I'm reading Cohen's Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality and in chapter 6 he laid out an argument detailing how, in their criticism of capitalism, Marxists (I used quotation marks on the title because he didn't say who these Marxists were) have taken for granted the concept of self-ownership (something one would imagine to be antithetical to any left-wing ideology). In chapter 8 he re-affirms capitalist exploitation of workers, but, I thought I'd pitch his criticism here to see what you fellas think.
Before going straight to his argument, let me quote section which provides a foundation for his criticism (the footnotes have the same numbers as they do in the book, ergo the disparity between them).
Why do Marxists think that the extraction in question is unjust? I believe that they think so largely because they think that the transfer of product from the worker to the capitalist involves what Marx called 'the theft of another person's labour time' [2]. (p.145)
Now on to the argument:
Marxists say that capitalist steal labour time from working people. But you can steal from someone only that which properly belongs to him. The Marxist critique of capitalist injustice therefore implies that the worker is the proper owner of his own labour time: he, no one else, has the right to decide what will be done with it. But he could hardly have that right without having the right to decide what to do with his own capacity to work, his labour power. The claim that capitalists steal labour time from working people therefore implies that the worker is the proper owner of his own power...That proposition is the thesis of self-ownership, and I claim that (something like)[5] it undergirds the Marxist case for the proposition that the capitalist relationship is inherently exploitative. (p. 147)
Does anyone disagree with how he laid out the Marxist claim of exploitation? If not, how would you square this circle?
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2. The Grundrisse, p.705
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... [There's more to this footnote, but I don't think it was important; also, I'm tired of transcribing. -Ethos]
not read this one but it seems the argument rests on the conflation of analytical and normative senses of exploitation. The question of if Marx held a theory of distributive justice is a very contentious one - I seem to remember Norman Geras writing a good piece on it in NLR in the 80s. Not my strongest area and can see am teetering on the brink of the fact-value dichotomy but I guess it is possible to hold to a theory of exploitation as the appropriation of social surplus product without holding that this process is unjust. Ortho Marxism tried to do just that in fact, combining it with a relativist class morality. Whatever the merits of this it seems to cast doubt on the idea Marxism must endorse self-ownnership