Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 00:08:14 -0700
Subject: Re: Exploitation, unproductive labor


  Justin makes a distinction between what he 
  claims are 2 essentially different ways of 
  thinking about what's wrong with exploitation.
  (I think he *must* mean *essentially* different 
  because if he didn't his point wouldn't be 
  anything like as interesting as he implies it 
  is.) There is the approach which sees the 
  surplus product of labor over and above the 
  wages paid to labor as being "robbed" or 
  unjustly taken by capitalists, and there is the 
  approach which sees the problem as one of 
  coercive diminutions of the worker's freedom, 
  through bossing him about a lot in the course of 
  his employment.  
  
  Now at times in his post Justin says things 
  which to me suggested that in practice both 
  things are sort of true, and in real life are 
  inextricably bound up with each other, but that 
  the moral force of the argument against 
  exploitation *really* derives from the second 
  consideration *rather* than the first.  I have a 
  number of doubts about Justin's position, which 
  I shall now spell out.
  
  1) What is wrong with robbery or theft, we 
  mostly think, is that it is, unlike a donation, 
  a coercive parting of some good from its owner.  
  At the very least robbery and theft, even though 
  the latter does not by definition involve any 
  actual violence against the person stolen from, 
  involve the removal of some good which a) 
  rightly belongs to someone else b) against the 
  will of that person, and c) in such a way that 
  the person stolen from is relatively powerless 
  to resist the removal.  Now a person can indeed 
  "consent" to the good's removal under some 
  threat--"Give me your wallet or I'll blow your 
  head off".  Alternatively, the good can be 
  removed without the person's knowledge (while he 
  is out of the house, say).  A person may 
  *resign* herself to being stolen from (e.g. 
  being forced to pay bribes) because of the 
  structure of the power relations in which she 
  finds herself, but what is key is a transfer of 
  some good rightly belonging to one person 
  contrary to that person's will and with no or 
  little effective immediate recourse.  To me this 
  sounds close enough to constitute a species of 
  coercion--one will dominates another, and the 
  latter will is dominated because it is 
  relatively powerless (though it is not necessary 
  that the relatively powerless agent got that way 
  by the action of the coercive agent--I can 
  coerce the unfortunate without having made them 
  unfortunate).  So I don't see that the 
  distinction Justin places so much reliance on is 
  one that makes a difference in this context.  
  The injustice of stealing, at least if it is 
  more than momentary, seems to *involve* a 
  coercive element, a going against the will of 
  its victim, when the victimizer knows he has 
  enough power to get away with it. 
  
  A question arises as to whether a person is 
  treated unjustly if what is done to him is not 
  against his will, or even more pertinently, in 
  conformity with his will.  My answer is no, 
  provided the person's will is operating with a 
  minimum degree of genuine autonomy and 
  independence.  Some workers in fact may 
  "consent" to capitalism, if they do, without 
  sufficient independence to meet this condition.  
  In practice it might not take very much actual 
  coercion to effect the expropriation.  
  Internalization of capitalist ideology may dull 
  the mind and undermine the autonomy of the will 
  of the worker to such a point that he hardly 
  notices what is happening.  This is a bit like 
  the case of the confidence trickster who steals 
  without resistance, or a rapist who first drugs 
  his victim.  Here the coercive element takes a 
  very subtle form, by negating even the capacity 
  to resist (for a time).  In practice workers 
  are, I think, a bit more resistant than that and 
  so the coercive element is more obvious. But if 
  workers were with genuine autonomy and 
  independence to consent to the relations 
  governing surplus transfers to capitalists, this 
  would constitute, it seems to me, a case of 
  donation, and so would involve no injustice, and 
  no coercion.  Of course, we would find a 
  generalized practice of this sort of donation 
  bizarre, and be mightily puzzled by it, and we 
  would rightly ask if there really wasn't 
  something fishy going on such that it would 
  nullify the presumption of autonomy and 
  independence.  But if we could satisfy ourselves 
  that this presumption described the facts, then 
  we could not object on the ground of injustice.
  
  2)  The converse does not follow.  That is, not 
  all cases of coercion are cases of injustice.  
  We rightly place certain people under arrest, 
  etc.  I can justly coerce another to obtain what 
  is rightfully mine.  Coercion as a *moral* 
  notion, therefore, seems to me to *presuppose* 
  some notion of justice--what moral rights and 
  obligations we have, deriving these from some 
  principles of minimum fairness or minimum 
  virtue.  If the capitalist drove the worker to 
  produce for his profit, but was within his 
  *rights* in doing so, then the fact that he 
  applied coercion would not be morally 
  significant (at least, not in the overall moral 
  context of the case).  What's wrong is not 
  simply that he uses coercion, but does so in a 
  context in which justice does not sanction its 
  use.
  
  3)  Justin complains about the justice/surplus 
  transfer account of exploitation because it 
  covers more cases than just the 
  capitalist-worker relationship, for example, it 
  covers the case of workers paying taxes to 
  support the poor.  But here surely we should say 
  that the coercion is *justified* by the correct 
  principles of distributive justice.  I.e. the 
  principle should state not that workers are 
  entitled to whatever their labor produces, but 
  rather that it so entitles them once they have 
  satisfied other obligations, which are necessary 
  to the reproduction of a fair and decent 
  society.  I.e. the agents of taxation and 
  redistribution to the poor have available to 
  them a moral principle (fairness) or virtue 
  (compassion) which the captalist expropriator 
  does not.  By eschewing the justice approach, 
  Justin, it seems to me, is in danger of making 
  it look as if he would wish to deny these 
  arguments to public agents by pretending that 
  these cases and the case of capitalist 
  exploitation are on all fours.  But it is 
  obvious, except to the most boneheaded (i.e. the 
  vast majority of libertarians) that the cases 
  are quite different.  The state has a reasonable 
  claim, the capitalist doesn't.  (I'm not talking 
  about working entrepreneurs here)
  
  4) In summary, it seems to me that Justin's 
  account presents a false dichotomy.  (In)Justice 
  and (Un)freedom are not separated in genuine 
  cases of exploitation (construed as a moral 
  notion).  Capitalism offends against justice, 
  and in doing so diminishes freedom.  But how 
  much freedom we ought to have is not independent 
  of considerations of justice.  Coercion, though 
  it infringes freedom understood in a pre-moral 
  sense, is not morally problematic unless we can 
  say if and how the infringement is unjust.  And 
  in deciding what is just or unjust, more goods 
  than simply the good of freedom must be taken 
  into account.
  
  As regards the question of productive versus 
  unproductive labor: we should ask why a 
  capitalist would employ unproductive labor if it 
  didn't (ex hypothesi) contribute to the 
  production of income which he could expropriate.
  But of course, production of income is not the 
  same thing as production of products.  For one 
  thing the former needs more labor than the 
  latter.
  
  Peter Burns
  pburns-AT-lmumail.lmu.edu  


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