1 Reiman, Jeffrey, ‘Exploitation, Force, and the Moral Assessment of Capitalism: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 16, 1 (Winter 1987) 3-41Google Scholar

2 In response to an early draft of this paper, G. A. Cohen has pointed out to me that Marx calls a serf exploited who must pay rent in kind to his feudal lord, though he works to produce the in-kind payment not under the control or supervision of the lord (personal communication, August 8, 1988).

3 ‘If it is morally all right that capitalists do and workers do not own means of production, then capitalist profit is not the fruit of exploitation.... The question of exploitation therefore resolves itself into the question of the moral status of capitalist private property’ (Cohen, G. A., ‘More on Exploitation and the Labour Theory of Value,’ Inquiry 26, 3 [1983], 316)Google Scholar.

4 See Cohen’s ‘Self-Ownership, World-Ownership, and Equality,’ in Lucash, F., ed., Justice and Equality Here and Now (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986), 103-35Google Scholar; and ‘Self-Ownership, World-Ownership, and Equality, Part II,’ in Paul, et al., eds., Marxism and Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell 1986), 77-96Google Scholar. See also, Steiner, Hillel, ‘The Natural Right to the Means of Production,’ Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1977) 41-9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Kant, Immanuel, The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, Ladd, J., trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1965), 35Google Scholar

6 See, for example, Tucker, Robert C., The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: Norton 1970), esp. Ch. 2Google Scholar; and Buchanan, Allen E., Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1982), esp. Ch. 4.Google Scholar

7 Marx, Karl, Capital (New York: International Publishers 1967), vol. 111, 819Google Scholar. Hereafter, references to Capital will be cited in the text as ‘C followed by the volume number and the page number.

8 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1967), 99; emphasis mineGoogle Scholar.

9 I develop the notion of ‘structural force’ in ‘Exploitation, Force, and the Moral Assessment of Capitalism,’ 11-18 (see n. 1, above).

10 On ideology in Marxian theory, see my “The Marxian Critique of Criminal Justice,’ Criminal Justice Ethics 6, 1 (Winter/Spring 1987), 30-50. Note that there, as well as here, I mean by ideology, the basic and global ideology that capitalism seems naturally to carry with it. I am not therefore referring to those specific belief-systems (e.g., racism or religious otherworldliness) that may historically accompany capitalism and lend their support to its preservation.

11 I develop this approach to assesssing distributive justice in ‘The Labor Theory of the Difference Principle,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, 2 (Spring 1983), 133-59.

12 Marx, Karl, ‘Critique of the Gotha Program,’ in Tucker, R., ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York: Norton 1978), 530Google Scholar. Actually, Marx holds that the worker will receive back for his labor an amount of goods produced by an equal amount of labor after deductions for general costs of administation, public goods (e.g., schools, hospitals), and funds for those unable to work have been made (ibid., 529-30). Since we can think of these deductions as purchasing goods or insurance for everyone, they can be taken as an indirect return to individuals of labor equal to what they contribute, and thus not altering the basic distributive principle of equal labor exchange.

13 It should be obvious that I am assuming here that the only objection to the labor theory of (economic) value is Cohen’s objection that it is irrelevant to the charge of exploitation. There are numerous other objections to the theory as an economic theory per se, which I here sidestep primarily by offering instead a labor theory of moral value. Cohen, by the way, proposes that the charge of exploitation can rest on the notion that the worker produces what has value, without having to hold that the worker produces value itself in proportion to his labor-time. Then, the evident fact that the capitalist appropriates some of the value of the thing the producer has produced and gives the worker less than the value of that thing will–combined with the claim that the capitalist’s ownership of means of production is unjust–support the charge that the worker is exploited. But this seems to me false. If the worker creates what has value, but not the value, it still remains possible that the capitalist’s story is true: that the worker is paid the fair value of his work, which happens to be less than the value of the thing he produces. Then it seems that the worker is not taken advantage of even if the capitalist’s ownership itself is unjust. A thief who sells me stolen goods (not stolen from me) at a fair price doesn’t exploit me.

14 Another objection that might be raised is one that Cohen argues for in ‘The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 12, 1 (Winter 1983) 3-33; and ‘Are Workers Forced to Sell Their Labor Power?’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 14, 1 (Winter 1985) 99-105. In these articles, Cohen contends that, as individuals, workers in modern capitalist societies are not forced to sell their labor power since they have the possibility of starting small businesses of their own. I will not take up this objection here since I have already dealt with it in ‘Exploitation, Force, and the Moral Assessment of Capitalism’ (see n. 1, above).

15 ‘On the other hand, the number and extent of [the worker’s] so-called necessary wants, as also the modes of satisfying them, are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a great extent on the degree of civilization of a country, more particularly on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed. In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element’ (C,I, 171).

16 It might be asked what would be the case if workers were all guaranteed the normal standard of living whether or not they worked, and they continued working for capitalists in order to obtain the things they wanted above the normal standard. Note, first, that this condition is unlikely: Since the normal standard is historical, it has a kind of ratchet quality such that one year’s luxury becomes the next year’s necessity. The very forces that shape the value of labor power historically work to keep it pretty close to what capitalism is generally able to offer workers. If, however, the condition described did obtain, we might still describe the workers as exploited in the general sense, though no longer in the specific Marxian sense.

17 Buchanan, Allen E., ‘Marx, Morality, and History: An Assessment of Recent Analytical Work on Marx,’ Ethics 98, 1 (October 1987) 118-19CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 I believe that the upshot of considering these varying qualifications on straight application of the ideal of equal sovereignty is that the justice of whole social systems must be tested in light of something like the ‘difference principle,’ such that a social system is just to the degree to which allocates the social conditions of effective sovereignty either equally, or unequally only so far as this increases the sovereignty of the worst-off persons. I argue for this view in Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press forthcoming 1990). In The Labor Theory of the Difference Principle’ (see n. 11, above), I try to show how the difference principle interpreted as distributing labor-time can account for the preference for the socialist and the communist standards of distributive justice, given appropriate empirical conditions. Rather than get mired in the details of these arguments in the present paper, however, here I have made my case simply in terms of the social relationshp of equal sovereignty and tacked the qualifications on at the end.

19 See n. 1, above.

20 A revised version of this manuscript has since been published: John Roemer, ‘What Is Exploitation? Reply to Jeffrey Reiman,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 18, 1 (Winter 1989) 90-7

21 Cohen, G. A., ‘Review of Allen Wood’s Karl Marx,’Mind 92, 367 (July 1983) 440-5Google Scholar

22 ‘...Roemer appears simply to define stipulatively as “exploitive” any system in which property is not distributed equally...’ (Buchanan, ‘Marx, Morality, and History,’ 129).

23 Cohen, ‘Review,’ 444

24 Ibid., 445

25 Personal communication, August 8, 1988

26 Ibid.