I wrote:
> as a an ethicist friend of mine says, one of the strongest (and
> easiest) moral cases one can make is by pointing to the contradiction
> between moral theory and actual practice (i.e., hypocrisy), because
> there's no need to develop basic moral principles (which some say is
> impossible). (According to Cornell West's dissertation, Marx's ethics
> ended up focussing precisely on this contraecitions.)
Carrol quotes Engels:
>The above application of the Ricardian theory that the entire social
product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the
sole real producers, leads directly to communism. But, as Marx indeed
indicates in the above-quoted passage, it is incorrect in formal
economic terms, for it is simply an application of morality to
economics. According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest
part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it.
If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has
nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this
economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx,
therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the
inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily
taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only
that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact.
But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same
be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral
consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one
time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the
fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made
their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and
untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed
behind the formal economic incorrectness. This is not the place to deal
more closely with the significance and history of the theory of surplus
value.<
I generally agree with the above, except for the bit about "the
inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily
taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree" which seems to be based in Marx's optimism rather than in scientific analysis of capitalism of his day. (After all, it didn't collapse. Or did I miss something?)
Anyway, I was not advocating the contradiction between "our morality" and "capitalism" in my passage quoted above. Rather contradiction is between capitalism's official morality (equal opportunity, etc.) and capitalism's reality. In Marx's CAPITAL, for example, it seems to me that Marx took the idea that many political economists of his day believed, i.e., that products sold (approximately) in proportion to their labor-value, or the capitalist's own view that "I worked for it, goddamn it, so it's mine" as assumption. He then showed that exploitation could and did exist anyway, because workers were dominated in the "hidden realm" of production and thus produced surplus-value.
Jim
