Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of WealthRyan, John A. (John Augustine)
PhilosophyChristian
Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth
Ryan, John A. (John Augustine)
Economic history; Income distribution -- Moral and ethical aspects; Wealth -- Religious aspects
A milder and better reasoned form of the theory was set forth by Karl
J. Rodbertus.[232] Professor Wagner calls him, "the first, the most
original, and the boldest representative of scientific Socialism in
Germany." Yet, as Menger points out, Rodbertus derived many of his
doctrines from Proudhon and the Saint-Simonians. He admitted that in a
capitalist society the value of commodities does not always
correspond to the labour embodied in them, and that different kinds of
labour are productive in different degrees. Therefore, he had recourse
to the concept of a normal, or average, day's labour in any group, and
would have the various members of the group remunerated with reference
to this standard. This was to be brought about by a centralised
organisation of industry in which the whole product would ultimately
go to labour, and the share of the individual worker would be
determined by his contribution of socially necessary labour.
Although Karl Marx adopted and formulated in his own terms the theory
that value is determined by labour, he did not thence deduce the
conclusion that labour has a right to the whole product.[233] Being a
materialist, he consistently rejected conceptions of abstract justice
or injustice, rights or wrongs. In opposition to the methods of his
predecessors, he endeavoured to discover the historical and positive
forces which determined the actual distribution, and to derive
therefrom the laws that were necessarily preparing the way for a new
social order. While he contended that rent receivers and interest
receivers appropriated the surplus value created by labour, he
refrained from stigmatising this process as morally wrong. It was
merely a necessary element of the capitalist system. To call it unjust
was in Marx' view to use language without meaning. As well might one
speak of the injustice of a hurricane or an avalanche. Not the
preaching of abstract justice, but the inevitable transformation of
the capitalist into the collectivist organisation of industry, would
enable labour to obtain its full product.
Nevertheless, it is probably true that a majority of the followers of
Marx have drawn from his labour theory of value the inference that all
the value of the product belongs by a moral right to the labourer. So
deeply fixed in the human conscience is the conception of justice, and
so general is the conviction of the labourer's right to his product,
that most Socialists have not been able to maintain a position of
consistent economic materialism. Indeed, Marx himself did not always
succeed in evading the influence and the terminology of idealistic
conceptions. He frequently thought and spoke of the Socialist régime
as not only inevitable but as morally right, and of the capitalist
system as morally wrong. Despite his rigid, materialistic theorising,
his writings abound in passionate denunciation of existing industrial
evils, and in many sorts of "unscientific" ethical judgments.[234]
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