>For Marx the employer is depriving the employee of compensation when he >devotes surplus to investment, a surplus which, in Marx' view, the employee, >not the employer, is entitled to. This is the horrendous error....<
Marx wasn't talking about "entitlement" in CAPITAL, in which ethical matters are secondary. His argument is about who created the surplus in the first place (i.e., the workers). But because of the property system that is capitalism, it is the capitalists who are legally entitled to the surplus. And because of the power of the system over most people's minds, that entitlement has moral backing (in practice). It's pretty clear that Marx didn't want to simply take the surplus-value away from the capitalists. Rather, in my interpretation, the _whole process_ of production, distribution, and use of the surplus should be run democratically by the working class. Thus, the workers would also be the "employers." If people like, we could see the entire worker/capitalist (employee/employer) relationship as a form of alienation. What Marx was hoping for was that the organized working class would end that alienation. Anthro-man seems to be assuming that the capitalist employers will _always_ have the upper hand. If you make that assumption, what he's saying makes some sense. But it leads to total misinterpretation of what Marx was saying in CAPITAL. Hi to Martin Cohen, too. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
