Abstract
Chapter 6, The Ethical Dimension of Economics, examines Dussel’s detailed study of the work of Karl Marx. Dussel interprets Marxism as an ethics of liberation which deploys an analectic method. Dussel argues that living labor, for Marx, retains a certain exteriority to the economic system despite being exploited by capital for private gain. In particular, the chapter focuses on alienation of living labor in the form of labor power subsumed by capital. It also discusses the theory of surplus value and how bourgeois economics mystifies capital accumulation as though capital created value out of nothing when in reality this value comes in large part from unpaid (surplus) labor time. For Dussel, the ethical principles are subsumed as norms of the struggle to overcome the alienation of labor as well as to halt the degradation of the biosphere.
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Notes
- 1.
In an interview with the author, Dussel drew attention to dead (or hypoxic) zones in the ocean with such low oxygen levels from pollution that fish suffocate upon entering these waters. This, indicated Dussel, is an example of the urgent need to take measures to stop the devastation of the biosphere and prevent the disappearance of humanity. Mexico City, January 10, 2018.
- 2.
Dussel discusses dependency theory and the transfer of of surplus value from the peripheral to the central (countries) in 16 tesis de economía política: Interpretación filosófica (2014a, Theses 10 and 11); Section 18 on the Grundrisse and the “question of dependency,” in La producción teórica de Marx: Un comentario a los Grundrisse (1985) (The Theoretical Production of Mark: A Commentary on the Grundrisse); and Section 15 on “the manuscripts of 61-63 and the ‘concept’ of dependency,” in Hacia un Marx desconocido. Un comentario de los manuscritos del 61-63 (1988/2008a) (Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 61-63). While important to Dussel’s application of Marxism to dependency theory as it impacts Latin American politics and economics, a discussion of this issue is not within the scope of this monograph.
- 3.
As we discussed in previous chapters, this two-dimensionality of human life does not constitute a substance dualism; human life is always a lived body in a metabolic relationship to its means of production and reproduction. Yet, given its reflexive nature, human life has both intrasystemic and extrasystemic dimensions.
- 4.
For a discussion on the relation between living labor and labor power, see Mario Saenz (2000, 214–230).
- 5.
By dual status I do not mean to attribute substance dualism to Dussel. Living labor is always a feature of the lived body and never a mind body dualism. I mean only to draw attention to the exteriority versus functionality of living labor.
- 6.
The author’s interview with Enrique Dussel, January 10, 2018, Mexico City.
- 7.
We have already defined alterity as this extrasystemic space. It is not that of the Cartesian solipsistic ego. It is not a being that exists substantially distinct from its body. Human beings are lived bodies in community and in a metabolic relation to Mother Earth, however, much one might entertain the illusion of oneself as being an incorporeal spectator consciousness.
- 8.
As reported in the New York Times, on February 5, 2018, New York City livery driver in his 60’s, Doug Schifter, “killed himself with a shotgun in front of City Hall in Lower Manhattan, having written a lengthy Facebook post several hours earlier laying out the structural cruelties that had left him in such dire circumstance. He was now sometimes forced to work more than 100 hours a week to survive.” Bellafante, G. (February 6, 2018).
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Mills, F.B. (2018). The Ethical Dimension of Economics. In: Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94550-7_6
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