What justice? (2011)

Book Review from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

On The Currency Of Egalitarian Justice. By G.A. Cohen, Edited by Michael Otsuka, Princeton University Press, 2011

Contrary to popular myth, Marx and Engels did not frame their arguments for socialism in terms of material equality. In fact they rejected demands for levelling down as ‘crude communism’. As the political philosopher Allen Wood has pointed out, they did not criticise capitalism because poverty is unevenly distributed, but because there is poverty where there need be none, and that there is a privileged class which benefits from a system which subjects the majority to an artificial and unnecessary poverty. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx argued that socialism or communism (they mean the same thing) would be based on from each according to ability, to each according to need. This is not an egalitarian slogan. Rather, it asks for people to be considered individually, each with a different set of needs and abilities. Nor would socialist society have to be underpinned by some conception of ‘distributive justice’. From each according to ability, to each according to need is a practical arrangement for meeting self-defined needs.

This book is a collection of essays by the academic political philosopher G.A. Cohen, who died in 2009. The ‘currency’ in the title is a reference to the principles used by political philosophers in the academic debate about ‘egalitarian justice’, though in one essay Cohen does acknowledge that those who have more currency (meaning more money) are freer than those who have less of it. This may seem blindingly obvious but it is often denied in academia. Cohen has built a reputation on work allegedly inspired by Marx’s writings, but here again he misleads. This is confirmed in the essay ‘Back to Socialist Basics’ in which he demonstrates no understanding of socialist basics. Cohen claims that he is setting out the principles for ‘egalitarian justice’ –  as if they existed in a timeless social and economic vacuum. But the mechanisms for bringing about the desired changes – Cohen argues for a ‘fair’ redistribution of money via taxation – crucially depend upon capitalism’s ability to actually deliver an egalitarian society. Since he does not show that capitalism can do that there is no reason to take his philosophising seriously.

According to political philosophy justice prevails when people get what they deserve, though there are widely differing interpretations of its ethical implications. For socialists, as for Marx, the concepts of justice and fairness are not so much wrong or false as not relevant for our purposes. They misrepresent the exploitative social relations of capitalism and are inappropriate to the struggle for socialism. Socialists operate within a different frame of reference, using different principles which transcend present-day society. Socialism will undoubtedly be a more materially equal society, but that is not the objective. Common ownership of the means of life will be a social relationship of equality between all people. This establishes a classless society. That is the socialist objective and not a ‘fairer’ capitalism which was Cohen’s real aim.

Lew Higgins

Books received: Paperback edition of The Enigma of Capital by David Harvey (reviewed in the June 2010 Socialist Standard).