File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9711, message 245


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.





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