From: mim3-AT-mim.org Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 01:39:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: M-G: MIM replies to J. Schwartz: What's Wrong with Right and Wrong? MIM3 replies to: WHAT'S WRONG WITH EXPLOITATION? Justin Schwartz email: jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us The basic problem with this paper is that it raises various topics within Marxism and pigeonholes them into idealist philosophical discussion about justice and freedom. Such is progressive as intervention in academia, but it is questionable even in this wannabe activist space known as the "Marxism Space." A progressive intervention in the Marxism Space would be to show how philosophy continues to be dominated by bourgeois idealism. We are treated to the like of "Since freedom is a good, unfreedom is an evil." Marx was not a moralizer. He would regard bourgeois philosophy of today as continuing its hangover as a vestige of religion. That's why you were closer to the mark when you considered the following train of thought: "Marx consistently rejects talk of justice or rights. This is a second reason not to ascribe the Canonical View to him. Natural rights, for Marx, reduce to private property rights and are expressions of an atomized, "natural" civil society composed of "independent and egoistic individuals" (1975a, 167, 168), which society is in fact contingent and alterable, and neither natural nor desirable. Attacking rights in general, he dismisses the idea of a "fair distribution" as "obsolete verbal rubbish" and condemns "ideological nonsense about right and other trash" (1989, 87), since "conceptions of justice [Rechtsbegriffe] ...arise from economic [relations]" (ibid., 84). In capitalism, workers receive what they are entitled to--the value of their labor power--in the only sense he admits that the notion of entitlement has any application, a juridical one relative to a mode of production. In the wage transaction, "Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent" (1967a, 194). His dismissal of justice as merely relative, so lacking in normative force, threatens to render merely ideological all normative considerations." Not surprisingly given your insistence on finding everything to be rooted in normative "theories of justice," you have to raise doubts about things Marx was very clear about: "Something more must hold for surplus transfer to be exploitation, or there is no objection to capitalist appropriation. What that something might be is the question." That something is that it is not in the interests of the workers. Here is another example where moralizing took over and doomed the possibility of scientific kernels of Marxism sprouting into flowers: "The incentive to maximize surplus expropriation is not an "iron law." It is a tendency and can be opposed by countervailing tendencies, including social norms of paternalism and justice, a sense of decency on the part of particular members of dominant classes, or satiation in the absence of further incentives to enhance their wealth and power. Gramsci (1971) argues that stable class rule requires "hegemony," a central part of which is some concession to the interests of all the classes in a society (see also Fisk 1989)." These concessions should be seen as part of class struggle, not something proving the value of pre-scientific moralizing. Quite the contrary, those individual capitalists who go BEYOND the norms imposed in class struggle (against the proletariat and other classes) in their "decency," are run out of business by the other capitalists, if not taken over outright through purchase or war. Finally, as I suspected, Justin Schwartz like Doug Henwood only deals with the moralistic aspects of the distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" labor. Justin and Doug see no pre-scientific political meaning to this distinction Marx labored over, and so they toss it. Yet it is impossible to understand surplus-value without understanding the difference between productive and unproductive labor. Unproductive labor produces no surplus-value: it only realizes it or appropriates it. Here is what Justin says: "He thinks that "unproductive" labor which does not produce surplus value is not exploited, but his distinction between productive and unproductive labor (1967a, 509) is vexed in part because the distinction between production and circulation is hard to draw nicely and in part because surplus value represents, for him, the total embodied labor of society which is appropriated by capitalists, i.e., it is an aggregate notion which cannot be neatly disagreggated into work of different kinds." This is said by Schwartz, but we have to point out that Schwartz actually shows no interest in the separation of productive and unproductive labor in reality and in fact there is no reference to anything empirical in the paper. Actually, it is true that it is hard to draw the distinction. For instance, in the U$A, about a third of manufacturing sector "workers" are actually unproductive sector paper or electron-shufflers. Nonetheless, the distinction between white-collar and blue-collar still captures something, perhaps not accurately in every individual case, but certainly in some statistically regular way of less than 100% purity. If we were to look at the material world and always demand 100% purity of its phenomena, we would never begin any scientific endeavors. Nonetheless, this vein of Marx's, like many others, is RICH in insights for today. The distinction between productive and unproductive labor explains: 1) Political attitudes of workers globally today. 2) The productivity (as measured by bourgeois indices) slow-down seen where white-collar work increases. 3) The basis of economic crisis. --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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