Marx's Concept of Justice: Disambiguating Capitalist and Communist Justice

Karl Marx is back. No less than three academic monographs by philosophers treating Marx’s ethical, social, and political thought were published in 2024 alone. This is startling evidence of a renewed interest by philosophers in what Marx has to offer to ethics and social philosophy. Although an earlier flowering of interest by analytic philosophers – arguably beginning some fifty years ago with a debate between Allen Wood and Ziyad Husami – generated an enormous literature on Marx and justice, my contention is that we can uncover a heretofore insufficiently scrutinized concept of justice in the works of Marx precisely by returning to that inaugural debate. We can do this by triangulating the positions of Wood and Husami, showing how their views, when taken together, imply a third position that is more textually faithful and constitutes a more compelling interpretation than either of Marx’s concept of justice. My argument rests on three central interpretive claims: (1) there are two conceptions or standards of justice in Marx’s writings on capitalism, capitalist justice and communist justice, (2) the communist mode of production develops within the capitalist one, and (3) because of (2), the communist standard of justice can validly be applied within capitalism.