MARX'S CONCEPTION OF POWER

Marx's Conception of Power

Abstract

Marx's account of capitalist exploitation is undermined by inter-related confusions surrounding the notion of "labour power." These confusions relate to [i] what labour power is, [ii] what happens to labour power in the labour market, and [iii] what the epistemic status of labour power is (the issue of "appearance and reality"). The central theses of the paper are [a] that property ownership is the wrong model for understanding the exploitation of labour, and [b] that the concept of exploitation is linked more fruitfully to a conception of distributive injustice than to Marx's theory of surplus value.

Marx's Conception of Power

Introduction

To the extent that it is fruitful to think of capitalism as a mode of social existence involving exploitation - and I have no inclination to dispute this view - it is unnecessary to think of the exploitation which it involves as a specific economic mechanism, as Karl Marx himself appears to do. There are at least two strains in Marxist understanding of the labour-capital relationship. One of these - the one which by and large prevails, and is associated with the "mechanistic" view - deserves to be rejected; the other, less developed strain, deserves I think to be promoted and explored.

Part I

[i] Speaking of what is perhaps Marx's most fundamental theoretical concept in the analysis of capitalism - that of labour power - G. A. Cohen writes that "the proletarian must sell his labour power in order to obtain his means of life." In this he only follows Marx, who writes that "labour power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour power it is, offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity." [ii] On the other hand, however, Cohen insists that the wage worker fully owns his labour power. "Unlike the proletarian," he also remarks, "the serf has only some rights over his labour power, not all."

In the same vein, we are told that the proletarian's situation "is different. No superior has rights over his labour power." But here too, Cohen only follows Marx, who tells us that the labourer "must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity ... by this means alone he can avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it." [i] and [ii] are plainly not consistent. A commodity which one sells or has sold is something one thereby no longer owns, and one can hardly claim full rights (if any) over it.

How is the inconsistency to be resolved? The obvious solution, one might think, would involve distinguishing clearly and unequivocally between talk of the buying and selling of items, including labour power, on the one hand, and talk of the hiring or renting of items, including labour power, on the other - or equally, between talk of the purchase and sale of ownership rights, on the one hand, and talk of the purchase and sale of rights of use, on the ...