THIS ESSAY is a small contribution to two large subjects. The first large subject is that of exploitation—what it is for somebody to be exploited, in what ways people can be and are exploited, whether exploitation necessarily involves coercion, what Marx’s understanding of exploitation was and whether it was adequate: all these are issues on which I merely touch, at best. My particular concern here is to answer two other questions: whether Marx thought capitalist exploitation unjust and how the answer to that question illuminates Marx’s conception of morality in general. The second large subject is that of the nature of morality—whether there are specifically moral values and specifically moral forms of evaluation and criticism, how these relate to our explanatory interests in the same phenomena, what it would be like to abandon the “moral point of view,” whether the growth of a scientific understanding of society and ourselves inevitably undermines our confidence in the existence of moral “truths.” These again are issues on which I only touch if I mention them at all; the questions I try to answer are the following: what does Marx propose to put in the place of moral judgment, and what kind of assessment of the horrors of capitalism does he provide if not a moral assessment?
It is a feature of Marx’s work that he seems at one and the same time to be dismissive of morality and yet full of what most people would describe as moral indignation (Lukes 1985, 4–5). Take perhaps the best known of all Marx’s prophecies:
Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (Marx 1976, 929)
It is hard to deny that terms such as usurpation, slavery, degradation, and the like are terms of moral condemnation, and implausible to think that Marx employs them in less than a wholehearted way. Cohen’s claim that whether Marx knew it or not, he attacked capitalism for its injustice rests on the plausible point that Marx uses terms such as “rob” and “usurp” in their plain sense and does not, so to speak, bracket them or place them in quotation marks; Marx condemned theft, not “theft” (Cohen 1983, 443). Yet Marx’s skepticism about ethical appeals is well known. When he wrote to Engels about his address to the International Working Men’s Association, he observed, “I was obliged to insert two phrases about ‘duty’ and ‘right’ into the Preamble to the Rules, and also about ‘truth, morality and justice’ but these are placed in such a way that they can do no harm” (Marx and Engels, 1962a, 139). In the Communist Manifesto, Marx mocks the believers in eternal moral truths and seems at least to suggest that the Marxist conception of ideology relegates ideals of all sorts to an epiphenomenal status:
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge. (Marx and Engels 1962b, 1:52)
The task, then, is to see whether Marx has a consistent position on all this.
The starting point is Marx’s antipathy to writers who stressed the role of ideas—moral and other—in social life; it has two sources, neither of them particularly surprising. In the first place, Marx’s so-called materialist conception of history is very largely an “anti-idealist conception of history.” Marx, writing in opposition to his former friends and colleagues, was eager to insist, as he had done in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, that what happened in social, economic, and political life was not to be explained as the result of an Idea implementing itself (Marx, 1975, 60ff.). Greater economic equality was not caused by Equality manifesting itself in the phenomenal world. Demands for justice did not arise because Justice embarked on a campaign of self-realization. Whether Marx was right to think that his Idealist contemporaries believed in the efficacy of the Ideal in quite so literal a fashion is not a question we need pause for, though we ought to recognize the passion with which he assaulted all appeals to verités eternelles. It is enough to see that a man who denies that ideas owe their effectiveness to the operations of the Idea is not denying that ideas make an important difference to what happens. Marx, indeed, tended to overestimate the importance of ideas—intellectuals usually do; a man who thought ideas had no impact at all would hardly have spent twenty years in poverty and ill health writing Capital, nor would he have been so concerned to destroy the erroneous views that, as he thought, the Lassalleans put into circulation in their Gotha Program. All Marx seems to have believed was that for ideas to make a difference, they had to be somebody’s ideas and to make a difference to how they acted. Moral ideas may make a difference, but not in virtue of reflecting the demands of Morality; they make a difference by making a difference in the way individuals behave. As Cohen emphasizes in another context, when norms are cited in a causal explanation, it must be by way of how adherence to those norms affects behavior (Cohen 1978a, 217–25).
Second, however, Marx evidently believed that moral demands were intrinsically dubious in a way that other kinds of practical demands were not. There are two or three different things at stake. The first is that Marx thought that in politics, mankind is mostly moved by self-interest; so where people profess ideals, they will act against them under the impulse of self-interest, or they will interpret them so as to reconcile them with self-interest. It is thus inept to ask people to do for purely altruistic reasons anything very much opposed to their interests. Ethical socialists were asking employers and members of the ruling classes to behave “justly” or “fairly,” with no reason to suppose this would affect their behavior.
The second point is not a matter of sociological but of philosophical skepticism; although it is harder to elucidate, it is intellectually more fundamental. Marx followed Hegel in disbelieving in the existence of a realm of the ought that stands opposed to the is (Marx and Engels 1975, 37). Hegel’s objection to the Kantian picture of a noumenal realm of values that contrasted in all ways with the phenomenal realm of the merely factual strikes a chord with many twentieth-century readers. It starts from the objection that occurs to many readers on first taking up the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals—if men are moved in fact by phenomenal desires but are supposed, as a moral matter, to be moved by the moral imperatives of the noumenal self, it is impossible to see how the noumenal self gets the necessary grip on the phenomenal self. The point is not restricted to the most impressive or serious aspects of morality; an opening batsman who is going out to face what Len Hutton aptly called “the nasty short-pitched fast stuff” in the fading light may reasonably feel fairly frightened, but he cannot quell his fears by issuing himself with injunctions to be brave or not to be frightened. Unless he already desires to be an unflinching opening batsman, nothing will come of addressing any number of imperatives to himself. In putting forward this view, Hegel and Marx were anticipating views recently defended by Philippa Foot and Bernard Williams, both of whom have argued that all reasons, moral reasons included, can be reasons only for persons who have preexisting aims to which those reasons are relevant (Williams 1981; the same thought runs through Williams 1985).
Third, Marx also thought, as many other writers have done, that there was something epistemologically dubious about moral judgments, or, more mildly, that they were not on all fours with factual judgments. A man who, when it is raining, believes that it is raining will best explain his beliefs by appealing to the fact that it is raining; the truth of what he believes features in the best explanation of the fact that he believes it. Marx’s theory of ideology may—though I think it does not—imply that the truth of a belief is never an adequate explanation of our holding that belief. In the case of moral beliefs, however, Marx certainly holds that we are always to look for an explanation of someone’s moral beliefs elsewhere than in their truth. His sociological analysis of morality, though utterly undeveloped, at least implies that “morality” belongs with law as part of the machinery by which class-divided societies preserve order in the face of conflicts of interest. The features that Kant ascribes to morality—its coercive character and its independence of self-interest above all—reflect in a mystified fashion the social function of the institution of “morality.”
It is in this perspective that what follows is written; before plunging into the main topic of exploitation and justice, I should say that the above sketch of Marx’s position is not intended to preempt discussion of a familiar view (put forward as persuasively as I have seen it by Steven Lukes in his Marxism and Morality) to the effect that Marx had no time for the morality of rights, obligation, and justice, but espoused what one might call an ethics of liberation (Lukes 1985, 27). I think that this is a misleading way of stating the case, and one that does some violence to Marx’s insistence that he preached no ideals, not even that of liberation. To my mind, the interest of Marx’s stand on the status of morality is this: he repudiates any suggestion that his condemnation of capitalism rests on ethical or moral considerations, and he looks forward to the day when we shall dissolve all forms of appraisal in the one category of the “practical.” I shall argue for this view at the end of this essay, however, and do not mean to beg it now. For the moment, I want only to rest on the familiar fact that Marx both appears to condemn capitalism as unjust and immoral and to repudiate moral assessments as practically futile and intellectually worthless. It is to the dissolution of this paradox that I now turn.
The best recent discussion concludes that Marx thought that capitalist exploitation was unjust; some writers who hold this view go on to claim that Marx had what can properly be characterized as a theory of “needs-based” justice, epitomized in the famous slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Elster 1985, 229–31; Geras 1985, esp. 60–65). I do not suggest—some writers have done so, however—that Marx thought that capitalist exploitation was just; my claim is that Marx thought that it was not in an absolute sense just or unjust, because there is no such sense. On Marx’s account, capitalism was and had to be just in appearance according to prevailing notions of justice, but it was and had to be unjust in reality according to those same prevailing notions. The assertion of a gap between appearance and underlying mechanism is a familiar feature of Marx’s analysis of capitalism (Cohen [1971] usefully explains why), but it raises the question whether Marx believed that capitalist exploitation was really unjust. This turns out to be a bogus question because it presupposes what Marx denied, that there is a transhistorical standard of justice that can be applied to the case. His position is not unlike that of the post-Copernican astronomer who readily speaks of the sunrise and who yet understands the nature of the phenomenon quite differently from his Ptolemaic predecessor. The astronomer denies that the question “Does the sun really rise?” has a firm answer, and Marx in the same way denies that the question “Is capitalist exploitation really unjust?” has a firm answer. The proper response is neither yes nor no, but an account of why we talk about the world in the way we do. Marx’s denial of eternal moral truths, and of justice eternelle along with them, makes the status of his own distributive principle (first enunciated in so many words by Louis Blanc, apparently) “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” problematic. Is it a principle of socialist justice? My answer is that it is not—or, to put it differently, that Marx certainly thought it was not and had compelling reasons for so thinking.
The question of exploitation arises for Marx in the following way. It is apparent that in precapitalist societies, a lot of unpaid labor is done by, say, peasants working their lords’ fields three days a week, or by slaves working at the absolute pleasure of their owners. If we ask how the surplus product generated in such societies finds its way—is ausgepumpt (“pumped out”), in Marx’s graphic term—from the laborers to their superiors, a story about the exploitation of the direct producers comes naturally. Those who produce the product work for nothing; they perform unrequited labor for their feudal superiors or their owners or whomever. But we might say that the question whether they are exploited needs a further premise in addition to the premise that they perform unrequited labor. This is that they perform this unrequited labor on an unjust basis; this proposition may be supplied by, or run in conjunction with, another premise, namely, that this labor is forced labor.
It is debatable whether the fact of coercive extraction is an indicator rather than a constituent of injustice. In the view that it is a constituent, we begin from the premise that seizing goods or labor from another is prima facie unjust, either because it is a violation of the proprietorship of the victim or because it is an unwarranted invasion of his freedom. The contrast between coerced and uncoerced labor marks the distinction between a gift, which raises no questions of justice, and forcible taking, which does raise such questions. In the “indicator” view, it is some other notion of justice that explains the injustice of the taking; the fact of coercion is itself explained by appeal to the unlikelihood that the victims would consent to unjust treatment. If we were to set as the criterion of justice the view that the laborer should receive goods equal to the market value of his efforts, it would be neither here nor there whether workers were forcibly parted from the difference between that standard and what they actually got. If they were induced by some sort of religious enthusiasm to accept an exploitative bargain, it would still be exploitative. We might, however, expect to find that most exploitation was backed by coercion just because ideological blandishments work badly if they have to work on their own. My own view is that Marx is not absolutely clear on this, but that his settled position is that it is the coerced quality of the labor that is objectionable. In any view, we may certainly say that when one man labors unrequited for another, and does not do so voluntarily—that is, when he is not giving his efforts as a gift—the question of injustice is raised. Marx was impressed by the way capitalism’s apologists pointed to the contrast between the visibly coercive nature of feudalism and slavery and the contractual nature of capitalism, and to the contrast between the visibly unpaid nature of slave labor or feudal services, on the one hand, and the paid labor of the worker under capitalism, on the other, as the features that make capitalism nonexploitative and intrinsically just. To their apologia, he had two powerful replies. The first is that within slavery and feudalism there was a standard of justice that slavery and feudalism appeared to meet (Marx and Engels 1962b, 426, 429 [Wages, Prices and Profit]).
The slave owner was entitled to the product created by the slave because the slave was the property of the owner; there was no more question of the slave having entitlements over the product than of the plow or the spade he wielded having entitlements over the product. Since the slave was the owner’s slave, so was the slave’s labor and so was the slave’s product. With his functional account of moral ideas, Marx was committed to the thought that in some sense the slave system had to have a legitimating theory that allowed it to survive; if slaves more or less met the conditions the theory demanded—were captured in war, were foreigners rather than former citizens, or whatever it might be—the social order could operate smoothly enough. It goes without saying that slaves do not like being slaves; but the point of all theories of justice is to allow us to think that what people do not like doing, they may rightly be compelled to do if the coercion simply enforces just entitlements. Mutatis mutandis, the same story applies to feudalism; the theory of justice required is not one that turns the direct producers into the property of the exploiting classes, but one that depicts them as related in a hierarchical system of mutual obligation and benefit. Once again, there must not be too great a gap between the legitimating theory and the apparent operations of the society; Marx seems to think that this presents few problems until the social system is ripe for dissolution.
A qualification to my denial that Marx holds an absolute standard of justice must now be made. Marx is in no doubt that the standards of right that emerged as slavery gave way to feudalism, and as feudalism gave way to capitalism, were “higher” standards. He is, in this, a good pupil of Hegel, holding as Hegel did that the perception that “men as men are free” is one of the achievements of the modern world. This is not, however, because Marx thinks that at the end of the road lies a state of affairs in which we know what justice really is and finally create a society that realizes justice. At the end of the road lies a society that has left justice behind. To see this, we need to move on to the question of how Marx’s account of the operations of a capitalist economic system relates to his ideas about justice and exploitation. The basic elements of the story are the same as before, but their employment is interestingly more complex.
The concept of exploitation features in Marx’s second reply to the apologists for the capitalist order; its technical role belongs to Marx’s account of the generation of surplus value and thus to part of the explanation of the capitalist’s profit, but that account also demolished the apologists’ understanding of how the capitalist was entitled to his profit. Marx faces a problem that baffled his predecessors. If the capitalist buys all his inputs at full value and sells his product at no more than its full value, where does the “extra” come from that the capitalist can pocket as his profit? That he has to pay full price for his inputs is guaranteed (on average) by the existence of competitive markets; anyone dissatisfied by his offered price can move elsewhere. By the same token, he can ask no more (on average) than the full value of his output. Marx hits on the solution when he decides that what the capitalist bought from the worker was a special kind of commodity, namely, “labor-power.” Labor-power is special because it is the one commodity that, when it enters into production, creates more value than went into its production (Marx 1976, 270ff.). “Labor-power” is the worker’s capacity to work, and when the capitalist buys it, what he buys is the right to set the worker to work for whatever time it is the labor contract lasts and to appropriate whatever value the labor actually done adds to the other inputs.
The question arises whether the worker is “robbed.” The difficulty is that Marx appears to say both yes and no. The worker certainly does unpaid labor; as Marx insists, only a part of the worker’s time is used to repay the cost of his subsistence, the rest going gratuitously to the capitalist. But Marx equally insists that the capitalist acts “with full right”; the fact that he gets a better deal out of the worker than the worker intends or understands is neither here nor there—any more than it is when you sell me a horse you believe to be ill-tempered and feckless and I turn it into a Derby winner (Marx 1976, 301). One way of resolving this apparent contradiction is to beat one’s way through Marx’s vast oeuvre looking for a definitive view. The difficulty with that approach is that it is easy to impugn the status of much of what Marx wrote, and we are still left to decide which texts represent (what would have been) his considered position. The other way is to put together what appears to be the most coherent account that is tolerably consistent with what he said over many years; this is what I shall do now.
So we must revert to the question of how we are to decide on the justice of the process whereby the worker sells his labor-power for its full value—which is, roughly, subsistence wages—but gives surplus value to the capitalist. Bourgeois justice is based on the thought that everyone ought to receive a return equal to his or her contribution; this is the principle of market exchange, that equals exchange for equals, and it displays the kind of equality and impersonality to which bourgeois society aspires (Marx 1976, 280). There is no space here to go into the interesting question of how this standard relates to another basis for the capitalist’s assertion of a right to his profit, namely, his insistence that his capital is his, just as the worker’s labor-power is the worker’s, and whatever happens after the bargain is struck makes no difference to the legitimacy of the bargain. Marx certainly takes this claim seriously, as we have seen. The obvious thought is that Marx intends, first, to employ this kind of argument ad hominem against socialists who found their socialism on the idea that workers own their labor, and second to show how vulnerable capitalism is to an inquiry into its origins. If capitalism began in forcible expropriation, the current generation of capitalists cannot claim that the resources they control really are “theirs.” If the system began in robbery, it must go on being robbery, just as it would be only an elaborate form of robbery if I stole £50 off you by first seizing your bicycle and then selling it to you for £50 (Elster 1985, 222–23). Quite how the attack on the pedigree of current titles of ownership bolts on to the ad hominem demonstration of capitalism’s injustice is hard to say. For my purposes, it is enough to notice that at least it provides Marx with yet another opportunity to insist that what the workers ultimately want is not justice but the abolition of private property.
“Equals for equals” is a very different standard from that which underpinned slavery and feudalism: under capitalism, “freedom, equality, property and Bentham rule” (Marx 1976, 280). At the level of exchange, claims Marx, this principle did, generally and on the whole, govern proceedings. Some employers cheated their workers, paid them with dud coin, made them buy their food in the employer’s shop and then watered the milk—but these were exceptions, and the existence of profit did not depend on the existence of crooks. Indeed, magistrates and judges from the same social class as these criminals were perfectly ready to use the law against them. Social stability demanded that most people believe that justice was enforced, and justice had to be enforced to induce that belief.
At the level of exchange, where the operations of capitalism were visible to the untutored eye, equals exchanged for equals. There was a known standard, and wages revolved around it. The worker whose employer would not pay the going rate could leave and work elsewhere; the employer could truthfully say that he could not pay more than the going rate—if he did, his prices would rise, he would lose his trade, and he would go out of business. There was thus no question of exploitation being a matter of personal wickedness on the part of capitalist employers, a fact Marx insists on when he explains how capitalists appear in the pages of Capital only as the bearers of capitalist relations (Marx 1976, 92). Some capitalists were decent, good-natured men, and some were perfect brutes who abused their wives and children along with their employees and their servants. That was beside the point. The point was that qua capitalists, they were all locked into the same exploitative relations with their employees, and that their relationship had to be, and was, compatible with bourgeois standards of justice at the surface, unreflective level.
It is important to take this insistence on detaching the question of surface justice from the moral evaluation of individual capitalists at its proper weight. In part, it amounts to nothing more than Marx’s reminder that the task of the social scientist is not to judge but to explain—we do not rebuke Odysseus for his superstitions, for he could not be expected to rise above the intellectual level of the age, and we do not rebuke capitalists for behaving as their position in the economy forces them to behave. If it is true that in the usual sense of freedom, capitalists, having more resources than their workers, are therefore much freer than they, it is also true that Marx sees all of them so caught up in the workings of the capitalist economy that he regards it as futile to ask whether the capitalist is “free” to cease being a capitalist. Marx does not suppose that capitalists wish to injure their workers, and he does not suppose that capitalists have eccentric views about the desirability of overwork, bad housing, and bad food; what they suppose, and largely correctly, is that they cannot under capitalism do anything about it.
Marx’s impatience with moralizing is more than an insistence on that point. It reflects, if it is not itself an argument for, his holistic view of the social and economic order, both his explanatory holism and his evaluative holism. It is a requirement of capitalist production relations that the transactions that appear as an exchange of wages for work should be compatible with conventional ideas about justice, and however we are to explain the origins and acceptance of the bourgeois conception of justice, its interest for Marx is almost wholly exhausted by its role in the system. Marx’s interest in justice does not descend to the level of injustices done to or perpetrated by individuals, even though, as the long extracts from the Blue Books and elsewhere in Capital make clear, it is the effects of the capitalist system upon individual welfare—overwork, fear, destroyed health, destroyed family life, pervasive misery—that make capitalism repulsive (Marx 1976, 370–416). In explanatory terms, it is the abstract and impersonal nature of the capitalist system that is distinctive. Individual capitalists are but the agents of capital, which governs them—more comfortably, to be sure—just as it governs the workers. Marx’s thought is exceedingly hard to set down simply, but it is at least that whereas the systemic properties of the whole society depend upon the thoughts and actions of its individual members, they also confront individual members as an external fact (Giddens’s [1976] concept of “structuration” is intended to accommodate this double perspective). It is worth writing in terms of “the capitalist mode of production” only because it is simultaneously a network of individuals interacting according to their own aspirations and beliefs as well as a system that dictates to those individuals what aspirations and beliefs to adopt.
The heart of the analysis, in Marx’s own eyes, lies in the analysis of the productive system. He was full of contempt for economists who distinguished, as Mill did, between the laws of production and the laws of distribution (Cohen 1978a, 108–11). He had even more contempt for “distributivist” socialists who thought that all the ills of capitalism could be cured by tinkering with distributive mechanisms in the name of “fairness” (Marx and Engels 1962b, 2:21 [Critique of the Gotha Programme]). In Marx’s account, production determines the distributive system. So it is not surprising to find that Marx looks for the truth about the exploitation of the laborer in production, not distribution. Marx claimed that the surplus was created in production, not distribution; it was only realized in exchange. It is not because goods are bought at less than their value or sold at more than their value, but because a surplus appears in the course of production that the capitalist can appropriate a profit. The process is simple enough; the capitalist buys his inputs, including labor-power, then sets them to work; all inputs other than labor-power simply add their existing value to the output. When labor-power, bought at its full exchange value, is turned into labor—which is a use value—the divergence between what goes into the worker’s labor-power and what the laborer can add to the product’s value appears, and there is the surplus value waiting to be appropriated (Marx and Engels 1962b, 1:430–31; Marx 1976, 268–70).
The merits of this account as an account of the generation of profit are not very great; happily, they are no concern of ours here. Three aspects of the account are important, however. In the first place, Marx’s account locates the source of profit only in “living labor”; the great contrast that Marx insists on is that between capital considered as “dead labor” and the worker’s activity, which is “living labor” (Marx 1976, 1006–08 [appendix]). The metaphysical horror of capitalism is that dead labor sets living labor to work; and the worker’s efforts go toward reinforcing the power of dead labor over him. The driving force of capitalism, says Marx, is capital accumulation; dead labor demands constant additions to its strength, and neither the worker nor the capitalist can resist it. This is in part a matter of imagery and rhetoric, but it is important imagery and rhetoric, since it is the natural embodiment of Marx’s sociological perspective on the capitalist economy. What Marx says is that capital itself appears like a vampire, death in life, sucking the lifeblood of its victims. The sociological holism of his explanatory theory generates an evaluative (but not a moral) holism, for the implication is that capitalist society is “inverted” and the curious combination of slavery and freedom embodied in capitalism results in a society where the absolute freedom of everyone to buy and sell in the market is at the same time the enslavement of everyone by an impersonal, even a dead, force.
A second and equally important, though less dramatic, feature of the argument is that it shows how Marx can both assert and deny that capitalist exploitation is consistent with justice. In buying labor-power, the capitalist does not violate the rule of “equals for equals”; in using labor-power, he does (Marx and Engels 1962b, 1:429). “Robbery” does take place, but it does not take place where any previous critic thought it took place. This, incidentally, is one reason why Cohen cannot be quite right in arguing that Marx’s theory of exploitation can be detached from the labor theory of value (Cohen 1978b). Under capitalism, the surplus exists only as surplus value. With rents in kind, forced labor, or the ownership of slaves, the workers’ forced contributions to the wealth of the exploiting classes is based directly on the products of their labor, but capitalist exploitation works at all only because the way in which it works is veiled by its expression as the appropriation of value rather than things. It is nonetheless true for Marx that exploitation is always the same thing, namely, the forced performance of unrequited labor. But Marx’s contrast between what goes on visibly in exchange and invisibly in production now shows why there is no straightforward answer to the question whether capitalism is unjust; the elaborate but only satisfactory answer is that capitalism is in contradiction with itself, forced to produce in ways that violate the principle of justice that it is simultaneously forced to profess.
It must be noted that Marx is not, as some commentators have thought, arguing that capitalism is just by its own lights and unjust by socialist lights. Insofar as capitalism is unjust, it is unjust by capitalism’s own lights, not by some socialist standard of justice. Indeed, there are no socialist standards of justice. For the third thing to observe about Marx’s analysis of exploitation in the production process is that it leads on very naturally to what he says in the Critique of the Gotha Programme about the fatuities of the Lassalleans and the true contrast between capitalism and socialism.
The Lassalleans had demanded a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and had propped this demand up with the claim that since labor was the only source of value, the laborers were the only people entitled to share in it (Marx and Engels 1962b, 2:18–20). Marx regarded this as utter nonsense; the value of whatever is produced depends on much more than the labor that goes into it, and in any case, under any system of production, the total product will have all sorts of claims on it—for depreciation, research, new investment, and the education of those too young to work and those too old or too ill to work. To suppose that “the whole product of labor” is there to be consumed at will by the laborers is completely absurd. Moreover, appeals to a fair day’s wages compound the folly by supposing that there could be such a thing as fair wages; the only rational demand is for the abolition of wages. And it is to this that Marx turns his attention.
In doing so, he makes his famous distinction between the lower and the higher stages of socialism, arguing that under “stage one” of socialism, “bourgeois standards of right” will prevail in the sense that what workers receive will vary according to their contribution to the social product; only under “stage two” will society be governed by the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The interesting issue concerns the status of stage one. In stage one, workers are paid in proportion to their contribution; and at this stage, we find that exploitation ceases and (bourgeois) justice is achieved. For in the absence of capitalists, nobody can take home an income simply because he happens to own the means of production; the workers as a whole get the whole product—over a lifetime, of course, not in the wage packet each week. For between what they get through the social wage—education, pensions, sick pay, and so on—and their ordinary wages, they get everything there is to be had. That is one purpose of getting rid of the capitalists (Marx and Engels 1962b, 2:22–23).
But as between one individual and another, justice requires that those who contribute more should receive more. As Marx says repeatedly, equal right creates unequal results; returning what is contributed means that those who contribute more get more (Marx and Engels 1962b, 2:24). Thus, over a lifetime, the more productive receive more than the less productive, though neither loses anything to the unproductive classes, who have now been expropriated. Marx plainly regards this stage as a second best; so do writers such as John Roemer and Jon Elster, who are committed to “individualist” accounts of justice and might therefore be expected to regard it as the end of the road to justice. In fact, all three concur in their skepticism about the idea that greater contributions entitle those who make them to greater rewards. Elster and Roemer are partly motivated by skepticism about the whole idea of desert, and partly by the thought that those who do the most productive work frequently have the most interesting occupations and therefore hardly need added reward. Marx does not go into details, but seems to hold something of the same view as Rawls—that desert may well be illusory, but that differential rewards are an economic necessity. It is worth stressing that it is only because of economic necessity that “bourgeois” justice still gets a look in.
After that stage, we reach the end of the road. Here, in my view, there is no justice because there are no rights. There is, however, a principle for distributing work and resources, the famous principle of “from each according to his capacity, to each according to his need.” This is not a principle of justice in Marx’s eyes—or mine—because it does not ground claims of right. There is no question of its imposition on the members of a communist society; there is no question of anyone being forced to work on these terms. Not only is it not a principle of justice, but it is not a moral principle at all. It will be understood by everyone not as a moral principle, but as a practical or rational principle. It does not have the mystified standing of what are nowadays passed off as moral principles; that is, people who adopt that principle will understand that they have chosen it because it expresses the way of life they wish to live, not because it is a “dictate of morality.”
Skeptics will not wish to take my word for it that this is Marx’s view. They may be persuaded if they consider what Marx says in his early Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In that essay, Marx defends two views: first, Hegel is quite wrong to suppose that the modern state is a rationalized constitutional monarchy, and second a truly democratic society would abolish the state entirely. The status of this second claim is exceedingly unclear, but there seem to be two elements in it: first, there would be no distinctively “political” institutions in such a society, and second, social decisions would not issue in “law.” These two thoughts are connected; Marx thought that republican theory, as found in writers like Rousseau, emphasized the public-spirited role of the citizen and the general-interest-directed nature of the state precisely because the actuality of bourgeois society was competitive, individualistic, and directed at private interests only. The Rousseauist state had to be simultaneously a moral ideal and a repressive reality because it demanded the sacrifice of men’s real interests for the sake of imposing an external order on the war of all against all that raged in civil society. Paradoxically, Marx came to think that there was a hidden harmony to be elicited in capitalist society—production was cooperative and social—even though he held as strongly as anyone that in practice, bourgeois society was riven with conflict. This allowed him to think of the institutions of a socialist society as, so to speak, emanations of the collective life of that society, not as something imposed in the name of a political morality. That rational institutions are such emanations was something else he learned from Hegel; as a very young man, he seems to have thought that law might be this even in his own Prussia. Thereafter, he held the view we always associate with his name—the view that law is essentially coercive and class interested, but that a society free of conflict would have rules that were noncoercive and, by our present standards, not really “rules” at all.
An illustration is his treatment of representation. Real representation is a matter of real needs; so the butcher and the baker are my real representatives—they mediate between nature and me. Political representation is illusory; there cannot be any such process as that of licensing another person to bear my moral or political will and commit me against my actual empirical will. There can, and under any conceivable scheme would have to be, some way of delegating decision making. The authority such decision makers would have is not moral or political authority. It is, so to speak, only as much authority as the facts and our wishes between them will generate. It would be a practical matter, and their authority would be in the same sense only a practical authority. They would serve my need to delegate decision making in the same way the butcher and the baker serve my need to delegate the process of getting food.
Critics of Marx have often mocked his apparent belief in the possibility of a society in which there was simultaneously absolute freedom of choice for every individual and absolute unanimity in collective decision making. It is certainly true that he offers not even a sketch of the decision-making process by which the freedom of each is to be reconciled with the decisiveness of all. It is equally true that he owed his readers some account of the process, since it is plain that the two chief planks in his account of socialism are its concern for individual freedom and its commitment to a form of economic rationality that transcends the “anarchy of production.” I do not have anything to add to this argument, except for a suggestion about the proper framework for its conduct. That framework is holistic and historicist, and is roughly as follows. Like Hegel, Marx sees history culminating in freedom and reason; capitalism is, in some ways, the most perverse of social and economic orders just because it offers so much liberty, in the sense of laissez-faire, and demands so much rationality, in the sense of means-ends calculations, and yet operates under the sway of blind necessity. It is this latter fact that is decisive. Marx contrasts what one might call our mastery of nature with the social system’s mastery of us. This is Marx’s naturalized version of the Hegelian notion of alienation, and it is what underlies the Marxian conception of freedom. It is a concept that makes sense only in a holistic context, one in which the subject of history is the human species; the mechanisms of alienation are capable of reconstruction in individualist terms, however, and the species’ misfortunes fall, of course, upon individual human beings (Marx 1975, 189).
At this point it is possible to put the argument together. The horrors of capitalism are, of course, horrors—misery, overwork, ill health; they are not, however, moral horrors. That is, they are not be laid at the door of anyone’s wickedness or misbehavior, and they lead to no conclusions about who is to blame. Nobody is guilty of the crime of constructing capitalism. They are, so to speak, natural disasters like cancer or consumption, plainly disastrous but not the results of wickedness. This is wholly consilient with the view that we are the victims of capital, not masters of our productive abilities; it is also consilient with the view that freedom and necessity are compatible where the necessity is that of the natural connection between means and ends—and that they are not compatible when the contrast is between being constrained by needs you would rather not have as opposed to needs that stem from goals you choose. In saying this, I am not conceding that Marx does, after all, have a moral view, one founded on freedom. It is not a moral view; freedom is not an ideal, and we are not morally obliged to seek it. Like freedom from ill health, it is a natural good, and its pursuit is a practical, not a moral, imperative. This is not to say that very much hangs on whether we follow my view or that put forward in Lukes’s Marxism and Morality; I do, however, think that my view has the advantage of lining up more exactly with what Marx said and with what motivated him. Against Lukes, my reading makes it more intelligible that Marx should insist so vigorously that the communists preach no ideals (Marx and Engels 1965, 47). It also makes Marx an interesting precursor of, for instance, Bernard Williams. Like Williams, Marx denies the existence of specifically and specially moral considerations; though he does it in different terms, he also—following Hegel—sees the difference between Greek, or more specifically Aristotelian, ethics and modern forms of ethical thinking in the impact of nonteleological natural science and in a resulting ability to analyze the judgments made with so-called thick concepts into a descriptive and an evaluative component (Williams 1985, 143–45). What Marx adds is a sociological hypothesis about why we have the mystified concept of “morality”—I readily concede that what Marx omits is a careful account of where the boundaries lie between “moral” and non-“moral” evaluation.
Is it worth insisting on the extreme position I have been pursuing? It is not a question to which a wholly conclusive answer can be given, but there are some considerations I find very persuasive. It might be said that Marx leaves open exactly what Bernard Williams leaves open, namely, the debating of alternative conceptions of the good life, “ethics” even if not “morality.” This, however, cuts across two distinctively Marxian concerns. In the first place, although Marx was avowedly attracted to the Greek world in something of the same way that Schiller was, he was insistent that mankind had grown out of that stage of life. If we try to say that Marx had an “Aristotelian” conception of ethics as opposed to a Kantian conception of morality, we have to acknowledge that Marx himself would have insisted that in the modern world, one could not be an Aristotelian without qualification. In the second place, Marx’s concept of the practical goes beyond Aristotle in supposing that we might conflate all separate forms of assessment in the one category of the practical. Critics of Marx as well as enthusiasts for the intellectual bravado with which he conducts his case will surely wish to emphasize the divergence of his case from common sense as well as from Aristotle.
Similarly, it might be argued that Marx’s insistence on the need to move beyond assessments of justice and rights makes him some sort of utilitarian. Here again, I think Marx’s insistence that decision making under socialism would not issue in rules, would not involve concepts such as blame, would not rely on inner sanctions such as the conscience, pulls him so far away from moral theory as ordinarily understood that we do better regarding both moral theory and an accurate grasp of intellectual history to emphasize the difference between Marx’s enterprise and anything more orthodox. Indeed, I think we ought to side not only with Bernard Williams’s sharp contrast between morality and ethics but also with Geoffrey Warnock’s earlier insistence that it is intellectually coherent to deny the claims of morality and that writers such as Nietzsche did so (Warnock 1971). On my reading, Marx did not do that; rather he bracketed the claims of morality and went on to characterize capitalism and its alternatives in different terms. That leaves it an open question whether he was wholly wise to do so; I hope I have suggested that he was not, but I should emphasize that I have certainly produced no conclusive arguments against his enterprise.
One last point needs to be made. There is one sense in which Marx might be said to have an ethic. The imperative to rise up and overthrow capitalism is a practical, not a moral, imperative. Nonetheless, if it is to be followed, there are various qualities of mind and character that men must possess if they are to do it. The sick patient who is either cowardly or self-deceived may in a sort of way know that he must have a painful operation or submit to a disciplined course of medical treatment, but he will not be able to bring himself to do it or will always find some half-believed reason for not doing so. So with the proletariat; what it needs above all else is a combination of intelligence, vitality, and courage. Sentimentality and self-indulgence will do no good—as Marx told Wilhelm Weitling with some heat as far back as 1846 (McLellan 1973, 157). These are what one might call military virtues; they are, again, instrumental rather than moral, but no harm is done by calling them virtues. As always with Marx, and with many other thinkers for that matter, there is some question whether he does not in fact value the qualities of cis-revolution man so highly that he really has less enthusiasm for the trans-revolutionary than he claims to have. Anyone who has spent any time in an art museum will remember the contrast between many artists’ detailed and enthusiastic treatment of this world and the inferno, on the one hand, and their insipid depictions of what purports to be paradise. That, however, is another topic and one that would take us very far from the narrower topics of this essay.1
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———. 1978a. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1978b. “The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 8:338–60.
———. 1983. Review of Marx, by A. Wood. Mind 92:440–45.
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———. 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1962a. Selected Correspondence. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
———. 1962b. Selected Works. Vols. 1 and 2. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
———. 1965. The German Ideology. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
———. 1975. The Holy Family. In The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 4. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
McLellan, D. 1973. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. London: Macmillan.
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———. ed. 1986. Analytical Marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Warnock, G. J. 1971. The Object of Morality. London: Methuen.
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———. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana.
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