Marx and Cohen on Exploitation and the labor theory of value

Gerald A. Cohen, in ‘The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation’, argues that, contrary to the traditional assumption, Marx's charge of exploitation against capitalism does not require the labor theory of value. However, there is a related but simpler basis for the charge. Hence Marx's criticism can stand even if the labor theory of value falls. Furthermore, he argues that the labor theory of value is false. It is argued here that Cohen is mistaken; the charge Marx makes against capitalism does require the labor theory of value. Cohen's conception of exploitation is weaker than Marx's both theoretically and morally. It is also argued that Cohen's criticisms of the labor theory of value rest on misunderstandings of the theory and Marx's methodology.     

I. Marx's two‐fold character of labour

Ulrich Steinvorth ('Marx's Analysis of Commodity Exchange’, Inquiry, Vol. 19 [1976]) and C. J. Arthur ('Labour: Marx's Concrete Universal’, Inquiry, Vol. 21 [1978]) rely on the two‐fold character of labour in arguing that the mysteries of money and profit have been correctly interpreted by Marx. However, Marx's own arguments for his distinction between abstract and concrete labour are faulty, as is his identification of labour and material products. They also claim that the exchange of commodities and distribution of resources in capitalist society validate Marx's theory that the determination of value by labour‐time is the ‘secret’ behind capitalist crises. These claims are insufficiently justified, and provide no additional reason for accepting the two‐fold character of labour.     

Philosophy,psychology and the moral crisis: Reflections on compassion “between tradition and another beginning”

Abstract

The author presents, and his thinking passes through, the work of Werner Marx who seeks a non‐metaphysical ethical mooring via compassion, grounded in emotional dimensions of existential‐phenomenology. Through Marx's re‐centered compassion the author inquires if reason and faith cannot be resurrected in intrinsic and holistic form. Marx's ethics is introduced as one of the directions humanistic thinking is taking, suggesting this latter's considerable prospective role as a human vision in the ethical debate in transition between failed modern and ethically vulnerable postmodern paradigms.     

Clarifying value judgment: Principles of content and procedure

This contribution to the debate over Marx's theory of value gives an account of his concept of ‘abstract labour’. Contrary to Stanley Moore {Inquiry, Vol. 14 [1971]), Marx never abandons his early critique of the Hegelian ‘Concept'; for he gives a material basis to the conception of social labour as concretely universal. If, in analysing the commodity form of the product of labour, Marx characterizes the labour that forms the substance of value as ‘abstractly universal labour’, the priority of the abstract over the concrete at this point is not due to the influence of Hegel's Logic on Marx's work, but reflects the material process of abstraction occurring in commodity exchange. We show that Marx takes up a critical stance to this reality.     

‘The Egg of Columbus’?How Fourier's social theory exerted a significant (and problematic) influence on the formation of Marx's anthropology and social critique

In scholarship on the history of philosophy, it is widely assumed that Charles Fourier was a utopian socialist who could not have exerted a significant influence on the development of Karl Marx's thought. Indeed, both Marx and Engels seem to have advanced this view. In contrast, I argue that in 1844 when Marx was developing his anthropology and social critique, he relied upon Fourier's thought to supply a key assumption. After establishing this connection, I explain why Marx's tacit reliance on Fourier creates a problematic undercurrent in his thought.     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Mental Causation and the Mind-Body Problem

Marx may be taken to hold that productive forces (e.g. the steam engine) explain productive relations (e.g. capitalism) more than the other way on, and that productive relations explain superstructures (e.g. the legal system) more than the other way on. There are no satisfactory standard causal understandings of these claims about explanatory primacy. That is, no standard causal understanding saves Marx from the traditional objection that relations very greatly affect forces, and superstructures very greatly affect relations. One satisfactorily articulated attempt to save Marx has been the attempt to understand the claims teleologically. Three such understandings can be distinguished, but they do not work. The first fails since it attempts to explain events by way of abstract objects. The second fails since it attempts to explain a thing by means of that thing. The third fails for a related reason. Each understanding also fails for another reason as fundamental. So‐called teleological explanations are in fact claims that standard causal explanations exist, which relevant explanations conflict with the ruling idea of Marx's philosophy, that history is somehow independent of men's consciousness and wills. There may be no evidence that Marx himself intended historical materialism to be understood teleologically. There may be evidence against.     

Marx on the compatibility of freedom and necessity: A reply to David James

In a recent paper, David James argues for a new understanding of the compatibility of freedom and necessity in Marx's idea of a communist society. According to James, such compatibility has less to do with anything distinctive about the nature of labour and more to do with how communist producers organize the sphere of material production. In this paper, I argue that James provides a nuanced and plausible account of one part of Marx's story of the compatibility of freedom and necessity in communist society but that his account misses another, and, in my view, more fundamental part of the story. The part I have in mind centres on Marx's claim that communist producers achieve their freedom through the performance of necessary labour—by helping others to satisfy their needs. I argue that Marx is committed to a stronger claim than James wishes to make, namely, that freedom and necessity are not merely compatible but that participation in the realm of necessity is required for human freedom.     

Philosophy (I)

Carver's interpretation of Marx's value theory (Terrell Carver, ‘Marx's Commodity Fetishism’, Inquiry, Vol. 18 [1975]) is accepted, but his rejection of it criticized by explicating the reasons Marx gives for his theory after his faulty analysis of exchange-value at the very beginning of Capital. The central concept of abstract labour is shown to relate commodity exchange to other forms of distribution; by being compared to these the function of commodity exchange is recognized as the attachment of an amount of abstract labour to a commodity, and exchange-value as that which determines that amount What it means to say value is thought to inhere in commodities is explicated.     

Marx and Justice

Marx's thought about justice is essentialist and dialectical. It has been interpreted in terms of immoralism. It is rather a synthesis of the traditional natural law, based on the Aristotelian concept of nature as the potential for perfection or ideal fulfilment, radically different from the Hobbesian reductionist concept of nature as atomistic and mechanical; of the tradition of dialectics in its German idealist form; and of Feuerbach's humanism. Marx's explicitly realist idea of science reveals 'veiled wage-slavery'. Concentration on the market exchange, to the exclusion of the subsequent exploitative use of labour power, deceives exclusively analytic observers into the belief that there is some justice in capitalism. Marx characterized the proletariat as the 'universal class', capable of bringing about the fulfilment of the human essence in a family-style mode of production , because it is the victim of total injustice . However, he criticized workers for not rising above such bourgeois selfishness as demanding 'a fair wage', which is not even a coherent concept. Capitalism is not only a moral injustice, but an ontological injustice, a violation of the worker's humanity. It is coercion into alienation, fetishism and idolatry.     

Freedom and Necessity in Marx's Account of Communism

This paper considers whether Marx's views about communism change significantly during his lifetime. According to the ‘standard story’, as Marx got older he dropped the vision of self-realization in labour that he spoke of in his early writings, and adopted a more pessimistic account of labour, where real freedom is achieved outside the working-day, in leisure. Other commentators, however, have argued that there is no pessimistic shift in Marx's thought on this matter. This paper offers a different reading of this debate. It argues that there are two visions of the good life in Marx. However, it suggests that these two visions cannot be understood in terms of a simple shift between a ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Marx. Rather, it claims that Marx moves between these two visions throughout his writings. In this way, it suggests that Marx's intellectual development on this issue is best understood as an oscillation rather than a shift. Once this interpretive claim is advanced, the paper then moves on to consider some potential causes and implications of Marx's life-long oscillation between two different conceptions of the good life.     

Die Philosophie und das Marxsche Erbe

What is the fate of philosophy as the spiritual weapon of the proletariat in changing reality when it is clear that the communist experiment has failed? The question pertains above all to the heritage of Marx's theory, not to Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. The latter are party-inspired and -dominated and aspire to be schools of philosophy, whereas Marx did not seek to create a philosophy but to realize philosophy in the material world. For Marx, philosophy and emancipation go hand in hand: man is emancipated when philosophy is realized in the world. The fate of the Marxian idea is set off against the development of dialectical materialist philosophy and Marxist social theory. In this way, the ground is laid for the conclusion that what is properly philosophical in Marx is restricted to a philosophy of history attendant on a theory of economic development. The conclusion is subject to the caveat that as yet unpublished notes by Marx about the true nature of dialectic may in fact reveal a more far-reaching philosophical conception. The realization of philosophy seems like a romantic illusion against the background of the events in Germany in autumn 1989. The working masses have elected capital as the basis of their future social existence, thus putting paid to the Marxian theme of class struggle. The fundamental conclusion is that Marx's vision of the task of philosophy is vitiated by a deep-rooted ambivalence: on one hand it is the ‘head’ of emancipation but on the other hand it neglects, indeed supresses, historical details, as shown by the example of the dialectic of class struggle and class exchange. This kind of suppression, neglect, comes to the fore in Marx's writing whenever he substitutes his romantic vision of the deprived proletariat for social science. This blind eye to detail is at the root of the later ideologization of Marxist theory and its subordination to local party interests.     

The Compatibility of Freedom and Necessity in Marx's Idea of Communist Society

Taking a well‐known passage from the third volume of Capital as my starting point, I explain on what grounds Marx thinks that freedom and necessity will be compatible in a communist society. The necessity in question concerns having to produce to satisfy material needs. Unlike some accounts of this issue, I argue that the compatibility of freedom and necessity in communist society has more to do with how production is organized than with the direct relation of the worker to the object produced or to his or her own productive activity. Moreover, I show how self‐realization and a form of activity that possesses an intrinsic value are made possible by the organization of the production process and how this is integral to Marx's account of the compatibility of freedom and necessity in communist society.     

Young Marx and Alienation in western debate

The publication of Marx's early writings has given us a perspective on the early development of socialistic thought that provides a clearer view of its connection with current discussion in philosophy and sociology. The link is the phenomenon of alienation, with which the early Marx was much concerned. In this article the author marks the distinctiveness of the two main current approaches to the alienation phenomenon, the ontological and the sociological, and suggests that the tension between Hegelian ontology and empirical sociology in. the early Marx's analysis of the phenomenon reflects the strength rather than the weakness of this analysis as a contribution to the understanding of the human position.     

History,knowledge, and essence in the early Marx

A careful study of the concept of essence which is found in Marx's early writings will show that his theory of knowledge does not involve, as is often claimed, the acceptance of an unknown thing-in-itself and does not imply that we can only know objects as they have been constituted for-us. We can know things as they are in-themselves. To show this will also require that we recognize and explain how the early Marx can hold that the object of knowledge is both constituted and that it reflects or copies things as they are in-themselves.     

Marx and Exploitation

The discussion of the adequacy of Karl Marx's definition of exploitation has paid insufficient attention to a prior question: what is a definition? Once we understand Marx as offering a “reference-fixing definition in a model” we will realise that it is resistant to certain objections. A more general analysis of exploitation is offered here and it is suggested that Marx's own definition is a particular instance of the general analysis which makes a number of controversial moral assumptions.     

Objectless activity: Marx's ‘theses on feuerbach’

According to Friedrich Engels (Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy) the so‐called ‘Thesen über Feuerbach’ are ‘the brilliant germ of the new world conception’. For Karl Korsch ('Review of Vernon Venable’, Journal of Philosophy 42 [1945], no. 26) there are ‘magnificently summed up’ in them the ‘texts of Marx and Engels's first (Hegelian and post‐Hegelian) period’. Even given the important distinction between the ‘young’ and the ‘mature’ Marx these two opinions are not incompatible. The present paper's concern, however, is with the relationship of the ‘Thesen’ to the materialist conception of history. Once the ‘Thesen’ are read as a consistent whole it is clear that they are incompatible with any non‐social (non‐human) nature; hence with the ontological independence of nature from man; hence with any materialism, historical or otherwise. Furthermore, taken as a whole the ‘Thesen’ form an attempted solution to the problem of the justification of ideals, a solution both activist and dogmatist. Since the attitude expressed in the ‘Thesen’ underlies both Marx's ‘theory of alienation’ and his ‘critique of political economy’ neither of these can lay claim to the status of knowledge.     

The Marxian conception of the working class and the development of physics

Marx extrapolated the relations of production of the factories of his time into his predictions about the development of the working class. These predictions are among the most important theses of Marxism-Leninism relative to the socialist world-revolution which the working class was to carry out. The physics of Marx' era was not very developed. Marx could have no inkling of the future development of physics and of its application to technology. This is why his predictions had to be in simple and direct proportion to the development of the relations of production of the time. Industry developed — thanks in part to the development of physics — in ways other than Marx had suspected. The use of modern physics, leading to cybernetics and automation, gradually changed the workers from forces of production to supervisory engineers. Were one to undertake today an extrapolation like that which Marx carried out, one would have to see as highly probable the disappearance of the very working class that Marx saw as carrying out the world-revolution.     

Marx,Rawls, Cohen,and Feminism

Although G. A. Cohen's work on Marx was flawed by a lack of gender‐awareness, his work on Rawls owes much of its success to feminist inspiration. Cohen appeals effectively to feminism to rebut the basic structure objection to his egalitarian ethos, and could now appeal to feminism in response to Andrew Williams's publicity objection to this ethos. The article argues that Williams's objection is insufficient to rebut Cohen's ethos, inapplicable to variants of this ethos, and in conflict with plausible gender‐egalitarian ethoses. The article also advocates an understanding of basic structuralism and publicity consistent with feminism, and argues that Rawlsians need not reject plausible domestic egalitarian ethoses on either publicity or liberty grounds. To Michèle, G. A. Cohen's Harriet Taylor     

Marx's genealogy of the idea of equality

Contrary to egalitarian readings of both Marx's critique of capitalist society and its replacement by communist society, his lack of commitment to the idea of equality has been emphasized. I argue that Marx's statements concerning the idea of equality, and especially how it would represent an inappropriate norm for genuine communist society, are ultimately to be explained in terms of its relation to the exchange value that governs acts of commodity exchange. Marx wants to show how general recognition of the idea of equality and the legal and political forms that it assumes have their origin in the way in which exchange value has come to dominate social relations, leading human beings to develop an abstract conception of themselves, others and how the world ought to be that is incompatible with the goals of communist society.