Karl marx what makes a society just

And since exchange value is the phenomenal expression of value, the former becomes superfluous. Marx explicitly spells out this vision of a new society in the Grundrisse :. The general character of labor would not be given to it only by exchange; its communal character would determine participation in the products. The communal character of production would from the outset make the product into a communal, general one. Mediation of course has to take place.

Marx [—] a Not all forms of social mediation are constitutive of value production. The latter is transcended when social relations become mediated by intersubjective connections between freely associated individuals. The alternative to abstract forms of domination is not, for Marx, domination by concrete collective or social entities such as characterized pre-capitalist societies.

Instead, in a new society individuals collectively learn how to live without the domination of either concrete social hierarchies or the abstractions of value. Cooperative forms of production and distribution can surely prefigure such forms of life after capitalism. Nevertheless, democratic and cooperative forms of decision making do not by themselves contravene the law of value so long as they are circumscribed by the dictates of socially necessary labor time—if not immediately, then over the long haul.

The notion that the alternative to capitalism can spring sui generis from isolated, separated experiments in collectivized living—a notion common to the tradition of Proudhon and his successors—was alien to Marx.

So, is there a way out? The contrast of capitalist with non-capitalist modes of life makes it possible to break from the mind-forged manacles that naturalize transitory social formations. He first turns to the past by briefly surveying pre-capitalist economic forms in which common ownership of the means of production prevail.

No abstract entity, such as exchange value, mediates human relations; the connection between producers and their products are transparent. Marx will delve deeper into this subject in his studies of pre-capitalist societies after completing Volume 1 of Capital , in his voluminous writings of the s and s on communal forms in India, China, Russia, Indonesia, North Africa, and among Native Americans.

Exchange value and universalized commodity production come to an end. Producers decide how to make, distribute, and consume the total social product. Remuneration is based on actual labor time—the quantum of actual hours of labor.

A new mode of conceiving, relating to, and organizing time becomes the cardinal principle of socialism. But a parallel is not an identity. The exchange could not be more different than what exists in capitalism, since it is defined by a freely associated exchange of activities instead of an exchange of commodities based on an abstract average over which individuals have no control. Socially necessary labor time confronts the individuals as an impersonal force that acts irrespective of p.

Distribution of the elements of production on the basis of actual labor time represents a radical break from capitalism, since its signals that its peculiar social form of labor—the split between abstract and concrete labor—has been abolished. As a result, value production comes to an end with the inception of socialism. All that is permitted, according to the traditional Marxist conception—one that is shared by many who criticize traditional Marxism—is to discuss the immanent possibilities for emancipation that exist within the present.

And yet this is exactly what Marx calls on us to do. Has he fallen prey to utopianism? No, because the future is generated within the present, by struggles against the dictates of value production. Marx had occasion to directly witness such a struggle shortly after publishing Volume 1 of Capital —the Paris Commune. The contrast between existing society and the vision of the future that he discerned in the praxis of the communards led him to revise his discussion of commodity fetishism in the second German edition of , which devotes for the first time a distinct section to it.

He was surely aware that not all struggles that aim to bring down the status quo are socialist or Communist. To know whether or not a movement is socialist requires evaluating it. To evaluate something requires a measure. And a measure requires a conception that defines it. Marx is supplying such a conception in chapter 1 of Capital.

As the text of Capital demonstrates, there is no necessary connection between imagining the future p. But a question remains: Why does Marx pose actual labor time as a determining principle of a post-capitalist society in his brief discussion in chapter one of Capital?

The Grundrisse states that capitalism generates the material conditions for its supersession by reducing the amount of living labor relative to capital at the point of production. Is this perspective at odds with what is developed in Capital? Marx never held the view that labor would remain the predominant form of social interaction in a post-capitalist society.

Capital poses actual labor time as a measure for distributing the products of labor, but it does not suggest that it serves as the measure for social relations as a whole. Moreover, Marx does not state even in the Grundrisse that labor is completely abolished in socialism. What about the labor that is not productive of surplus value, such as work that involves caring, nurturing, teaching, and critical thinking—which some refer to as affective labor? The latter tends to be devalued in capitalism, since it is not productive of surplus value.

Which is why the domestic, reproductive labor of women is often downplayed or ignored. But is it a given that affective labor has no place in socialism? There is no reason to presume that the abolition of productive labor involves the abolition of all forms of labor—unless instrumental, industrial labor is equated with every kind of laboring activity. But to do so is to naturalize a transitory historical formation.

Nor p. Marx is pursuing a different question—namely, what social relations are necessary for the production of surplus value? He does so in order to pinpoint how to abolish value production. It is not only Volume 1 of Capital that contains discussion of the economic content of a post-capitalist society; it is also found in a number of passages in Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital.

He writes in the former:. With collective production, money capital is completely dispensed with. The society distributes labor power and means of production between the various branches of industry. There is no reason why the producers should not receive paper tokens permitting them to withdraw an amount corresponding to their labor time from the social consumption fund.

But these tokens are not money; they do not circulate. Marx [] The Critique of the Gotha Program. Marx responds by directly discussing a future socialist or Communist society the two terms are interchangeable in Marx and do not denote distinct historical stages.

In doing so he distinguishes between two phases of socialism or Communism: the first as it emerges from the womb of the old society, the second as it stands on its own foundations. Modern workers, he argues, have become estranged from the goods they produced, from their own labour activity, and from their fellow workers. Rather than achieving a sense of satisfaction and self-actualisation in their labour, workers are left exhausted and spiritually depleted.

For Marx, the antidote to modern alienation is a humanist conception of communism based on free and cooperative production. The Communist Manifesto Available here. It outlines the growing tensions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat under capitalist relations of production, and predicts the triumph of the workers.

The German Ideology Available here. He traces the development of different historical modes of production and argues that the present capitalist one will be replaced by communism. After his death, communist revolutions did come to pass—not exactly where or how he imagined they would but, nevertheless, in his name. By the middle of the twentieth century, more than a third of the people in the world were living under regimes that called themselves, and genuinely believed themselves to be, Marxist.

He saw that modern free-market economies, left to their own devices, produce gross inequalities, and he transformed a mode of analysis that goes all the way back to Socrates—turning concepts that we think we understand and take for granted inside out—into a resource for grasping the social and economic conditions of our own lives.

Apart from his loyal and lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, almost no one would have guessed, in , the year Marx died, at the age of sixty-four, how influential he would become. Eleven people showed up for the funeral. For most of his career, Marx was a star in a tiny constellation of radical exiles and failed revolutionaries and the censors and police spies who monitored them but almost unknown outside it.

The books he is famous for today were not exactly best-sellers. After four years, it had sold a thousand copies, and it was not translated into English until Marx had spectacularly bad handwriting; Engels was one of the few people outside the family who could decipher it. The unfinished Paris manuscripts, a holy text in the nineteen-sixties, did not appear in English until Marx seems to have regarded none of that material as publishable.

To the extent that those movements were reformist rather than revolutionary, they were not Marxist although Marx did, in later years, speculate about the possibility of a peaceful transition to communism. With the growth of the labor movement came excitement about socialist thought and, with that, an interest in Marx.

After , communism was no longer a utopian fantasy. Marx is a warning about what can happen when people defy their parents and get a Ph. Hegel was cautious about criticizing religion and the Prussian state; the Young Hegelians were not, and, just as Marx was being awarded his degree, in , there was an official crackdown. So Marx did what many unemployed Ph. There is a story, though Sperber considers it unsubstantiated, that once, in desperation, he applied for a job as a railway clerk and was turned down for bad handwriting.

In the eighteen-forties, Marx edited and contributed to political newspapers in Europe; from to , he wrote a column for the New York Daily Tribune , the paper with the largest circulation in the world at the time.

When journalistic work dried up, he struggled. He depended frequently on support from Engels and advances on his inheritance.

Sperber contests this. Marx had less money to waste than historians have assumed, and he accepted poverty as the price of his politics. He wrote and published articles offensive to the authorities, and, in , he was kicked out of Cologne, where he was helping run a paper called Rheinische Zeitung. He went to Paris, which had a large German community, and that is where he and Engels became friends. Engels, who was two years younger, had the same politics as Marx. Engels hated the work, but he was good at it, as he was at most things.

Engels eventually became a partner, and the income helped him keep Marx alive. In , Marx was expelled from France. He moved to Brussels. Three years later, though, something happened that almost no one had foreseen: revolutions broke out across Europe, including in France, Italy, Germany, and the Austrian Empire.

When unrest reached Brussels, he was suspected of arming insurgents and was evicted from Belgium, but he returned to Paris.

Rioters there had broken into the Tuileries and set the French throne on fire. He got the phrase from Engels. Bonaparte eventually declared himself Emperor and ruled until , when France lost a war with Prussia. The Paris Commune was a by-product of that war. So in Marx was forced into exile once again. He fled with his family to London. He assumed that the stay would be temporary, but he lived there for the rest of his life.

The impressive bronze bust you see on his tombstone today was placed there, in , by the Communist Party of Great Britain. What was Marx like? The number of first-person reports is not large, but they tend to agree. He was, in some respects, a caricature of the German academic which he had once expected to become : an imperious know-it-all with untamed hair in a misbuttoned frock coat.

In professional matters, he was forbidding. He was a cogent speaker but had a lisp and was a poor orator; he knew it, and rarely addressed a crowd.

He was ruthless in print, made enemies of many friends and former allies, and did not suffer fools—a large subset of his acquaintance, in his view. For example, if I am taxed for the benefit of those unable to work, I will be exploited by the above definition, but this is not what the definition of exploitation was intended to capture. Worse still, if there is one person exploited much more gravely than anyone else in the economy, then it may turn out that no-one else is exploited.

Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to adjust the definition to take account of these difficulties, and as noted several other accounts of Marx-inspired accounts of exploitation have been offered that are independent of the labour theory of value.

Many of these alternative definitions add a notion of unfreedom or domination to unequal exchange of labour and goods Vrousalis The exploited person is forced to accept a situation in which he or she just never gets back what they put into the labour process.

Now there may be, in particular cases, a great deal to be said about why this is perfectly acceptable from a moral point of view. However, on the face of it such exploitation appears to be unjust. Nevertheless, we will see in the next section why attributing such a position to Marx himself is fraught with difficulty.

The issue of Marx and morality poses a conundrum. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never directly says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he directly say that communism would be a just form of society. In fact he frequently takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works.

The puzzle is why this should be, given the weight of indirect moral commentary one also finds in his writings. There are also separate questions concerning his attitude to ideas of justice, and to ideas of morality more broadly concerned. This, then, generates four questions: a Did Marx think capitalism unjust? These are some of the questions we consider in this section.

The initial argument that Marx must have thought that capitalism is unjust is based on the observation that Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker. How could this fail to be unjust? Allen Wood is perhaps the leading advocate of the view that Marx did not believe that capitalism is unjust. Wood argues that Marx takes this approach because his general theoretical approach excludes any trans-epochal standpoint from which one can comment on the justice of an economic system.

Even though it is acceptable to criticise particular behaviour from within an economic structure as unjust and theft under capitalism would be an example it is not possible to criticise capitalism as a whole. Marx claims that juridical institutions are part of the superstructure, and that ideas of justice are ideological. Accordingly, the role of both the superstructure and ideology, in the functionalist reading of historical materialism adopted here, is to stabilise the economic structure.

Consequently, to state that something is just under capitalism is simply a judgement that it will tend to have the effect of advancing capitalism.

According to Marx, in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; the core of the theory of ideology. Ziyad Husami however, argues that Wood is mistaken, ignoring the fact that for Marx ideas undergo a double determination. We need to differentiate not just by economic system, but also by economic class within the system. Therefore the ideas of the non-ruling class may be very different from those of the ruling class. Of course, it is the ideas of the ruling class that receive attention and implementation, but this does not mean that other ideas do not exist.

Husami goes as far as to argue that members of the proletariat under capitalism have an account of justice that matches communism. First, it cannot explain why Marx never explicitly described capitalism as unjust, and second, it overlooks the distance Marx wanted to place between his own scientific socialism, and that of other socialists who argued for the injustice of capitalism.

Nevertheless, this leaves us with a puzzle. Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is, once more, from G. Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was unjust Cohen In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have perfect knowledge of his own mind.

In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view. But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language. Such an interpretation is bound to be controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts. Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live.

Points made in his early writings remain present throughout his writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfilment and freedom. People do not relate to each other as humans should. Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not?

Capitalism impedes human flourishing. It is hard to disagree with the judgement that Marx. Roberts Marx, though, once more refrained from making this explicit; he seemed to show no interest in locating his criticism of capitalism in any of the traditions of moral philosophy, or explaining how he was generating a new tradition.

There may have been two reasons for his caution. The first was that while there were bad things about capitalism, there is, from a world historical point of view, much good about it too. For without capitalism, communism would not be possible.

Capitalism is to be transcended, not abolished, and this may be difficult to convey in the terms of moral philosophy. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need to return to the contrast between Marxian and other forms of socialism. Many non-Marxian socialists appealed to universal ideas of truth and justice to defend their proposed schemes, and their theory of transition was based on the idea that appealing to moral sensibilities would be the best, perhaps only, way of bringing about the new chosen society.

Marx wanted to distance himself from these other socialist traditions, and a key point of distinction was to argue that the route to understanding the possibilities of human emancipation lay in the analysis of historical and social forces, not in morality. Hence, for Marx, any appeal to morality was theoretically a backward step.

Would communism be a just society? Communism is described by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme , as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need.

This certainly sounds like a theory of justice, and could be adopted as such Gilabert If we start with the idea that the point of ideas of justice is to resolve disputes, then a society without disputes would have no need or place for justice.

We can see this by reflecting upon the idea of the circumstances of justice in the work of David Hume — But Hume also suggested that justice would not be needed in other circumstances; if there were complete fellow-feeling between all human beings, there would be no conflict and no need for justice.

Of course, one can argue whether either material abundance or human fellow-feeling to this degree would be possible, but the point is that both arguments give a clear sense in which communism transcends justice. Nevertheless, we remain with the question of whether Marx thought that communism could be commended on other moral grounds. On a broad understanding, in which morality, or perhaps better to say ethics, is concerned with the idea of living well, it seems that communism can be assessed favourably in this light.

But beyond this we can be brief in that the considerations adduced in Section 2 above apply again. Quite possibly his determination to retain this point of difference between himself and other socialists led him to disparage the importance of morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical necessity.

There are, of course, some famous quotations, not least from The German Ideology manuscripts. The point should not be exaggerated, but these striking images notwithstanding, there is no clear and sustained discussion of ideology in the Marxian corpus. Many commentators maintain that the search for a single model of ideology in his work has to be given up. Marx does not view ideology as a feature of all societies, and, in particular, suggests that it will not be a feature of a future communist society.

This stability is not permanent, but it can last for extended historical periods. This stability appears puzzling to Marx because class-divided societies are flawed in ways which not only frustrate human flourishing, but also work to the material advantage of the ruling minority. Why do the subordinate classes, who form a majority, tolerate these flaws, when resistance and rebellion of various kinds might be in their objective interests?

Such societies might often involve the direct repression or the threat of it of one group by another, but Marx does not think that this is the whole story. There are also non-repressive sources of social stability, and ideology is usually, and plausibly, considered one of these.

Other factors might include: dull economic pressure, including the daily grind of having to earn a living; doubts—justified or otherwise—about the feasibility of alternatives; sensitivity to the possible costs of radical social change; and collective action problems of various kinds which face those who do want to rebel and resist.

Marx does not think individuals are permanently trapped within ideological modes of thinking. Ideology may have an initial hold, but it is not portrayed as impervious to reason and evidence, especially in circumstances in which the objective conditions for social change obtain.

And they are social in that they directly concern, or indirectly impact upon, the action-guiding understandings of self and society that individuals have. These action-guiding understandings include the dominant legal, political, religious, and philosophical views within particular class-divided societies in periods of stability MECW Not all false or misleading beliefs count for Marx as ideological. Honest scientific error, for example can be non-ideological.

And ideological belief can be misleading without being strictly false. Perhaps the only reason I believe something to be the case is that the belief in question has a consoling effect on me. Arguably such a belief is held ideologically, even if it happens to be true. Nevertheless paradigmatic examples of ideology have a false content.

For example, ideology often portrays institutions, policies, and decisions which are in the interests of the economically dominant class, as being in the interests of the society as a whole MECW 5: 60 ; and ideology often portrays social and political arrangements which are contingent, or historical, or artificial, as being necessary, or universal, or natural MECW In addition to false or misleading content, ideological beliefs typically have at least two additional characteristics, relating to their social origin and their class function.

Ideology stems, in part, from this deceptive surface appearance which makes it difficult to grasp the underlying social flaws that benefit the economically dominant class. Marx portrays the striving to uncover essences concealed by misleading appearances as characteristic of scientific endeavour MECW 37, And, in this context, he distinguishes between classical political economy, which strove—albeit not always successfully—to uncover the essential relations often concealed behind misleading appearances, and what he calls vulgar economy, which happily restricts itself to the misleading appearances themselves MECW 37, In response critics often see this as just another example of sloppy functional reasoning—purportedly widespread in the Marxist tradition—whereby a general pattern is asserted without the identification of any of the mechanisms which might generate that pattern.

In the present case, it is said that Marx never properly explains why the ruling ideas should be those of the ruling class Elster Yet there are obvious possible mechanisms here. To give two examples. First, there is the control of the ruling class over the means of mental production, and in particular the print and broadcast media which in capitalist societies are typically owned and controlled by the very wealthy MECW 5, A second possible mechanism appeals to the psychological need of individuals for invented narratives that legitimise or justify their social position; for instance, Marx identifies a widespread need, in flawed societies, for the consolatory effects of religion MECW 3, This broad heading—the state and politics—could cover very many different issues.

Consequently, many other important political issues—the nature of pre-capitalist states, relations between states, the political transition to communism, and so on—are not dealt with. Marx offers no unified theoretical account of the state in capitalist society. Instead his remarks on this topic are scattered across the course of his activist life, and deeply embedded in discussions of contemporary events, events which most modern readers will know very little about.

The next three paragraphs draw heavily on Elster — On this account, the state might also act against the short term, or the factional, interests of particular capitalists.

The picture here is of the state as an instrument directed—presumably by a subset of capitalists or their representatives—in ways which promote the long term interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. This model gets its name from the exceptional social circumstances said to explain the independence of the state in this case.

In situations where the social power of the two warring classes of contemporary society—capitalists and workers—are very nearly balanced, the political state and especially the executive can gain independence from both, exploiting that conflict in order to promote its own interests the interests of the political caste.

On this account, the state has interests of its own, but presumably only gets to pursue them if those promises to others are plausible, finding some reflection in its policies and behaviour. Where the instrumental picture claims that the state acts in the interests of the capitalist class because it is directly controlled by the latter, the abdication picture advances an explanatory connection between the promotion of bourgeois interests and the retreat from the direct exercise of power.

There are several possible explanations of why the bourgeoisie might remain outside of politics in order to promote their own interests. To give three examples: the bourgeoisie might recognise that their own characteristic short-termism could be fatal to their own interests if they exercised direct political as well as economic power; the bourgeoisie might find political rule sufficiently time and effort consuming to withdraw from it, discovering that the economic benefits kept on coming regardless; or the bourgeoisie might appreciate that abdication weakened their class opponents, forcing the proletariat to fight on two fronts against capital and government and thereby making it less able to win those struggles.

The instrumental account is the earliest account, which he largely abandons from the early s, presumably noticing how poorly it captured contemporary political realities—in particular, the stable existence of states which were not directly run by the capitalist class, but which still in some way served their interests.

That outcome is possible under either of the two other accounts. However, Marx seems to have thought of the class balance model as a temporary solution in exceptional circumstances, and perhaps held that it failed to allow the stable explanatory connection that he sought between the extant political arrangements and the promotion of dominant economic interests.

A weak definition of state autonomy might portray the state as autonomous when it is independent of direct control by the economically dominant class. On this definition, both the class balance and abdication models—but not the instrumental account—seem to provide for autonomy. Elster Only the class balance view seems to allow significant explanatory autonomy.