Jim Devine wrote: > However, I find the readings on "Marxism and Morality" that I've done to be > interesting and useful. Marxism may not be (or incorporate) an ethical > system, but it does not contradict all ethical systems. > Allen Wood developed the interesting argument that Marx's critique of political economy had nothing to do with justice and that the capitalist class does exploit the working class but this exploitation is just. Wood explains: "He (Marx SP) equally scorned those concerned themselves with formulating principles of distributive justice and condemning capitalism in their name. Marx conceives that justice of economic transactions as their correspondence to or functionality for the prevailing mode of production. Given this conception of justice, Marx very consistently concluded that the inhuman exploitation practiced by capitalism against the workers is not unjust, and does not violate the worker's rights; this conclusion constitutes no defense of capitalism, only an attack on the use of moral conceptions within the proletarian movement. Marx saw the task of the proletarian movement in his time as one of self-definition, discipline and self-criticism based on scientific self-understanding. He left for later stages of the movement the task of planning the future society which it is the historic mission of the movement to bring forth." To summarize, law and justice are judicial concepts. Judicial concepts belong to the superstructure which is determined by the mode of production. A society will thus have a conception of justice that fits and grows naturally out of its mode of production. Capitalist exploitation is just in capitalist mode of production but unjust in a socialist mode. It is wrong therefore, to ascribe some universal form of justice applicable to all modes of production. A future communist society will not be 'more just' than capitalist capitalism, it will simply have a conception of justice that fits its mode of production; a mode of production where capitalist exploitation doesn't exist. Wood fleshes out his argument in his book _Karl Marx_ and his article "Marx and the Critique of Justice", Philosophy and Public Affairs, VI no. 3 1972. Seems to me that Wood's main goal is to avoid pigeonholing Marx as a utilitarian or as a partisan of a deontological(Kantian) form of ethics. Sam Pawlett
