The purpose of this essay is to discuss the debate that surrounds the position of Karl Marx concerning Social Justice. The key players in this debate are concerned with unravelling the conundrum of whether or not Marx regarded Capitalism as unjust and Communism as just. It is clear from Marx’s writings that he had distaste for both the bourgeois classes and what he referred to as their exploitation of the working classes. It is also clear that he thought that Communism was a fairer form of society than Capitalism, but he doesn’t actually say so. Marx (1848) does tell us that bourgeois ‘jurisprudence is but the will of their class made into law for all’, (Marx, 1848), an assertion that the philosophy of law is the will of the ruling classes turned into justice for everyone. But his failure to address the injustice of the capitalist system leaves the reader of his works wondering why, if he felt Capitalism to be unjust and Communism to be just, he appears to deliberately have avoided direct moral discourse, preferring only to infer his position in the language he chose to use.
The Tucker-Wood Thesis suggests that the reason Marx did not address this directly is because Marx did not think that Capitalism was unjust. They accept that Marx condemned Capitalism but highlight various instances where Marx actually states that Capitalism is not unjust such as in ‘Capital’, where he states that exploitation is ‘a piece of good luck for the buyer but by no means an injury to the seller ’(Marx, 1867). They argue that the labour-exchange process in capitalist society is just, the worker freely exchanges his labour for an agreed price and Marx agrees with this, because justice in the labour-exchange sphere is defined by the mode of production, it is considered a fair exchange, freely entered into. What he is concerned with is the surplus value that is created within sphere of production. Within the epoch of capitalism it is within the sphere of production that the worker becomes alienated from the commodities that he produces through his labour. Marx is clear that it is this that is an injustice, not the labour-exchange process. What makes this an injustice is the fact that the worker has exchanged his labour for less than the value of the commodity, which his labour has produced. This makes the surplus value theft. The language Marx uses when describing the different spheres of production within capitalist society such as exploitation, theft, alienation etc, all suggest injustice within the system. Arguing that Marx doesn’t think Capitalism is unjust, because he doesn’t make that statement is ridiculous, the language he uses is clear enough in its intent.
Wood (1972, 1981) argues that Marx’s concept of society is not juridicial, because it places the mode of production, not justice at its centre. This means that according to Marx the economic institutions are a source of influence on the political institutions, which in turn influence moral conceptions, and therefore it would be inappropriate for Marx to critique capitalism using terms of Justice, so he instead uses economic terminology to critique capitalism. Husami (1978) explains that the problem that occurs is that Wood has failed to make a distinction between a moral theory and Marx’s sociology of morals.
Geras (1985) suggests that there is a hierarchy of spheres of justice that coexist, one in which transactions appear to be just, the sphere of circulation and one in which transactions are unjust, the sphere of production . He argues that Marx avoids talking in terms of justice because,
“Standards of justice… are relative or internal to specific historical modes of production. It is not merely that they are generated by these—that juridical relations and the ‘forms of social consciousness’ corresponding to them ‘originate in the material conditions of life’—but that, in addition, they are only applicable to and valid for them. The only principles of justice which are appropriate to judging a particular mode of production are those that in fact ‘correspond’ to it, that are functional to sustaining and legitimating it.” (Geras, 1985).
To uncover Marx’s sociology of morals we must turn to ‘Ideology’, the set of common values and beliefs shared by most people in a given society, a concept that permeates Marx’s works. For Marx morality is ideological, part of a false consciousness that is social in origin. Therefore if we accept ideology as being shaped and formed by the dominant material force and intellectual class within each epoch as Marx and Engels explain it is in The German Ideology (1846). We must also acknowledge that as Malkin (2001) explains ‘Morality is a human creation expressing in an ideal form a set of social relations. But these social relations reflect and are, in the final analysis, determined by an underlying material relations of property and power’, (Malkin, 2001, i), ergo in the epoch of Capitalism morality is shaped by the bourgeoisie in their own interests. This idea suggests that morality does not transcend historical epochs and is therefore only reflective of the interests of the ruling classes in the epoch in which it is contained. It is a mechanism through which the bourgeois maintain their hegemony in capitalist society. This could explain Marx’s aversion to direct moral discourse in his writings. He may not have wished to use the moral discourse of the bourgeois to explain what he perceived as an unjust society, thus avoiding giving credence to their hegemony within the epoch of Capitalism.
It is important to ascertain if, in Marx’s opinion, morality could not transcend historical epochs. For Marx each epoch is determined by the modes of production, historical materialism. Therefore for Marx, morality endorses the social norms and values that are best suited to efficient production. Thus maintaining the status quo within that epoch until the epoch itself is punctuated by changes, which are brought about by a severe decline in economic efficiency. One ruling class and ultimately the epoch are replaced by another. When this happens new social norms and values become part of the new ruling class ideology and so a new morality emerges. However there are two points to make here, Marx’s view of history is teleological, for him history is progressing towards a purposeful end. This suggests that some elements of a previous epoch must survive to the next. Furthermore Marx himself tells us that there is a dominant ideology, that of the ruling classes. This infers that there are other ideologies those of the non-ruling classes.
It is possible that morality is among the elements that transcend epochs, as Husami (1978) argues if this were not the case, the workers in the epoch of capitalism would be unable to criticise capitalism because they would have no concept of justice outside of the capitalist one. The dominant morality must in fact exist in conjunction with other moralities, other notions of justice, those notions of justice that are held not by the bourgeoisie but by the proletariat, the masses. Surely then it is not inconceivable that such a sense of justice could transcend historical epochs. This would allow one class to criticise the existing system and also any future systems, thus demanding change and enabling history to progress towards some end. If there were no critics in a society what need would there be for change? History could remain static. Marx (1848) presents the history of all hitherto society as being a history of class struggles in which the contenders fight until one contender beats the other and a new ruling class is formed. The new ruling class brings with it new modes of production and ultimately new moral discourse. It is not as if overnight everyone suddenly awakes with a new sense of justice and have forgotten all of the moral discourses of the former epochs. Such a transformation would negate the human ability to communicate, the socialisation process and the way that norms and values are transmitted from one generation to another. Marx does not claim that ideologies do not transcend historical epochs, only that the existing dominant ideology is replaced with another and so, because morality is ideological, moral discourses also transcend historical epochs.
So we have now have an understanding that Marx believed that morality is ideological and can transcend historical epochs, thus although the dominant morality is replaced by a new one in each epoch, other forms of morality remain that allow criticism of the current epoch. Marx (1848) acknowledges this clearly; he states ’ There are… eternal truths, such as freedom, Justice etc that are common to all states of society,’ (Marx, 1848). We can also see that in avoiding using the moral discourse of the dominant classes Marx is able to criticise Capitalism and infer that it is an unjust system thus producing a moral theory using the language of moral philosophy. There are elements of the system that according to Marx when measured in terms of capitalist justice are not unjust such as the labour exchange transaction, its as if he is telling the proletariat this is what the bourgeois say is just and asking the proletariat to wake up from this false consciousness and recognise that things are only fair because it is in the interests of the bourgeois that the proletariat believe they are fair. He argues ‘The Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win’ (Marx, 1848) this statement infers freedom from something, the chains of injustice that bind the proletariat, which results in a freedom to win their world for themselves. It is very clear throughout ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848) that Marx believes that Capitalism is unjust.
In the ‘The Communist Manifesto’, (1848), Marx is also clear that he thinks that communist society is a just society, he describes it as ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx, 1848). Again Marx is using the language of justice in the form of a freedom. Each individual becomes free from restrictions on personal development and this creates a society in which all individuals are free from restrictions to do the same. This is a different freedom to the bourgeois freedom, which Marx (1848) insists ‘is free trade, free selling and buying’, (Marx, 1848). For Marx freedom is a freedom from something so that the individual is free to do something other than produce surplus value. This suggests that in the epoch of capitalism the freedom of the individual has restrictions placed on it, which of course it does. For many people, for the majority of the day, five days a week, their freedom is restricted by the requirement to work to produce goods or services for the capitalist system. Once that individual has produced his wage value in goods or services he is not free to carry out his own pursuits. He must continue to produce surplus value. He has honoured his part in the labour-exchange contract and yet has to continue to produce beyond the value of his labour. Thus there is a restriction in capitalism on the amount of time an individual has to pursue those things that he has talent or the will to pursue, simply because within this system he must produce profit for the bourgeois. This system is unjust, Marx calls it exploitation , and exploitation is not just. Marx also calls the creation of surplus value theft again an unjust act committed by one person against another. Perhaps if the labour-exchange system were renamed the time-exchange system in which an individual sells not his labour but his time to the capitalist, (which is what really happens), Marx would have had greater difficulty establishing that the creation of surplus value was unjust without actually using the bourgeois language of justice to say so. Indeed if it were time that was the commodity for sale there would be no surplus value at all. Such a transaction would require the capitalist to place a monetary value on time itself and this would be difficult to justify differences in wage rates, because surely one mans time is not worth more than another’s. To place different values on the time of individuals would indeed be an injustice. So the terminology labour value is, under the bourgeois meaning of morality, a more just term to use because it implies that different people have skills that are not of equal value. Time is of course of equal value to all men, we all have a finite amount of time to live. So Marx has cleverly engaged in the language of bourgeois morality by using their terminology to illustrate the weakness in their claim that capitalism is just.
Marx describes the higher stage of Communism as being a society based on the principle of ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his needs,’ (Marx, 1875); this is quite simply a statement that describes a just society. What could be more just than a society in which, everyone contributes to the best of their ability to provide enough of what is needed for everyone. That is quite simply social justice. So to imply that Marx does not think capitalism is unjust or communism just is a ridiculous notion to entertain. With every paragraph he illustrates injustice in the capitalist system and he manages to do so without resorting to actually saying so. He infers injustice and illustrates it coherently throughout his works. Taking a few simple sentences out of context as Allen Wood (1972, 1981) has and which Husami (1978) argues were possibly meant to be ironic and arguing that Marx did not think that capitalism was unjust on the basis of that he never made the statement that ‘Capitalism is unjust’, is a flawed way to try to make a point. To understand Marx’s point it is necessary to understand his views of history, freedom, his theory of how capital is produced, and his sociology of morals, it is only then that the reader can understand that when Marx said that there was nothing about the labour exchange system that was unjust he was indeed referring only to that single aspect of capitalism in the context of the constraints of the bourgeoisie dominant morality and that he was doing this within what he was presenting as a moral theory for society.S.McGonigal(2005)
Footnotes
The key players include Wood (1972,1981), Husami (1978), Cohen (1988) Geras (1989), Tucker (1965, 1980) and Lukes (1985).
Original text says ‘your’ Marx is addressing the bourgeois class.
In some translations buyer is translated as capitalist, seller is translated as worker and injury is translated as injustice, however the original German states ‘ein besondres Glück für den Käufer, aber durchaus kein Unrecht gegen den Verkäufer’ the translation of the word Unrecht is literally injustice, unjustness or wrong to the law.
It is within the sphere of production that exploitation takes place
exploitation can be defined as the utilising of another person or group for selfish purposes.
Theft can be defined as the taking of the property of another without right or permission.
Bibliography
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