1 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Collected Works, Vol. 35 (Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1975-), pp. 226–27Google Scholar, and Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. 1, translated by Fowkes, Ben (New York: Vintage, 1976), p. 325Google Scholar. The Fowkes translation of this passage is clearly the more accurate of the two. See Marx, Karl, Das Kapital, Erster Band (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1989), p. 231.Google Scholar

2 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 91, and Marx, Karl, Grundrisse, translated by Nicolaus, Martin (New York: Vintage, 1973), p.705; emphasis in the original.Google Scholar

3 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 37, p. 208; Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. 3, translated by Fernbach, David (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 313Google Scholar; and Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 31, p. 264. Also see Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 565, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 710.

4 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 581, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 728. Even when Marx takes exception to the view of other critics of capitalism that “Capital is nothing but defrauding of the worker” (emphasis in the original), he does not disagree with this assessment. Rather, he insists it is necessary to also recognize the positive consequences of capitalist development. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 32, pp. 394–95.

5 See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 239, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 340.

6 That this implication seems to contradict Marx's claim that labour power is purchased at its value does not prevent it from being implied by his theft claims. For a discussion of how to deal with this apparent contradiction in Marx, see Cohen, G. A., Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 147–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Ibid., pp. 146–47.

8 Ibid., pp. 151–52. For the classic expression of this challenge to Marxists see Nozick, Robert's Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 253Google Scholar.

Since necessary labour is, for Marx, labour necessary for the reproduction of labour power, and working to pay taxes for services that will not benefit the worker is not working to reproduce his labour power, the labour expended in the process to pay these taxes is surplus. Marx explains wage differentials between countries, in part, as a result of the policy of some countries to have workers pay taxes to the state by receiving part of the surplus value they produce, while in other countries workers' wages cover only the value of their labour power. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works', Vol. 35, p. 562, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 705.

9 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 34, pp. 404, 423, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 996, 1016. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, pp. 195, 206–207, 537, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 292, 303, 677.

10 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 204, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 301.

11 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 535 (emphasis in the original). That Marx places quotation marks around “robbed” suggests the term is not his own. Also see p. 558 (ibid.); Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 731–32; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 34, p. 455; and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 1052.

12 See Geras, Norman, “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and Rejoinder,” New Left Review, 198 (September-October 1992): 37–69, esp. pp. 45–54.Google Scholar

13 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 34, p. 363, and Vol. 35, p. 534, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 671–72, 954.

14 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. 337–38, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 460–61. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 95; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 178, and Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 87.

Two important collections of articles dealing with the debate over Marx's relationship to matters of justice are Marx, Justice and History, edited by Cohen, Marshal, Nagel, Thomas, and Scanlon, Thomas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Marx and Morality, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Suppl. Vol. 7, edited by Kai Nielsen and Steven C. Patten (1981). For a detailed cataloguing and critique of the debate, see Geras, Norman, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, 150 (March-April 1985): 47–85Google Scholar, and his previously noted “Bringing Marx to Justice,” pp. 37–69.

15 Wood, Allen, Karl Marx (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 137–38.Google Scholar

16 Allen, Derek P. H., “Marx and Engels on the Distributive Justice of Capitalism,” in Marx and Morality, edited by Nielsen, Kai and Patten, Steven C. (1981): 221–50, esp. pp. 246–50.Google Scholar

17 Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” p. 68.

18 See Smart, Paul, Mill and Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 144.Google Scholar

19 Cohen, G. A., Review of Karl Marx, by Allen Wood, Mind, 92 (July 1983): 440–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. p. 444 (emphasis in the original). See Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” p. 70, and Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice,” p. 65.

20 Cohen, Review of Karl Marx, p. 443. Cohen has continued to hold the views he advanced in this article. See Cohen, Self-Ownership, p. 195, n.l.

21 Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” p. 70.

22 Personal correspondence, January 3, 1997. Cohen's wording here reflects his agreement with the position I shall argue for in Section 3 that Marx's theft claims are the evidence that Marx had a juridical critique of capitalism. See Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 145–46.

23 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 588, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 739.

24 Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” p. 72.

25 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 750, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 929.

26 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 22, and Marx, Grundrisse, p. 634 (emphasis in the original). Might Marx be saying that workers produce free time that, by rights, belongs to society as a whole and not exclusively to the capitalists who steal it or the workers who produce it? Marx's sentence is in the form of a conjunction; the production of free time is for society in the sensethat, when workers engage in free individual development, society develops. See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 93, and Marx, Grundrisse, p. 708.

27 Elster, Jon, Making Sense of Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 216, 230Google Scholar. This proposal is also slightly modified by Elster to resolve the apparent tension between Marx's theft claims and his alleged egalitarianjustice claims (see my Section 5).

28 Ibid., p. 222. I shall not address the issue of whether the needs principle of developed communism is a description of distributive justice in that society or simply a description of what happens in that society. However, Marx describes distribution according to need as a form of right, suggesting he believed it was a principle of justice.

29 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 87.

30 Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 119, 146. In Chapter 8 of Self-Ownership, Cohen presents an interesting discussion on the distinction between normatively fundamental and causally fundamental injustice as it relates to the alleged Marxian account of the injustice of capitalist appropriation and the injustice of inequality in productive resources.

31 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. 762–63, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 911. By ignoring the first three sentences, Norman Geras is able to interpret this passage as saying “no more nor less than that people are not morally entitled to exclusive use of the productive resources of the earth; saying that private ownership of these constitutes a wrong” (Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” p. 77).

It should be noted that, for Marx, land “means, economically speaking, all conditions of labour furnished by Nature independently of man” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 604, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 758). Marx responds to the claim that labour is the source of all wealth by acknowledging that nature is a source of use-values and is “the primary source of all instruments and objects of labour” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 81. Cf. Vol. 35, p. 599, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 752).

32 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 706, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 875. See Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” p. 58.

33 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 504. See also Vol. 35, p. 751, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 930.

34 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 266. In his “The Tragedy of History” (New Left Review, 220 [1996]: 36–61), Jeffrey Vogel argues that Marx's normative dictates rely on the working class emerging in circumstances favourable to both human progress and human dignity. This allows Marx to avoid what Vogel calls the “Dilemma of the Enlightenment” in which universal moral principles are only practical by choosing either human progress or human dignity as a primary concern (ibid., pp. 50–51). While I find Vogel's argument interesting, this passage shows Marx faced this “dilemma” and chose human progress as his primary concern.

35 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 390–91, and Marx, Grundrisse, p. 463 (emphasis in the original). In the Collected Works, “Beurteilung” is incorrectly translated as “awareness.” This carries the suggestion of an accuracy of consciousness which is not present in the German. “Judgement” is a more accurate translation. Unlike Elster, I favour the Collected Works translation of Bewusstsein as “consciousness”—which is how the term is usually translated when used by Marx—rather than “awareness.” Even the Nicolaus translation of this passage uses consciousness for the second mention of Bewusstsein. See Marx, Karl, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), pp. 366–67.Google Scholar

36 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 34, p. 246. See Karl Marx und Engels, Friedrich, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Zweite Abteilung, Band 3, Teil 6 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1982), p. 2287.Google Scholar

37 Elster, Making Sense of Marx, p. 219.

38 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 263. See also Vol. 5, pp. 36–37.

39 Ibid., Vol. 5, p. 479 (my emphasis). Here is another passage to consider: “[I]n reality the proletarians arrive at … unity only through a long process of development in which the appeal to their right also plays a part. Incidentally, this appeal to their right is only a means of making them take shape as ‘they,’ as a revolutionary, united mass” (ibid., p. 323).

40 See Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 122, 125–26, 132.

41 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 85–86. Marx also claims that, in communism, surplus labour time will be required to contribute to “a fund for development, which the very increase of population makes necessary” (ibid., Vol. 30, p. 412).

42 Ibid., Vol. 24, p. 86. Marx also states that “what a producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society” (ibid., p. 85). Nevertheless, workers do lose control over some of their surplus labour, surplus labour time, and surplus product as these are transferred to address the needs of others. Consequently, the ownership rights implied in Marx's theft claims are violated. Geras also makes this point in “Bringing Marx to Justice,” pp. 58–59.

43 Cohen, Self-Ownership, pp. 124, 159, and Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 86.

44 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 37, pp. 255–56, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 365–66. See also Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 34, p. 441, and Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 1037.

45 See Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 84–85. Marx does say that disposable time will grow for everyone due to rapid development in social production in communism (ibid., Vol. 29, p. 94, and Marx, Grundrisse, p. 708). However, this would not prevent the rate of uncompensated surplus labour, etc. from remaining constant, or even rising, as necessary labour time decreases.

46 Warren, Paul, “Self- Ownership, Reciprocity, and Exploitation, or Why Marxists Shouldn't Be Afraid of Robert Nozick,” The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 24, 1 (March, 1994): 33–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 45–51. As the title of his article suggests, Warren is responding specifically to Cohen's view that Marx's theft claims imply the self-ownership thesis. However, his argument can apply when the ownership rights that follow directly from Marx's theft claims are the focus.

Warren suggests that if Marx's theft claims do imply perfect reciprocity, then perhaps Marx did not intend his use of the terms “theft” and ldquo;stealing” to be taken literally (ibid., p. 45). The difficulty with this view has already been discussed.

47 See Elster, Jon, “Exploring Exploitation,” The Journal of Peace Research, 15 (1978): 3–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. p. 3. Geras rejects Elster's suggestion for the same reason presented here. See Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice,” p. 59.

48 Carling, Alan, Social Division (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 143–44.Google Scholar

49 Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” p. 69.

50 Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice,” pp. 60–61.

51 I wish to thank Danny Goldstick, Arthur Ripstein, and G. A. Cohen for valuable comments on earlier versions of this work. I am indebted to Jim Silver, from whom I acquired my appreciation of Capital. I am also grateful to Ben and Will Taylor-Melanson for their technical assistance.