Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man.” Man works

“as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter” (Tucker, p. 309).

Finally, Marx does not see exploitation as arising from market imperfec-

tions or from the presence of oligopolistic elements.

His labor theory of

value is meant to show, among other things, that even under a system of

perfect competition, exploitation exists in a capitalist society. He wants to

bring to light—to make clear for all to see—the way in which the capitalist

order, even when it is fully competitive, and even when it fully satisﬁes the

conception of justice most adequate to it, is still an unjust social system of

domination and exploitation. This last is crucial. Marx wants to say that

even a perfectly just capitalist system, one just by its own lights and the con-

ception of justice most adequate to it, is a system of exploitation. It re-

places feudal exploitation with capitalist exploitation.

At bottom, both are

the same. That is what the labor theory of value is supposed to show.

4. I should now say that I do not think the labor theory of value is suc-

cessful. Indeed, I think that Marx’s views can better be stated without using

this theory at all. In saying this I accept the view of Marglin, and of many

other present day Marxist economists, who do not regard the labor theory

of value either as sound or as essential. Sometimes it is insufﬁcient; at other

times, even when sufﬁcient, it is superﬂuous.

The real point of the labor theory of value concerns the fundamental

controversy about the nature of capitalist product. Contrary to the domi-

nant neo-orthodox view, which stresses the parity of the claims of land,

capital, and labor, and therefore the parity of the claims of landlords, cap-

italists, and laborers, Marx puts forward the central and basic role of the

working class under the capitalist mode of production as under previous

such modes. The aim of the theory is to highlight the main features of cap-

italism as a mode of production that are hidden from view by the parity of

the capitalists in market relations of exchange. All this is by way of provid-

ing what Marx thought was a truly scientiﬁc basis for condemning cap-

italism as a system of domination and exploitation.

We come back to this

in the next lecture in discussing Marx and justice.

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His View of Capitalism as a Social System

15. Such a view is found in A. C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan,

1920).

16. Capital, I, Ch. XXVI: ¶¶5–7, in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 433.

17. See Stephen A. Marglin, Growth, Distribution, and Prices (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

vard University Press, 1984), pp. 462f.

18. See Marglin, Growth, Distribution, and Prices, pp. 463, 468.

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5. With this said, I conclude with a comment about labor-power: Marx

was proud of the distinction he drew between labor-power and labor, or

the use of labor-power. He thought this distinction helped him to explain

how proﬁt could arise in a free market system of non-coercive exchanges in

which, in every market, equal values exchange for equal values.

He holds that (under the assumptions of Vol. I) the capitalist, in hiring

the worker, pays the worker the full value of the worker’s labor-power.

This means, as we have seen, that a worker is paid wages that equal the so-

cially necessary labor time required for the production of his labor-power.

During a day, this is the amount to cover the worker’s maintenance and to

make good wear and tear, and other losses. In short, a worker’s wages cover

what is socially necessary to enable workers to produce, and to reproduce

themselves over time.

The distinction between labor-power and the use of labor-power is

analogous to the distinction between a machine (as a piece of capital equip-

ment) and the use of the machine (for a certain purpose for a certain period

of time). Capitalists, in hiring workers, are renting human machines. Walras

called the human being viewed as a machine, “personal capital.” Education

and training are often called investment in “human capital.” How much a

capitalist can use the human machine, what a capitalist can get the worker

to do in the work process during a working day, may vary. In any case, the

capitalist has paid a full day’s value for the machine. Hiring the worker is

worthwhile because labor-power has the capacity to produce more value

than it takes to produce the labor-power itself. This is the crucial point.

Appendix: Marx Lecture I

1. Now for a few deﬁnitions and remarks to clarify the labor theory of

value. From Capital, Vol. I, we read the following. (All these selections are

in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader.)

Ch. 1: Commodities, Secs. 1, 2, 4;

Ch. 4: General Formula for Capital, entire;

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19. There is a difﬁculty here: if labor alone is creative, why don’t the capitalists bid up

the price of labor until there are only zero proﬁts? On this see Joseph A. Schumpeter, His-

tory of Economic Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 650f. There are other

answers.

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Ch. 6: The Buying and Selling of Labor-Power, entire;

Ch. 7: The Labor Process and the Process of Producing Surplus

Value, Sec. 2, pp. 357–361;

Ch. 10: The Working Day, Secs. 1, 2.

From Capital, Vol. III, the selection in Tucker, pp. 439–441.

2. References: (in Tucker) to deﬁnitions involved in the labor theory of

value: commodity deﬁned: 306f.

the value of a commodity is equal to the total socially necessary la-

bor time required for its production: 305–307.

socially necessary labor time: 306.

abstract vs. concrete labor: 310.

simple labor: 310.

simple labor as unskilled labor: 311.

skilled labor as simple labor multiplied: 310.

labor-power deﬁned: 336.

value of labor-power deﬁned: 339.

3. A schema: in connection with Ch. 10, Sec. 1, pp. 361–364 (see Figure 7).

Necessary vs. surplus labor: 361–364.

Surplus value: 351.

Absolute and relative surplus value: 418.

4. A Deﬁnition:

The value of a mass of commodities = the value added by: C + V + S,

where C = constant capital (machinery, raw materials, etc.).

V = variable capital (wages or paid labor).

S = surplus labor (unpaid labor).

Since machinery and raw materials add no value, and wages are paid

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His View of Capitalism as a Social System

Figure 7. Schema, Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 10, Sec. 1.

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out for necessary labor, total surplus value is the product of total surplus

labor.

This means that Marx’s labor theory of value attributes the whole so-

cial surplus in any period time to surplus (unpaid) labor.

5. Some Ratios:

The ratio s/v = ratio of surplus labor / necessary labor.

= the rate of exploitation (the rate of surplus value).

The ratio s/c + v = rate of proﬁt.

The ratio c/c + v = the organic composition of capital.

6. A Remark

The rate of proﬁt depends only on s/v and c/c + v; that is, only on the

rate of surplus value (exploitation) and the organic composition of capital.

This relation holds because:

s/c + v = (s/v)(1− (c/c + v)),

which says that the rate of proﬁt equals the rate of exploitation multiplied

by one minus the organic composition of capital (= c/c + v).

Thus, the greater the rate of exploitation, the higher the rate of

proﬁt; and the greater the organic composition of capital, the lower the

rate of proﬁt.

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His Conception of Right and Justice

§1. A Paradox in Marx’s Views of Justice

1. Let me begin with some discussion about Marx’s ideas about exploi-

tation: Marx’s deﬁnition of exploitation in his labor theory of value is a

purely descriptive deﬁnition: it is given by the ratio of surplus (or unpaid)

labor over necessary labor, or s/v. But this cannot be all there is to the con-

cept of exploitation. The reason is that a just socialist society, like any other

society, needs a social surplus, let’s assume, to provide for public goods such

as public health, education and welfare, environmental protection, and

much else. This means that people must work for more time than it takes

to produce the goods they receive as wages. This is true in any society one

cares to live in. Thus, while the ratio s/v is deﬁned as the rate of exploita-

tion, and while this is a purely descriptive deﬁnition, there must be more to

exploitation than this. For certainly, exploitation is a moral concept, and im-

plicitly appeals to principles of justice of some kind. Otherwise, it would

not have the interest for us that it does.

For Marx it is the institutional background within which the ratio s/v

occurs that makes this ratio a measure of exploitation. Whether s/v is ex-

ploitation depends on the nature of the basic structure that gives rise to it,

and on who has the institutional control of s. Marx must have a way of

judging that structure as just or unjust. In the next lecture, I remark that he

views exploitation as arising once the basic structure rests on a basic in-

equality in alienable productive assets owned by the two main classes of

capitalist society. In the capitalist case, surplus labor is in no way controlled

by workers collectively, say through their democratic votes, nor is it in gen-

eral to their good; whereas in socialist society the total of non-consumption

goods (which replaces s in the socialist case) is both. We must look at the

basic structure of society to see how what is produced by s is used. If it is

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used for such things as the average worker’s public health, education, and

welfare, it is no longer treated as surplus labor.

The upshot is that the concept of exploitation presupposes a concep-

tion of right and justice in the light of which basic structures are judged. Or

if not a conception of right and justice, certainly some kind of normative

view is required. This raises the question: What kind of normative view did

Marx hold? There has been considerable controversy about this among stu-

dents of Marx, whether they are Marxists or not. For example, did he con-

demn capitalism as unjust? There are those who think he did, and those

who think he did not.

Of course, both sides take for granted that he condemned capitalism.

This is obvious and leaps off the pages of Capital. The question concerns

the particular values in terms of which he did so: whether those values in-

clude a conception of right and justice, or are expressed in terms of other

values, for example, those of freedom, self-realization, and humanity.

2. The answer I suggest (and here I follow Norman Geras and G. A. Co-

hen) is that Marx did condemn capitalism as unjust. On the other hand, he

did not see himself as doing so.

What explains this seeming paradox is that

Marx’s explicit comments about justice interpret the concept in a narrow

way, and this in two respects:

(a) He thinks of justice as the prevailing legal and judicial norms inter-

nal to the social and economic order; and when appropriate, those norms

are adequate to that order’s fulﬁlling its historical role.

(b) Marx also thinks of justice as relating to exchanges in the market

and beyond that to the distribution of income and of consumption goods

that results. In this aspect justice is commutative and distributive justice,

both narrowly construed.

But once we think of a conception of political justice in a broad fashion

as applying to the basic structure of society and thus to the institutions of

background justice, then Marx might have had, at least implicitly, a concep-

tion of political justice in the broad sense. If this proves to be the case, it

may remove the paradox. Whether he does have such a political conception

turns, as I have said, on the speciﬁc values he appeals to in condemning cap-

italism.

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1. See Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 440, from Capital, Vol. 3.

2. See Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” in Literature of Rev-

olution: Essays on Marxism (London: Verso, 1986), p. 36.

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3. I shall proceed as follows: I ﬁrst sketch some reasons for saying Marx

does not condemn capitalism as unjust. And then I sketch some reasons for

saying he does, at least implicitly. By this I mean that what he says implies

that capitalism is unjust although he does not say so in so many words.

Later I will sketch his conception of a full communist society—the ideal

in light of which he judges capitalism and all preceding historical forms of

society—to see whether that ideal contains elements that make it include a

conception of political justice and in what sense, if any, it is a society be-

yond justice.

It must be admitted, however, that this question may not be conclu-

sively decidable. Marx did not think carefully or systematically about it.

While he was a scholar by nature and temperament, given his aims, he

didn’t believe it was important to do so. Other things he thought more ur-

gent. In this he may have been quite mistaken, since his seemingly dismiss-

ive attitude to ideas of right and justice may have had serious long-run con-

sequences for socialism. Who knows? But leaving that aside, the result is

that we have to piece together what he says, and ask ourselves what overall

view best accounts for and connects the more signiﬁcant and clearly formu-

lated aspects of his thought.

§2. Justice as a Juridical Conception

1. I begin with the view suggested by Allen Wood and others.

The

main thoughts seem to be these, and then I will give a few details.

(a) Marx holds in Capital that the wage relation, as an exchange of

equivalent values (labor power for wages) involves no injustice to the worker.

(b) In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx attacks socialist ideas of

fair or just distribution as seriously in error and moving the wrong way.

sential elements of—speciﬁc modes of production; and in this sense, they

are relative to the particular historical period in which they are in force.

(d) Marx thinks of morality in general as ideological and thus as belong-

ing to the superstructure of society; morality, and with it justice, changes

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His Conception of Right and Justice

3. Allen Wood, Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 1981).

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when that superstructure adjusts to the historical sequence of speciﬁc

modes of production.

(e) To insist that Marx has a concern for justice is mistakenly to cast his

views in a narrow, reformist direction of distributive concerns, such as

wage levels and differences of income; whereas his aims were clearly more

fundamental and more revolutionary, concerned as they were with the

transformation of the private property and wage system itself.

(f ) Also, to say that Marx was concerned with justice is to detract from

his main effort, which was to uncover the real, active historical forces that

were, he thought, leading to the overthrow and collapse of capitalism. To

say this would substitute instead moral arguments of various kinds, which

Marx viewed as idealistic, and of which he was highly suspicious.

(g) Besides, he thought that justice, since it was a juridical value, could

not be put into effect in a full communist society, which Marx is alleged to

have conceived as without juridical institutions of law and the state.

(h) Marx conceived of full communist society as one beyond the cir-

cumstances of scarcity and conﬂict. It is these circumstances that render the

norms of justice necessary, all of which looks forward to the higher distrib-

utive standard: “From each according to their ability, to each according to

their needs.”

(i) Marx did, of course, condemn capitalism, but he did so in the name

of other values, such as freedom and self-realization.

2. Now for a few details about this ﬁrst view. Wood, for example, thinks

that Marx does not criticize capitalism as unjust, and that he even appears

to say that it is just.

His explanation for this is the following:

Marx thinks of a conception of justice as a political and juridical con-

ception that goes with the institutional separation between the state and so-

ciety. This institutional separation presupposes the need for the state, and

hence the existence of a dominating class and a dominated class. When

such a state exists, exploitation (in Marx’s sense) also exists. Political and le-

gal institutions belong to what Marx sometimes calls the superstructure:

these institutions have a regulatory role and are adjusted to the require-

ments of the mode and relations of production. Each social form, each

kind of political organization and its associated mode of production, has a

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4. See Critique of the Gotha Program, I, Tucker, p. 531.

5. Wood, Karl Marx.

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distinctive conception of justice that is adequate for it as a social system.

When these institutions are properly adjusted to the underlying mode of

production, they serve its operative requirements in an effective way.

So, for Marx, the properly adjusted institutions of the superstructure in-

clude a conception of justice which serves the historical role of the underly-

ing economic mode of production. Capitalism, like any other historical

mode of production, has a properly adjusted superstructure and a concep-

tion of justice adequate to it. This conception is the one that best serves

capitalism’s historical role of building up the means of production at a

rapid rate compared to earlier social forms. But then: “The modern laborer

. . . instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper

below the conditions of existence of its own class. He becomes a pauper”

(Communist Manifesto, Tucker, p. 483).

Thus, capitalism’s fulﬁllment of its role is what makes possible the full

communist society of the not too distant future. Indeed, in the Communist

Manifesto, the capitalist as the personiﬁcation of capital is the great hero of

history who transforms the world and prepares the way for the “victory of

the proletariat” and the society Marx envisions.

3. Thus, on this view, capitalism, especially in its high period, the period

when it is effectively carrying out its historical role of building up the

means of production, is not unjust. There is a conception of justice appro-

priate to it, and by this conception, it is just so long as its norms are re-

spected. Other conceptions of justice are simply irrelevant; they may apply

to other economic modes of production that have existed in previous times,

or that will exist the future, but they do not apply in the particular historical

conditions of capitalism.

There is no conception of justice, then, that is always applicable or that

applies to all social forms. In this sense there are for Marx no universally

valid principles of justice. Whether a conception of justice applies to a par-

ticular political and social system is settled by whether it is adequate to the

existing mode of production in view of its historical role.

One passage in Capital, Vol. III, suggests this kind of view. Marx writes:

To speak here of natural justice, as Gilbart does,...isnonsense. The

justice of the transactions between agents of production rests on the

fact that these [transactions] arise as natural consequences out of the

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His Conception of Right and Justice

6. See “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Section I, Tucker, pp. 473–483.

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production relationships. The juristic forms in which these economic

transactions appear as willful [voluntary] acts of the parties concerned,

as expressions of their common will and as contracts that may be en-

forced by law against some individual party, cannot, being mere forms,

determine this content. They [these juristic forms] merely express it.

This content is just whenever it corresponds, is appropriate, to the

mode of production. It is unjust whenever it contradicts that mode.

Slavery, on the basis of the capitalist production, is unjust; likewise

fraud in the quality of commodities. (Capital, Vol. III, International

Publishers edition, pp. 339–340. Chapter 21, ¶5; italics added)

This passage occurs when Marx is discussing interest-bearing capital. In

a footnote to it he quotes Gilbart, The History and Principles of Banking (Lon-

don, 1834), as saying: “That a man who borrows money with a view of

making a proﬁt by it, should give some portion of his proﬁt to the lender, is

a self-evident principle of natural justice.” Marx replies that the payment of

interest is not a matter of a self-evident principle of natural justice. The

payment of interest arises as the natural consequence of the supply and de-

mand for funds on the money market, as this market exists within the

framework of capitalism. A loan is a valid contract, and the legal system

under capitalism will enforce it.

4. This passage is not by itself an account of a conception of justice un-

der capitalism, but it does suggest several points. First, there is the distinc-

tion Marx makes between juridical forms—for example, the juridical form

of a (valid) contract (as, say, an agreement to make a loan, or a purchase)—

and the content of these forms. The same juridical forms may be found in

many different legal systems and may apply to economic transactions under

widely different modes of production. I assume that the content of the ju-

ridical form of contract, say, refers to the speciﬁc kinds of contracts that

can be legally made and that will be enforced. Thus, under capitalism, a

contract into slavery, or for the buying and selling of slaves, is void, and

therefore unjust under the capitalist conception of justice. I assume also

that the content of the juridical form of contract covers the various condi-

tions under which valid agreements are made. Thus, under capitalism,

fraud and deception in reaching agreement is ruled out as unjust, as is ev-

erything else plainly incompatible with a regime of free contract.

Second, it seems that whether slavery or fraud, etc., is unjust under

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