ABSTRACT

A good deal of discussion within Marx scholarship, which is a very extensive body of literature, has concerned the question as to whether Marx had an ethic at all. During the 1970s and early 1980s in particular, thanks in part no doubt to John Rawls's discovery that writing philosophically about justice could still be quite rewarding, a portion of Marx scholarship took up the question as to whether there could be anything resembling a Marxian theory of justice. It is clear that Marx, in certain respects like Hegel in this regard, refused to develop an ethical code of admonitions and prohibitions such as one finds both in the Scholastic tradition and in much of contemporary moral philosophy. Marx takes note of the realities of colonialism. The central equation of Marx's analysis is the ratio of surplus value over the subsistence wage portion of value produced, to which latter Marx assigns the rather vague and unsatisfactory label of "variable capital".