1 I was born in 1941 in a part of Montreal which returned a communist to Parliament in 1945, and my parents, and, eventually, I, too, were active in the communist movement in Montreal, which was vigorous until 1956.

2 The Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973) 705

3 To see that this is so, note that a social system might repress the potential of all of its members equally, to no one's benefit, and not at the behest of any particular section of society: there would then be no ingredient of injustice in the repression. By contrast, there could not be a system under which each person suffers, through expropriation, a net loss of labour time.

4 Some people think that the protection he receives from the lord compensates the serf for his surplus labour. Suffice it to say, here, that Marx is not one of them.

5 The parenthesis is a gesture in the direction of a weaker claim: it is no doubt unnecessary to affirm an unrestricted version of the self-ownership principle in order to claim that the capitalist relationship is inherently exploitative. But Marxists have certainly not reflected on the possible restrictions, and they consequently have not distanced themselves from the unqualified self-ownership thesis. It is therefore a permissible simplification to attribute it to them in that form. (One possible restriction would be a prohibition on transfer of selfownership, which means selling oneself into slavery. That restriction is consistent with condemning capitalism as theft. The same does not hold for all restrictions on the exercise and income rights that go with self-ownership.)

6 Readers who find labour theory of value Talmudics boring may wish to skip these final paragraphs of section II and proceed to section III.

7 See the Grundrisse passage quoted on 365 above. There are many other relevantly similar passages, including the following one, which is especially interesting, since it shows that Marx himself regarded the charge that the capitalist steals (at any rate something) as consistent with his paying the worker what his labour power is worth: ‘Although equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, the whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has stolen from them’ (Capital, Volume I [Harmondsworth: Penguin 1976], 728).

8 I am here indebted to Douglas Ehring's ingenious argument that you can steal the use-value of a thing without stealing its market value. I should add that I do not accept Ehring's less important complementary and converse claim that you can steal market value without stealing use-value, and I also do not accept his criticism of some claims which I have made about labour, desire and exploitation. See Ehring's ‘Cohen, Exploitation, and Theft,’ Dialogue 26 (1987), 30ff. For the claims Ehring criticizes, see ‘The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation,’ in my History, Labour, and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988), 229-30.

9 One could readily agree that the case to be described is one of exploitation in a morally neutral sense of that term (if there is one), but the question of whether it should be regarded as one of unjust exploitation is, it will be seen, rather more delicate.

10 Needless to say, the above statement implies no retreat from the proposition that a society founded on private ownership of the means of production is unjust; and the peculiar example which I used to make a key conceptual point has no policy consequences for socialists, who favour a society in which infirm people would obtain support as a matter of basic right.

11 ‘The Critique of the Gotha Programme,’ in Marx-Engels Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1958), 24

12 A Marxist with a strong commitment to The Communist Manifesto might find it difficult to justify welfare state provision for the chronically unemployed and unproducing lumpenproletariat. Here is how the Manifesto describes them: ‘The “dangerous class,” the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’ (Marx and Engels, Collected Works Vol. 6 [London: Lawrence and Wishart 1976], 494).

13 Which here means just that they do not work more hours than are necessary to produce what they consume. It is here irrelevant that, in some broader sense, they may nevertheless be exploited.

14 That posture is struck in ‘Solidarity Forever,’ which brings all of the features together, and whose verses run as follows:

When the union's inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun; Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, For the union makes us strong.

It is we who ploughed the prairies, built the cities where they trade, Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid; Now we stand outcast and starving, ‘mid the wonders we have made, But the union makes us strong.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn, But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn; We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn That the union makes us strong.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, Greater than the might of atoms magnified a thousandfold; We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, For the union makes us strong.

Feature 1, that the workers constitute the majority of society, is not explicitly affirmed, but it is surely implied as part of the explanation of the immense potential power of the working class asserted in the first, third and fourth stanzas. The other part of the explanation of that power is that the workers are the producers, as the second stanza, and the all-important second line of the third, assure us. The feature of exploitation is apparent in the first line of the third stanza, and the third line of the second indicates how utterly deprived the workers are, no doubt on such a scale that the fifth feature (nothing-tolose) obtains. As for the revolution feature, the third lines of each of the last two verses, and the second of the first, imply that the workers can change society, and it is clearly part of the message of the whole song that they will.

15 See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso 1985). A meticulous critique of their wildly over-reactive retreat from traditional Marxist claims is provided by Norman Geras in ‘Post-Marxism?,’ New Left Review 163 (May/June, 1987). For a less meticulous critique, see Chapter 4 of The Retreat from Class (London: Verso 1986), by the enraged Ellen Meiksins Wood. Wood is right that those who say Farewell to the Working Class (the title of a book by André Gorz, Boston: Beacon Press 1982) fail to identify an agency of change comparable to the working class, as it was traditionally conceived, in power. But she exaggerates the extent to which the traditional agency is intact: see the features she attributes to the working class at pp. 14-15 of her book. It may be crazy to forgo the traditional agency and then say ‘business (more or less) as usual,’ but Wood says ‘business as usual’ without forgoing the traditional agency, and that could be regarded as crazier.

16 The phrase ‘white heat of technology’ was actually used without irony in the 1964 parliamentary election campaign.

17 The Wilson wheeze was revived by Michael Meacher, in an article in The Guardian which appeared less than a fortnight after Labour's 1987 election defeat. According to Meacher, ‘Labour cannot regain power simply by relying on its traditional manual worker vote… It is the technocratic class - the semiconductor “chip” designers, the computer operators, the industrial research scientists, the high-tech engineers-who hold the key to Britain's future. That is the class that Labour must champion and bring to power … .’ Meacher contrasts his faith in that group's possibilities with two alternative bases of Labour power: a ‘Rainbow Coalition of minorities,’ and ‘the growing underclass of have-nots’ (Guardian, June 24, 1987). It is depressing that a figure who is usually regarded as on the left of the Labour Party should depart so expressly from an egalitarian perspective.

18 The first four features in the list do not exhaust the possible bases for progressive politics in our time. There are four issues which do not figure on the list and which are moving millions to political commitment in the contemporary world: gender, poison, peace, and race.

19 The argumentation of this section is complicated, and readers may find this summary of its course helpful:

The communism objection: The communist principle contradicts the thesis of self-ownership, which therefore cannot be attributed to Marxists.

My first answer: If the communist principle contradicts the self-ownership thesis, then perhaps Marxists contradict themselves.

Objector's reply: They do not contradict themselves, since they invoke selfownership only in an ad hominem way.

My first rejoinder: They nevertheless ceaselessly employ it, and that might be enough to explain their vulnerability to libertarianism.

My second rejoinder: The ad hominem gambit does not work.

My third rejoinder: Merely ad hominem use of the self-ownership thesis would not explain the passion which accompanies the Marxist claim that the worker is robbed.

My second answer to the communism objection: The communist principle does not contradict the self-ownership thesis.

20 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1976), 47

21 Communism is ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (The Communist Manifesto, 506).

22 ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme,’ 24

23 It is harder, from the perspective of the claims of this paper, to accommodate what Marx says in The Critique of the Gotha Programme about the lower stage of communism, or what later came to be called socialism. In that society, there is some abridgement of the principle of self-ownership. For a fuller discussion of both societies, in relation to Marxian failure to repudiate the idea of self-ownership, see my ‘Self-Ownership, Communism, and Equality,’ in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary Volume, 1990).

24 See John Roemer, ‘Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation?,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (Winter, 1985), reprinted with abridgements, in John Roemer, ed., Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986).

25 See his Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books 1983), 117-19, 161-3, 301-3.

26 See his A Preface to Economic Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1985).

27 As in the left-wing song, ‘The Banks of Marble,’ by Les Rice:

I saw the seaman standing, idly by the shore, I heard the bosses saying, ‘Got no work for you no more.’

The song concerns disemployed farmers, miners and seamen, but it says nothing about those who never had a chance to farm, mine or work at sea in the first place. Those who never had such opportunities fall outside the set of ‘my brothers working’ who will ‘together make a stand’ so that they will come to own what they have ‘sweated for.’

For a brilliant attempt to treat the unemployed not as disemployed but as a class more or less permanently deprived of ‘job assets,’ see Philippe Van Parijs, ‘A Revolution in Class Theory,’ Politics and Society 15 (1986-7). Van Parijs points out that ‘the unemployed would gain much more from a redistribution of jobs than from a redistribution of wealth’ (469).

28 An egalitarian might reject initial external resource equality on the ground that resources need to be differentially distributed to compensate for talent differences. But that ground of rejection of resource equality requires denial of the tenet, derived from the thesis of self-ownership, that people are entitled to the differential rewards which (uncompensated for) talent differences produce, and it is therefore unavailable to Marxists. (There is more to be said about how, precisely, the Marxian condemnation of unequal access to means of production is related to the Marxian condemnation of extraction of surplus product. I hope to address that issue in another paper.)

29 Reprinted in Jeffrey Paul, ed., Reading Nozick (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1981).

30 One way of undermining Nozick's case for self-ownership is to distinguish carefully between the idea of self-ownership and the idea of freedom: see the closing pages of my ‘Are Freedom and Equality Compatible?,’ in J. Elster and K. Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989). Being more prone than egalitarian liberals are to confuse those two ideas, Marxists are also more strongly motivated than they are to expose the roots of that confusion.

31 This essay has been improved in the light of comments on earlier drafts by Samuel Bowles, John Broome, David Copp, Ronald Dworkin, Keith Graham, Alan Montefiore, John McMurtry, Derek Parfit, John Roemer, Robert Vander Veen, and Harry Willekens, and of major efforts of criticism and assistance by Michael Otsuka and Arnold Zuboff.