ABSTRACT
Robert Tucker and Allen Wood, in developing their influential and iconoclastic views of Marx and Marxism on justice, stressed that many people, including doubtlessly “numerous followers of Marx,” have assumed plausibly enough “that distributive justice is the value underlying” Marx’s harsh judgment “against existing society.” The foregoing description contains a mistaken account of the origin of surplus value, and Marx would reject the Ricardian view that the existence of surplus value shows that there has been an unequal exchange between worker and capitalist. Labor or, more exactly, labor power is the sole creator of value. The capitalist’s means of production do not grow in value unless they are consumed by labor. The reality of capitalist production and capitalist production relations is quite otherwise. That morality is ideology prone does not mean that morality is necessarily ideological.
