Last Sunday MRZine editor Yoshie Furuhashi posted an article titled
“Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham” on her Critical Montages blog
that has led to a heated debate on Doug Henwood’s LBO-Talk mailing list.
Basically Furuhashi argues that the abolition of de jure discrimination
brings the spirit of capitalism closer to the pure spirit of “Freedom,
Equality, Property, and Bentham” that Karl Marx referred to in Chapter
six of Volume One of Capital:
"This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and
purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate
rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.
Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of
labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will."
While the abolition of Jim Crow laws might have removed barriers to the
commodification of labor, Marxists don’t view this is some kind of
capitalist plot. It is in the interest of workers to remove all
legal/political barriers to their full right to sell their labor power,
even if this brings them closer to some kind of 19th century liberal
economic ideal. After all, Jeremy Bentham advocated the elimination of
slavery for his own reasons. On the other hand, radical abolitionists in
Great Britain saw emancipation from slavery as related to the general
emancipation of the working class. We must not recoil from emancipation
because Jeremy Bentham favored it, should we?
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/de-jure-discrimination-and-the-capitalist-system/