Did Marx Really Think That Capitalism Is Unjust?

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Acknowledgements

I dedicate this paper to Willie Watts Miller, a wonderful lecturer at the University of Bristol when I was undergraduate there 1989–92. Willie introduced me to Wood’s article and argument when I was in my second year. This paper began in 2018 when I wrote a much earlier version for a Workshop on ‘Wittgenstein and the Political’, hosted by Dimitris Gakis at KU Leuven. The subsequent expanded and refined version benefited from sharp and helpful comments and suggestions by Terrell Carver, Cecilie Eriksen, Fernando Rudy Hiller, Andres Luco, and Neil O’Hara. This final version was greatly aided by the generous and perspicuous comments and suggestions of a referee for this journal.

Notes

1 The word ‘capitalism’ does not appear in volume one of Capital (2015) until page 414, and only once thereafter (the German equivalent, ‘Kapitalismus’, is not used in Das Kapital). The opening line of Capital introduces the reader to ‘the capitalist mode of production’, but Marx’s referential term of choice is ‘capital’. I think he uses ‘capital’ to emphasise the continuous process of reproducing the system (the mode of production) through incessant interaction between buyers and sellers of labour power. For brevity, I sometimes just use the word ‘capitalism’ as shorthand for ‘the capitalist mode of production’.

2 This article is a re-reading of Wood’s ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice’, but it incorporates his subsequent ‘Reply to Husami’ (1979) and Chapters 9 and 10 of his 1981 book (2004). Apart from some reflections at the very end of this book’s Chapter 10, on which I comment in Section 5 below, this body of work is an organic continuation of Wood’s original thesis. Most of it repeats, expands, and elaborates on the original thesis, and there is nothing that can be identified as a substantial change in stance, interpretation, or exposition in the later work. For this reason, I rarely differentiate between the original and the later writings.

3 Karl Popper (1962) notes that ‘the first English translators of Capital [mis- N.P.] translated its sub-title as A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production’.

4 F.A. Hayek (1976: 71), one of the staunchest advocates of the market economy, maintains that it is ‘wholly analogous to a game’—a ‘game partly of skill and partly of chance’.

5 To illustrate Searle’s distinction between constitutive and regulative rules, think of how language works. Roughly, constitutive rules constitute (create and sustain) word-meaning, and regulative rules regulate the use of words into grammatical sentences. Essentially, constitutive rules bring into existence the possibility of acting in particular ways, and regulative rules regulate (make more orderly) forms of already existing behaviour.

6 Most commentators on this passage accept the Moore and Aveling translation of ‘Unrecht’ as ‘injury’, but Wood is surely right to translate it as ‘injustice’ in his (1972: 263) quotation.

7 Husami and other critics of Wood point to the language of ‘robbery’ and cognates that Marx sometimes uses in his description of the exchange relation. But compare this with ordinary language expressions such as ‘I was robbed’ after buying what one thinks is a pricy product—this clearly is not meant literally, and does not mean ‘I was treated unjustly’. Wood (2004: 139) later notes that in response to Adolph Wagner’s exposition of Marx on the exchange relation, Marx flatly denies that this relation amounts to ‘only a deduction or “robbery” of the worker’.

8 Bernard Williams (1993: 117) claims that precisely this is what ‘most people’ (with the striking exception of Aristotle) in Ancient Greece thought of the institution of slavery, i.e., that it is neither just nor unjust.

9 OED Online. Oxford University Press. (accessed 24 September 2021).

10 There is also an interesting analogy between the practice of measurement and the function of money in the capitalist mode of production. Just as the metre stick (and for all intents and purposes, any metre stick) cannot itself be ‘measured’ because it constitutes the very standard of measurement, so likewise tokens of a post-gold standard currency have no value in themselves because they are the medium for the exchange of valuable things. Searle (1999: 128) observes that British banknotes still carry the declaration from the issuing bank: ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten [or five, twenty, or fifty, depending on its value] pounds’. But how could that promise be fulfilled? Imagine taking one’s ten-pound note to a bank and demanding redemption of the promise on it. The bank could only give one another ten-pound note in ‘exchange’. Cf. Wittgenstein again: ‘Why can't my right hand give my left hand money?’ (1968: §268).

11 Another way of saving Wood’s thesis that Marx did not condemn capitalism on the grounds of injustice would be to interpret Wood as holding that the evils generated by capitalism are needlessly inflicted and remediable vis-à-vis the productive forces, but necessary and irremediable vis-à-vis maintenance of the mode of production itself. Under this scenario, the evils generated by capitalism would be necessary and irremediable features of the functioning of a mode of production that has itself become unconducive to the nurturance of the productive forces. This rather convoluted reinterpretation of Wood’s thesis goes against the import of historical materialism, because it would mean that a dysfunctional mode of production is nevertheless not unjust even though it has become a hindrance to the productive forces.

12 Wood (2004: xxiv) later conceded that Marx was ‘optimistic’ in ‘believ[ing] that capitalism’s instabilities, its periodic crises and internal irrationalities, meant that its period of dominance is coming to a close’. But he evidently does not take this as reason to revise the conclusion of his original reading, that Marx thought capitalism not unjust.

13 Whereas for Ancient slavery—which according to historical materialism was the constitutive ‘mode of exploitation’ in the Ancient mode of production—Wood (1972: 257) avers that it ‘was, as Aristotle argued, both right and expedient’. Later though, he (ibid.: 259) equivocates, stating that ‘if’ slavery ‘played a necessary role in’ the ‘prevailing mode of production’, then ‘in the Marxian view the holding of slaves by the ancients would be a just practice’. He should really have said ‘when slavery played a necessary role’ it was a just practice, because, according to historical materialism, a mode of production’s constitutive mode of exploitation gives it its identity, so slavery could not not have played a necessary role in the Ancient mode of production. However, given that the Ancient mode of production transformed into the Feudal mode of production, there would have been a time towards the end of its lifespan when slavery was no longer necessary for, and indeed became a fetter on, the development of the productive forces. The moral status of slavery at that point, from the standpoint of historical materialism, raises the same issue pondered above of whether it would be unjust because it was a hindrance to the productive forces, or just because it was necessary to the ‘prevailing mode of production’ of which it was a constitutive part.

14 The idea that slavery had become unconducive to the functioning of the capitalist mode of production and that this explains its demise was influentially argued by the Marxist historian Eric Williams (1994). The argument has subsequently been conclusively disproven (see Drescher 1977). There are, though, more sophisticated explanations for the causes and conditions of abolition which are at least partly inspired by, or resonate with, historical materialism (see Pleasants 2010).

15 It should be noted that Dresher’s work, which ‘presented the first full-scale attack on Williams’s thesis’ (Davis 2009) that slavery had become a hindrance to the capitalist mode of production, was published in 1977, i.e., after Wood’s ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice’, in 1972.

16 I cannot help but wonder: (i) why Wood takes so long to reveal eventually that he himself does not endorse the stance that his anti-injustice reading attributes to Marx; (ii) why he devotes so much attention to the exposition and defence of a view on the justness of capitalism that he himself cannot endorse; and (iii) why he attributes to Marx moral views that he himself finds unacceptable, namely, a ‘highly deflationary conception of morality’ and a ‘reductive and dismissive treatment of moral conceptions’ (Wood 2004: 160)? I hope to have shown in the text that these attributions are unwarranted, and that removing them from the anti-injustice reading makes its central thesis much stronger and more plausible.

17 For Marx, acknowledgement of the limitations imposed by one’s embeddedness in a mode of production is not an admission of epistemic weakness. For even the ‘giant thinker’ Aristotle, he (2015: 58) says, was prevented from achieving understanding of the social and moral enabling conditions of commodity production and exchange in virtue of his living in a society the mode of production of which structurally precluded those conditions.