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Liberty, Equality, and Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

John Exdell
John Exdell*
Affiliation:
Kansas State University
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Extract

According to conventional wisdom, the causes of economic inequality under capitalism are different in kind from those operating in a socialist system. In socialist societies today the distribution of wealth and income is determined by political authority, whereas in capitalism it is thought to arise mainly from the choices of individuals freely transferring goods and services in the competitive market. Robert Nozick's account of the workings of a ‘free society’ expresses this view clearly:

There is no central distribution, no person or group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchange and actions of persons … The total result is the product of many individual decisions which the different individuals involved are entitled to make.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 1981 , pp. 457 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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References

1 Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974) 149-50.

2 Ibid., 169.

3 Two Treatises of Government (New York: Hafner Publishing Co. 1947) 134.

4 Nozick, 171.

5 Ibid., 172.

6 Ibid. 170.

7 Ibid., 172.

8 Ibid., 169.

9 Marxists have generally been reluctant to admit that workers can exploit other workers. For an exception to the traditional view see Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert ‘The Marxian Theory of Value and Heterogeneous Labor: A Critique and Reformulation,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1 (1977) 173–192.Google Scholar

10 The length of the work week needed to earn 72 fish is 36 hours. Thus for 12 workers the labor embodied in wages comes to 434 man-hours. This total divided by the 72 fish consumed in wages gives us the number of man-hours embodied in each fish consumed by the workers, which is 6. Since each fisherman gets 8 fish/week he consumes 8 x 6 or 48 man-hours/week. Each rower's weekly wage embodies 5 x 6 or 30 man-hours/week. Subtracting hours worked by each fisherman (36) from man-hours consumed (48) gives us the figure of 12 man-hours. This represents the net hours of labor that the rowers supply every fisherman. The example assumes that the wage difference between rowers and fishermen is not accounted for by whatever labor the fishermen had to invest previously to acquire their skill. The assumption is Justified by the facts of a real world capitalist economy, where relative wages are not explained by differences in labor time embodied in the production of skills. This is a point on which radical and orthodox economists generally agree.

11 Nozick, 188.

12 See, for example, Rachels, James ‘What People Deserve,’ in Arthur, John and Shaw, William H. eds., Justice and Economic Distribution (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1978) 150–163.Google Scholar

13 Nozick, 185-189. See also pp. 235-238 on equality of opportunity.

14 Nozick attributes this view to Rawls, who in A Theory of Justice attempts to Justify a set of principles which ‘define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdes of social cooperation,’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. P. 1971) 14. One might also read Engels along these lines in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, when he argues that the transformation of labor from individual to ‘socialized production’ under capitalism requires new forms of appropriation.

15 Capital, Volume I (New York: Vintage Books 1977) 280.

16 See Braverman, Harry Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20th Century (New York: Monthly Review Press 1974);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Marglin, Stephen ‘What do Bosses Do? The Origin and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,’ Review of Radical Political Economics, 6 2, 33–60;Google Scholar Stone, Katherine ‘The Origins of Job Structure in the Steel Industry,’ RRPE, 6 2, 61–97;Google Scholar Noble, David F. America by Design: Scinece, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1977);Google Scholar Edwards, Richard Contested Terrain; The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books 1979).Google Scholar

17 See Braverman, Marglin, and Stone.

18 Zimbalist, Andrew ‘The Limits of Work Humanization’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 7 2, 50–60,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Zwerdling, Daniel Democracy at Work (Washington, DC: Association for Self-Management.)Google Scholar In Zwerdling see especially the chapters on General Foods and the plywood co-ops.

19 Nozick, 248.

20 See Stone and Braverman, chapters 4 and 6.

21 Marglin, 35.

22 Stone, 73-75. See also Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books 1977).Google Scholar Bowles and Gintis offer extensive evidence to show that skill differences have little influence on occupational position, Job performance and income.

23 For a study of the psychological effects of this ideology, see Sennet, Richard and Cobb, Jonathan The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage Books 1973).Google Scholar For critical analysis, see Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America.