1 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. 1971) 3.Google Scholar

2 In ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice’ Allen Wood argues that Marx rejects the Juridical model and that Marx does not criticize capitalism as being unjust. In the pages that follow I am quite critical of several key elements of Wood's inter· pretation of Marx, but it will be clear, I hope, that I think Wood's article raises fundamental issues and injects new life into recent work in Marx ('The Marxian Critique of Justice,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971·2) 246).

3 Rawls, 177-82.

4 For some recent work relevant to this task, see Moore, S., ‘Marx and Lenin as Historical Materialists,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (1974-5) 171-94;Google ScholarMiller, R., 'The Consistency of Historical Materialism,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (1974-5) 390–409;Google Scholar and Young, G., ‘The Fundamental Contradiction of Capitalism,' Philosophy and Public Affairs 5 (1975-6) 196-234.Google Scholar

5 Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by McLellan, D. (Oxford: Oxford U. P. 1977) 389.Google Scholar This is not to say, of course, that for Marx Juridical concepts play no significant role in explaining social phenomena in class-divided societies, it is only to say that they do not play the fundamental role which Marx assigns to the concept of the material base of society.

6 Tucker, R., The Marxian Revolutionary ldea (New York: Norton and Co., Inc. 1969) 37–53.Google Scholar

7 The wide consensus that the Tucker-Wood view is basically correct has been noted - and challenged - by McBride, W., ‘The Concept of Justice in Marx, Engels, and Others,’ Ethics 85 (1975) 206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See, for example, Tucker, 27, 41, and 44, and Wood, 254-5.

9 Wood, 265.

10 Wood, 259.

11 Wood, 257-9.

12 Marx, K., Capital, vol. I (New York: International Publishers 1967) 176.Google Scholar

13 McBride correctly points out that Unrecht can mean either ‘injustice’ or ‘injury' ('harm’) and he suggests that it is unwarranted for Wood to assume that the former, rather than the latter, is the correct translation. This does not seem to me to be a telling criticism of Wood for the simple reason that the ‘injury’ or ‘harm' translation seems implausible here, granted Marx's continual emphasis that by selling his labor-power to the capitalist the worker does suffer great injury, grievous harm, both mental and physical.

14 Holmstrom, N., ‘Exploitation,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1977) 353-69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Ibid., 366-7.

16 Ibid., 268.

17 Marx, , Capital, vol. I, 271.Google Scholar

18 Both Wood's analysis and Holmstrom's criticims of it are hampered by a failure to distinguish between Marx's external and internal criticisms, though Holmstrom's remarks on p. 368 suggest that she believes Marx advances an external critique of capitalism from the perspective of communist Justice.

19 M. Slate argues that Marx, as well as Engels and Freud, rely upon what Slate calls the principle of morality and ignorance in their criticisms of morality. Slate states the principle as follows: ‘A principle has validity as a basic principle of moral obligation only if it is possible for people to be committed to it as one of their basic principles of moral obligation without that commitment being due to, or explainable in terms of their ignorant, or being kept ignorant, of various facts' (Slate, , ‘Morality and Ignorance,’ The Journal of Philosophy 74 (1977) 745-67CrossRefGoogle Scholar). J. Murphy argues that Marx's critique of capitalism includes the charge that the most plausible moral Justification of punishment in capitalist society rests upon empirical assumptions or upon ignorance of basic facts about society. Among these false assumptions is the belief that social relations in capitalism are mutually beneficial (Murphy, J., ‘Marxism and Retribution,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972-3) 217-43Google Scholar). Both Slate and Murphy concentrate on examples of what I call Marx's internal criticisms.

20 Marx, , Capital, vol. I, 713-4.Google Scholar

21 Holmstrom, 368.

22 Buchanan, A., ‘Exploitation, Alienation, and Injustice,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 9 (1979) 121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 McBride, 204-5.

24 Wood, 245-7, presents strong textual evidence for this basic point.

25 K., Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 569.Google Scholar

26 These are some of the many scattered passages in which Marx and Engels state or imply that problems of scarcity will be overcome in communism: The German Ideology, in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, edited by Easton, L. and Guddhat, K. (New York: Doubleday and Company 1967) 468;Google Scholar Grundrisse, edited by Nicolaus, M. (New York: Vintage Books 1973) 705; Karl Marx: Selected Writings, pp. 73,Google Scholar 381, 383-4; and Capital, vol. Ill, 876; cf. also Avineri, S., The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge U. P. 1968) 147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 77-96.

28 Marx, , ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme', in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 569.Google Scholar

29 In the following two paragraphs I draw on my argument in ‘Exploitation, Alienation, and Injustice.'

30 In a recent article entitled ‘Marx on Distributive Justice', Husami, Z. attacks the Tucker-Wood interpretation of Marx's views (Philosophy and Public Affairs, 8 1977-8, 27–64).Google Scholar Husami quite correctly argues that Marx can consistently use conceptions (e.g., of human freedom and self-actualization) drawn from the nature of post-capitalist society as normative concepts with which to criticize capitalism. But he then makes the unwarranted claim that these concepts borrowed from the vision of post-capitalist society are not only normative, but Juridical concepts. Further, Husami is right to point out that the Tucker-Wood line cannot explain passages in which Marx refers to the exploitation of the worker as ‘theft’ or ‘robbery.’ But he is wrong in assuming that to account for these passages we must assume that Marx criticized wage-labor from the perspective of communist principles of Justice. We need only maintain that Marx criticizes capitalism for failing to live up to its own conceptions of Justice- that he advances internal Juridical criticisms of capitalism. It appears that the texts Husami cites to support the claim that Marx criticizes capitalism as being unjust from the perspective of communist Justice can be accounted for as instances of Marx's internal Juridical criticisms. My interpretation - unlike Husami's - squares with, and even explains, the three crucial dates mentioned earlier: (i) Marx's refusal to refer to communism as a Just society, (ii) his view that communism will abolish the circumstances of Justice, and (iii) his charge that talk about Justice and rights is ‘obsolete verbal rubbish’ and ‘ideological nonsense.'

31 Though his critics have often failed to notice it, Rawls’ Difference Principle might be viewed as a principle of productive-distributive Justice. Because what it distributes, strictly speaking, is prospects of primary goods, not material goods themselves, and because significant restructuring of the productive processes of a society may be needed to achieve the pattern of prospects it requires, the Difference Principle applies to the productive processes of society, not Just to its distributive arrangements. Rawls acknowledged this when he notes that satisfaction of the Difference Principle might require public ownership of the means of production (Rawls, 274).

32 See, for example: Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 77, 377, 381, 383-4; Capital, vol. Ill, 876; and Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works, vol. II, (New York: International Publishers) 93-4.Google Scholar

33 Engels, F., Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works in One Volume, (New York: International Publishers 1968) 430.Google Scholar

34 Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 51-2.

35 Ibid., 54.

36 Ibid., 54.

37 Mill, J.S., On Liberty (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1956) 7.Google Scholar

38 Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 56.

39 Ibid., 53.

40 Ibid., 53.

41 N. Daniels argues that Rawls’ theory cannot adequately cope with inequalities in the effectiveness of equal rights and that this defect signals a fundamental tension between Rawls’ first and second principles of Justice. Daniels’ argument is one of the more promising criticisms of Rawls from a Marxian perspective. (Daniels, N., ‘Equal Liberty and Equal Worth of Liberty,’ in Reading Rawls, edited by Daniels, N. (New York: Basic Books 1975) 253-81.Google Scholar) For a different, though related approach to the problem of inequalities in the effectiveness in the exercise of equal rights, see my paper, ‘Deriving Welfare Rights from Libertarian Rights,' forthcoming in Conceptual and Moral Issues in Income Support Policy, edited by P. Brown, C. Johnson, and P. Vernier of The Center of Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland at College Park.

42 Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 57.

43 Ibid., 35.

44 Ibid., pp. 568-9.

45 Tucker, 51-52.

46 Rawls, 9.

47 Avineri, 17-24, 48-9.

48 The executive of the modern representative state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie’ (Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 223).

49 For examination of the relevant texts, see A. Buchanan, ‘Exploitation, Alienation, and Injustice.'

50 I examine Marx's theory of revolutionary motivation and argue that it is seriously defective in a paper entitled ‘Revolutionary Motivation and Rationality,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1978-9).

51 Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 230.

52 Ibid., 231.

53 Ibid., 71.

54 Ibid., 566.

55 If one assumes that the principle To each according to his produce’ is offered by Marx as a principle of distributive Justice which will be publicly recognized as such during a transitional stage preceding fully developed communism (see Karl Marx: Selected Works, 568), one might argue that it provides a significant instance of a positive action-guiding use of a Juridical concept. The idea would be that appeal to this principle as a principle of Justice motivates the proletariat to change society in such a way as to achieve the distribution it prescribes and that these efforts in turn lead to fully developed communist society - a society in which the circumstances of Justice no longer obtain. The difficulty with assigning a significant role to the transitional principle is that it forces us to reject his frequent declaration athat successful proletarian revolution does not rely upon moral exhortation in general or on appeals to Justice in particular. Further, it seems difficult to square such an interpretation with passages in which Marx advances a rather simple rational-interest theory of revolutionary motivation which assigns no significant role to Juridical concepts.

56 Presumably Rawls and Dworkin would both wish to qualify this view so as to allow the possibility that, at least where the right in question is not one of the most basic ones and where the disutility of respecting the right-claim would be enormous, claims of right do not take precedence over considerations of utility.

57 Feinberg, J., ‘The Nature and Value of Rights,’ in Moral Problems in Medicine, edited by Gorovitz, S., et al. (Engelwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall 1976) 454-67.Google Scholar

58 My sketchy account of respect for persons as such owes much to Darwall's, S.L. illuminated analysis in ‘Two Kinds of Respect,’ Ethics 88 (1977-8) 36–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Kant, , Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Paton, (New York: 1964) 103Google Scholar(Akad. 435).

60 See The Holy Family 211, where Marx says that ‘punishment, coercion, is contrary to human conduct’ (Moscow 1956).