Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 10:23:27 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Exploitation and unproductive labor



Peter,

I will send you two things: (1) my explanation of how to maintain the
general sort of view we seem to share about justice without fdalling into
relativism or question-begging, which is currently seeking a publisher,a
nd (2) my review of Peffer, to appear in Radical Philosophy Review of
Books whenever they get around to it. 

It seems that Peter and I actually pretty much agree on the nature of the
theory of justice. I have discussed my theory on the old list and it may
be archived there, I think under the topic of progress in history. Since
no one else seems to be rising to the bait, and since I have to do a lot
of research on affirmative action and the 14th amendendment over the next
few days while I get ready to go to Ann Arbor, I'll leave the matter here
(almost, I have one further comment). I will be out of town (cilumbus)
foir the summer. I'm trying to get a free account on Juno and if I do I
will be back maybe around the end of the month, but after Thursday I'm
shutting down this address till August. 

ALthough I think in the end Peter and I are close on the theory of
justice, I still do not think that theft is the best way to understand the
injustice involved in exploitation. In part this is because the usual way
Marxist's talk about this theft is to fall back on the idea that workers
are entitled to the value they create because they have a supposedly
natural right to it in virtue of having created it, and I don't think
there are any natural rights.But more deeply I think that while
capitalists do take what they are not entitled to, the explanation for
why they are not entitled to it is that in the long run workers will not
tolerate the distribution of burdens and benefit characteristic of
capitalkist society, the justice of which (i.e., the justice in which)
creates the bourgeois entitlement to profit. 

Maybe a clearer way to put
the point is this. Theft is a notion internal to a system of entitlements.
Thieves take what they are not permitted to by the prevailing system of
justice. This may be Marx's point in saying that in the context of
capitalism, there is nothing unjust about exploitation. But like Peter and
unlike Marx, at least officially, I think that capitalist justice is
objectively inferior to proletarian justice. Of course capitalist
exploittaion would be prohibited by proletarian justicer, which would not
even have any room for capitalists, but it would not be stealing, because
there would be no legalized exploitation of labor in a workers' state. If
someone in such a state were to illegally exploit labor, the criume would
be closer to slavery than to theft. And that I think is the root of the
issue. 

Anyway, exams are done. They were brutal. At least this view was widely
shared. As to how I did, we will see.

--Justin




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