An Analysis Of The Debate On Marx’s Justice In Contemporary Britain And American

For a long time,Marx always showed his image of defending human justice.People’s traditional understanding of Marx is that Marx condemned capitalism as unjust.The formation of Tucker wood proposition subverts people’s traditional understanding of Marx and causes academic debate on Marx’s justice.The core point of this proposition can be summarized into two aspects.First,capitalism is just.Marx didn’t denounce capitalism based on justice.Marx denounced capitalism by resorting to immoral goodness.Second,this proposition holds that capitalism cannot be evaluated by external standards.The new mode of production is not more just than the old one,it just shows justice in its own way.Since Tucker wood proposition was put forward,many scholars have studied Marx’s thought of justice around this proposition.The scholars represented by Husami stand on the opposite side of wood’s proposition and put forward that Marx agrees with justice.While Norman Geras,Cohen and other scholars stand on the neutral position,trying to neutralize the two groups with distinct positions.Norman Geras,Cohen and other scholars believe that Marx’s expression of justice is vague and contradictory.At the same time,Buchanan,Stuart white and other scholars interpret Marx’s view of justice based on external standards.Buchanan believes that Marx’s criticism of capitalism based on justice has two critical perspectives,namely,the internal criticism based on legal power and the external criticism based on materialism.White pointed out that Marx criticized the injustice of capitalism based on the principle of need.What kind of justice does Marx hold? By combing the different understandings of Marx’s view of justice by scholars and analyzing the reasonable degree of the arguments supporting his view,we can see that the defects of wood’s proposition are mainly manifested in wood’s narrow understanding of Marx’s historical materialism,and wood’s judgment of Marx’s concept of justice only as facts.Therefore,wood’s understanding of Marx’s justice is bound to be narrow and incomplete.Marx’s justice thought is not only a fact judgment,but also a value judgment.It is the justice as Marx’s value judgment that enables Marx to examine the past social form and guide the direction of history.Secondly,based on the overall perspective,by comparing the external evaluation criteria based on capitalism,this paper analyzes the views of various scholars on Marx’s justice thought.It is concluded that Marx’s justice view based on the principle of human needs is more reasonable.Marx’s view of justice pays attention to the needs of human beings and the free and all-round development of human beings.Rethinking Marx’s view of justice is undoubtedly of great significance for clarifying Marx’s view of justice.