Did Marx really think that capitalism is unjust?

Abstract

Marx is typically and commonsensically seen as the arch moral critic of capitalism. But Allen Wood, in his celebrated but provocative ‘The Marxian critique of justice’, argued that in fact Marx held that capitalism (the capitalist mode of production) is not unjust, and indeed that it is perfectly just. His reasons in support of this attribution issue directly from Marx’s overarching social scientific and historical-cum-philosophical paradigm, ‘historical materialism’. Very few Marxists or exegetes of Marx have been persuaded by Wood’s radical reading of Marx on justice. G A Cohen, for example, dismisses it as an ‘unlikely thesis’. But I will argue that Wood’s ‘anti-injustice’ reading of Marx is essentially sound, though his key arguments for it are hostage to some subverting incoherencies. I go on to proffer a pared-down rendition of the defensible core of Wood’s anti-injustice reading of Marx.