“… [C]apitalism is just if and only if capitalists have the right to own the means of production they do, for it is their ownership of the means of production which enables them to make profit out of labour, and if that ownership is legitimate, then so too is making profit out of labour. The key question, then, is whether capitalist private property is morally defensible.
Now all, or virtually all, capitalist property either is, or is made of, something which was once no one’s private property, since (virtually) all physical private property comes immediately or ultimately from the land, which was there before any people, hence before any private owners of it, were. Some of what was once no one’s remains substantially no one’s even now, therefore accessible to everyone: the air people breathe is still public property. The rest has been removed from the public domain and turned into private property. If, then someone claims a moral entitlement to something he legally owns, we may ask, apart from how he in particular came to have it, how the thing came to be (anyone’s) private property in the first place, and we may then examine the justice of that transformation. I believe we shall find that the original privatization was unjust, that … property is theft, theft of what morally speaking belongs to us all in common.
Some may think it strange that someone who is more or less a Marxist should propose to himself the project of demonstrating that the capitalist system is unjust. That does not seem a very Marxist thing to get involved in [the late Marxist philosopher R. (Rodney) G. Peffer being a notable exception: Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990)]. It sounds like moral philosophy, not Marxism [as Brian Leiter no doubt would be quick to inform us]. But whoever thinks that should ask himself why Karl Marx wrote the last part of volume I of Capital, the part on primitive accumulation, in which he contended that a propertyless proletariat was created in Great Britain as a result of violent expropriation of small-scale private property held in common. Part of his aim was to refute the idea that capitalists became monopoly owners of means of production as a result of their own industry and frugality, or that of their forebears. He was trying to show that British capitalism rests upon an unjust foundation.
To the extent that Marx’s historical allegations are true, they tell against the pretension to legitimacy of British capital. But however successful he is on that score, his success from a broader point of view is limited. For he does not say, and it is not true, that primitive accumulation is always a savage affair. Capital does not always ‘come into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.’ Sometimes it emerges more discreetly. And anyway, Marxists do not believe merely that this or that capitalist society, or even every capitalist society, is unjust because of its particular origin. Marxists believe that capitalism as such is unjust, that, therefore, there could not be a just formation of capitalist private property, and that thesis requires moral rather than historical argument.” G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford University Press, 1988): 301-302.
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