Peter mew on justice and capitalism

Abstract

Section I argues, against Peter Mew, that, since people create nothing ex nihilo, everything now privately owned incorporates something that once was not, and that this has important consequences for distributive justice. Section II defends the ‘diachronic’ approach to distributive justice against Mew's charge that it is ‘otiose’, and section III claims that beliefs about distributive justice have a big effect on political conflict in the real world. Section IV enters a few disagreements with Mew's account of the political ‘quiescence’ of the Western proletariat. Section V relieves the tension between the Marxist commitment to the advancement of productive power and the Marxist commitment to those at whose expense that advancement occurs.