Self-ownership and the libertarian challenge: does the Marxist theory of exploitation tacitly endorse libertarian self-ownership, and must self-ownership be rejected to secure egalitarianism?

G. A. Cohen, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The Marxist theory of exploitation tacitly endorses libertarian self-ownership.1 The worker's grievance against the capitalist, as Marxists standardly express it, is that the capitalist gets the surplus of what the worker produces — which presupposes that the worker owns what she produces, which presupposes that she owns her productive labour, which presupposes that she owns herself.23

The structural argument from the Wilt Chamberlain transfer case (Nozick 1974) lands hard on Marxists because Marxists are committed to the premise that grounds it. The way out is not to retain self-ownership while securing equality through redistributive world- ownership (the left-libertarian path of Steiner, Otsuka, Vallentyne) — that path concedes the libertarian framing and runs into the eye-transplant and Tiny Tim cases.4

The way out is to reject self-ownership and to reground the Marxist critique of capitalism on a different foundation: equality of condition and the egalitarian ethos, not the worker's ownership of her own labour.5 The standard Marxist condemnation of exploitation thus has to be reformulated; the case against capitalism survives the reformulation, but with different content.

Sources

  1. I accused Marxists of implicitly affirming the thesis of self-ownership in their account of exploitation (with grave consequences for the coherence of that account: see sections 2,3 and 8 of that chapter). That Marxists fail to reject self-ownership and that they actually affirm it: those are, of course, mutually consistent claims.
    Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, p. 205
  2. To sustain their egalitarianism, orthodox Marxists must distinguish their position from a Locke-like one which asserts both the pre-eminent place of labour in value creation and the labourer's right to his labour and hence to its products. There are, in principle, two ways out of this dilemma. The first is to reduce the significance of labour in the account of value creation.
    Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, pp. 178–179
  3. What Marxists regard as exploitation, to wit, the appropriation, without recompense, of surplus product, will indeed result when people are forcibly denied the external means of producing their existence.
    Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, pp. 128–129
  4. They must, in particular, distinguish themselves more clearly than it has been their practice to do from 'left-wing libertarians', who affirm complete self-ownership but divide worldly resources in an initially equal way. 15 And that admonition is the main theme of Chapter 5.
    Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, pp. 23–25
  5. Nevertheless, Rawls regards 'the distribution of natural talents as a common asset', in the benefits of which people should share, in amounts decided by his egalitarian difference principle: A "Theory of Justice, p. 101; and Dworkin's scheme for taxing talent has a similarly egalitarian rationale: 'Equality of Resources', pp.
    Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, p. 127

Where the argument is made

  • Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge 1995) — the systematic book, especially Chapter 1 'Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: How Patterns Preserve Liberty'
  • Chapter 3 'Self- Ownership, World-Ownership, and Equality'
  • Chapter 4 'Are Freedom and Equality Compatible?'
  • Chapter 5 'Self-Ownership, Communism, and Equality: Against the Marxist Technological Fix'
  • Chapter 6 'Marxism and Contemporary Political Philosophy, Or: Why Nozick Exercises Some Marxists More than He Does Any Egalitarian Liberals'
  • Chapter 7 'Marx and Locke on Land and Labour' (the 1985 British Academy Lecture)
  • Chapter 8 'Exploitation in Marx: What Makes it Unjust?'
  • Chapters 9–10 on delineating and assessing self-ownership. 'Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat' in On the Currency (Otsuka ed. 2011) Chapter 7
  • History, Labour, and Freedom (1988) Chapter 11 'The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation'
  • Chapter 13 'The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom'

How the argument was received

SOFE is widely regarded as one of the most important works in late-twentieth-century political philosophy and the most sustained Marxist engagement with libertarianism in existence. The two-stage thesis has been contested at both stages. The Marxist-tacit- self-ownership claim has been challenged by Marxists who deny that exploitation theory presupposes self-ownership (some prefer a domination-based or alienation-based reading of exploitation that does not run through ownership of labour); the rejection-of-self- ownership claim has been challenged by the left-libertarian alternative (keep self- ownership, secure equality through world- ownership). The left-libertarian path is the most serious modern reply; my answer is that it still concedes the libertarian framing, which is what the rejection is meant to escape. The deeper reception has not reversed the central judgments: that Nozick's challenge cannot be dismissed by Marxists in the way it could be dismissed by left- liberals, and that the Marxist tradition has to clarify its own theoretical commitments before it can mount an effective critique.