Gina Cohen

In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, people’s material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality. In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawls’s theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making. Cohen also charges Rawls’s constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality.

In?The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation? I distinguished between two ways in which the labour theory of value is formulated, both of which are common. In the popular formulation, the amount of value a commodity has depends on how much labour was spent producing it. In the strict formulation, which is so called because it formulates the labour theory of value proper, the amount of value a commodity has depends on nothing about its history but only on how much labour would (now) be required to produce something just like it. I argued that strict and popular formulations are often wrongly treated as substantially equivalent, and that the practice of conflating them sustains two false impressions: that the labour theory of value is a basis for saying that capitalists exploit workers, and that the labour theory of value is true. The present paper is a reply to Nancy Holmstrom's recent attempt, in?Marx and Cohen on Exploitation and the Labor Theory of Value?, to refute the theses of the article referred to above.

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia is in large measure an ingenious elaboration of an argument for capitalism adumbrated by Plekhanov. The capitalism Nozick advocates is more pure than the one we know today. It lacks taxation for social welfare, and it permits degrees of inequality far greater than most apologists for contemporary bourgeois society would countenance. The present paper paper is only indirectly a critique of Nozick's defense of capitalism. Its immediate aim is to refute Nozick's major argument against a rival of capitalism, socialism. The refutation vindicates socialism against that argument, but no one opposed to socialism on other grounds should expect to be converted by this paper.

Section I argues, against Peter Mew, that, since people create nothing ex nihilo, everything now privately owned incorporates something that once was not, and that this has important consequences for distributive justice. Section II defends the ‘diachronic’ approach to distributive justice against Mew's charge that it is ‘otiose’, and section III claims that beliefs about distributive justice have a big effect on political conflict in the real world. Section IV enters a few disagreements with Mew's account of the political ‘quiescence’ of the Western proletariat. Section V relieves the tension between the Marxist commitment to the advancement of productive power and the Marxist commitment to those at whose expense that advancement occurs.