' suspicions of theft are well founded; not, however, in the way they think. Marx judges the processes of the system as a commutative injustice. He is able to do that, in the terms of his own analysis of the capitalist mode of production, because his is not a non-moral science of economics. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts he condemned the bourgeoisie's separation of the alienated sciences of political economy and "Cousin Morality", as itself a product of alienation. He did not believe that social science was value-free; in his opinion political economy's value was the accumulation of capital through thrift, which just happened at that time to be also Cousin Morality's chief value, making the contemporary "asceticism" of political economy (what Weber called "the Puritan ethic") "the most moral of sciences" -- therefore the most alienated .

In the terms of his humanist science, Marx explains how bourgeois morality justifies exploitation. The labourer receives in wages the value produced by half of the day's labour. That is an exchange of real equivalents; in other words that much use of labour-power -- a deformed expression of the human essence -- is thereby requited, though in the alienated form of the return to the worker of the value s/he has created. (Of course there is no way for this exchange to be acknowledged in the ledger books, because there the exchange is said, in what Marx has shown amounts to a confidence trick, to be between the day's labour and the day's wages). The second half of the day's labour is therefore unrequited -- so that that part of the mode of production is obviously not a free and equal exchange, but what Marx calls "the direct opposite of exchange", extortion, exploitation, which in his unalienated human science he is entitled to call, and does call, "robbery, embezzlement, theft". In real life, in the real mode of production, there is surplus labour -- labour, that is, surplus to that required to produce the value which forms the subsistence wage, which is the value necessary for the production of the commodity labour-power, that is, a human being's ability to work. This surplus labour produces surplus value, appropriated by the capitalists as profit, interest and rent. Of course the surplus labour in the real mode of production as analysed by Marx (but not recognised by the "labour" market or its ideological apologia, political economy) is not something which by bourgeois right has to be requited. That is indeed the essence of the system's exploitation.

It means that the unrequited surplus labour, while an injustice to the worker as a human being, is, in Marx's famous ironic phrase, the "no injustice to the [worker as] seller" [my emphasis-JD]. The irony is unfortunately, totally missed and this little phrase misinterpreted by those who think that it indicates that Marx is an immoralist. The reason that it is no injustice to the seller is clear once one considers what it is that the worker is selling: it is labour-power, the ability to work. The worker is not selling any part of the day's actual labour, neither the necessary nor the surplus portion of it. The day's labour is not a commodity at all and therefore has no value (although that statement is contrary to appearances, to the ledger books, and to the political economy textbooks); because the day's labour is the use of the commodity labour power, which has already been bought and fully paid for in the genuinely equal exchange of labour-power with wages. The previous owner of a car does not have to be requited by the new owner for its use as a taxi; that is bourgeois right.

Thus, in human terms, the wage relationship, as an integral and vital part of an entire system of production, is, in spite of superficial market appearances, "total injustice", just as Marx said it was in his "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction". Firstly, in terms of commutative justice, there is, as we have seen, a theft of unrequited surplus labour. In fact in the final analysis, since today's wages come from yesterday's profit (yesterday's surplus value, the product of yesterday's surplus labour), the worker in the final analysis works, not for an exchange at all, equal or unequal, "fair" or "unfair", but for nothing . This is nihil pro quo, the maximum of commutative injustice, of inequality of alleged "exchange", making the capitalist economy therefore the theft of all labour (the fully unrequited use of labour-power).

Secondly, there is distributive injustice. There is no equality in the primary distribution, that of access to resources (means of production). Some own capital with which to exploit, others only labour-power with which to be exploited. (Labour-power, says Marx, is not an asset; it is a liability). Thirdly, there is also, unrecognised by the workers, a vicious circular relationship between the distributive injustice and the commutative injustice; between the primary distribution, that of means of production, and the secondary distribution, that of income. The first determines the second; the industrial and financial capitalists and landlords necessarily get as income profit, interest and rent, the labourer wages. The secondary distribution (of income) however also determines the first (of means of production). Profit is for the capitalist the accumulation of capital, that is, an increase in ownership of the exploitative means of production; whereas the receipt of wages does not enhance the relationship of the worker to the means of production, which continues to remain the same, the ownership of nothing but labour-power. The capitalist secondary distribution (of income) is thus the continuous reproduction of the primary distribution (of means of production, that is, of capital and of labour-power), and thus of the exploitative capitalist relations of production. To put it another way, the labourer produces surplus value, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit, and returns as capital to further exploit the labourer. The worker makes ever bigger sticks, and gives them to the capitalist, to beat him or her with.

Thirdly, this process is not only a moral injustice. It is something infinitely worse, an ontological injustice. It is the ultimate in coerced alienation, fetishism and idolatry. Capital is the work of the labourer's hands; it is in fact the worker's self -- now totally alienated; yet s/he bows down and worships it, and is prepared at its command to live or die, to kill or be killed. Labour is the alienation of the worker's own essence, which becomes transformed into the ravenous monster, capital, a "restless, measureless thirst for surplus value" which Marx describes as a were-wolf, or a vampire which drains the worker' s blood.

Unlike the Lassalleans, Marx thus sees the system not partially and uncritically from within bourgeois economic terms, but holistically and critically from outside, as a divergence from a potential alternative, a classless productive system, one which would be a fully human approach to meeting the fullness of human needs, the physical, the moral, and above all the ontological -- that is, the radical human need to become fully human, to fulfill the human potential in a human way, in community. Therefore his condemnation of capitalism does not focus on the theft of surplus labour, even though he spent years discovering and demonstrating the existence and central importance of that, as the underlying mechanism which was the answer to the question he posed in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: how is it that the rich become richer and the poor become poorer? Even that material inequality itself is not his primary concern. He condemned capitalism as a whole, as a totality. His understanding of capitalism was not confined to the inhumanly narrow parameters of the bourgeois categories of negative freedom, wants, arbitrary pleasures or preferences, and exchange -- even of the unequal "exchange" in real life of surplus labour (and in the final analysis of all labour) for nothing. It is not even confined to the injustice of unequal distribution of means of production, overlooked by the workers in the purely (bourgeois) economic demands which were the only ones politically allowed. Marx is concerned with the totality of capitalist relations, economic and political, in other words human; with the ontological injustice of the system: its denial to workers of relationships which would be "worthy of" [ontologically due to - J.D.] "their human nature" (Capital III); its coerced alienation of the human essence, of human life-activity, into being a commodity competing with machines and other commodities; its prevention of, and repression of attempts at, a caring and intelligent system -- one of production from each according to ability, and of distribution to each according to need. His condemnation extends to the Enlightenment's ideology of possessive individualism, to its rejection of the model of social production, as the natural and rational one for humanity's dealings with each other, in favour of that of commerce in private property leading to the commodification of the human being. It is a condemnation of the inhuman aim of the capitalist economic system, which is the accumulation of capital, and of the fact that, with the completion of the world market, that is becoming the sole aim of the human race, the goal towards which all human activity is becoming organised by capital.

In this Marx is not only explicitly returning to Aristotle's condemnation in terms of the natural good for human beings of chrematistike, the use of money with the sole aim of making more money, and of pleonexia, unlimited acquisitiveness, but also recovering the Platonic and Senecan basic human value -- and communal right -- of communism. This is a value rediscovered by anti-feudal peasant movements, by Franciscans and Anabaptists. Hegel did not consider it, even when he was turning to the idea of the polis to try to compensate for what Fichte called "the complete sinfulness" of the modern age -- the consciously theorised and deliberately institutionalised private use of the community by the individual. Like Hegel, Marx keeps some elements of the Anglo-French Enlightenment's liberty and equality, and his idea of freedom is, like Hegel's political version of it, not the negative freedom of "civil society", the unhindered ability of a-social individuals to pursue pleasure, but positive freedom, the power to govern oneself by reason. However, human freedom in Marx's terms requires the abolition of the bourgeois separation between the "natural" economic and the "spiritual" political (and moral), and of the corresponding division, according to Hegel's justificatory theory, between civil society ("the natural") and the state ("the ethical"). For Marx a self governing community of self governing individuals requires, not the bourgeoisie's alleged classlessness of individuals in the market, but the genuine classlessness of community, of the "democratic association of producers". His idea of equality too (and hence of justice) is classlessness; as Engels puts it "The proletarian demand for equality is the demand for the abolition of classes" (Anti-Duehring, p. 132) . That would be the fullest democracy -- but as justice, an ontological and moral good. There is indeed a need to "make despotic inroads on capital ", but not, as Allen Wood interprets that phrase of Marx's, as the assertion of will and brute force against unqualified "right". It is the justified force of attacks on an inhumanly unjust system and its rights, one not only morally but ontologically unjust, destructive of human happiness because it is destructive of human being.