Abstract
This paper presents an exercise in the formalization of political principles, by taking as its theme the concept of distributive justice that Karl Marx advanced in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. We first summarize the content of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. Next, we transcribe the core of Marx’s presentation of the concept of distributive justice. Following, we present our formalization of Marx’s conception. Then, we make use of that formal analysis to confront Marx’s principle of distributive justice with John Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness, and the principles of distributive justice that derive from it. Finally, we discuss methodological issues relative to, and implications of, the way of formalizing political principles introduced here.
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Notes
Available online at http://plato.stanford.edu.
The SAPD is one of the origins of the current Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
For the sake of reference, we have numbered the 24 paragraphs of Marx’s text, a numbering that does not appear in (Marx 1970).
The first paragraph of the Gotha Program reads: 1. “Labor is the source of wealth and all culture, and since useful labor is possible only in society and through society, the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society.”In his comments to this first paragraph, which we do not transcribe here, Marx criticizes the naive conception that “labor is the source of wealth and all culture”, and the naive notion of “useful labor” itself.
Notice that Marx acknowledged that distribution and consumption can influence through time (i.e., diachronically) the development of production. HIs and Engel’s involvement in practical politics witness that acknowledgement.
For any set \(X\), we denote by \(\wp \left( X \right)\) the power-set of \(X\).
In fact, Rawls explicitly says that even the choice of the pair of principles of justice by the individuals in the original position is to be reached by an optimization procedure, the maximin decision procedure (Rawls 1971, p. 152).
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Lamont J, Favor C (2013) Distributive Justice. In: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Sept 2, 1996. Revised: Jan 2, 2013. Online version available at the web address http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive
Marx K (1875) Critique of the Gotha Programme. In: Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol 3, pp 13–30. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970. (First published by Friedrich Engels, in abridged form, in Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 1, No. 18, 1890–1891. Online version available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha. Accessed 17 Mar 2017
Rawls J (1971) A theory of justice. Belknap Press, Cambridge
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da Rocha Costa, A.C. Marx’s concept of distributive justice: an exercise in the formal modeling of political principles. AI & Soc 33, 487–500 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0707-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0707-6