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PARTISAN REVIEW
In bourgeois ideology everyone has access
to
the dominant entre–
preneurial class . In the capitalist economy that it expresses, of course,
the majority of the people do not. For the accumulation of capital–
which is the rationale of capitalism-profits must be made; for profits
to
be made there is one particular commodity that cannot be equally
exchanged and it is the only commodity that the majority of the
population possess-the commodity of labor power. In a capitalist
system the person who only has one commodity
to
sell (his labor power)
is thought
to
be doing this in a free and equal way-no one enforces
his labor and he is paid a "fair" wage for the job. But in
fac~,
if profits
are
to
be made and capital
to
accumulate, there is no way in which a
wage could be
equal
to
the proferred labor power-the labor power
must produce
more
than the wage answers for, else where is the profit
to
come from? (The worker's labor power, which is in a sense himself,
produces a surplus.) The freedom
to
work is little more than the
freedom not
to
go hungry: the equal bargaining power of employer
and employee is the right of the employer
to
hire or dismiss the
employee and the right of the employee
to
be dismissed or go on
strike-without a wage.
Under capitalism "equality" can only refer
to
equality under the
law. Because it cannot take into account the fundamental inequities of
the class society on which it is based, the law itself must treat men as a
generalizable and abstract category. It must ignore not only their
individual differences, their different needs and abilities, but the
absolute differences in their social and economic positions. Since the
seventeenth century the law has expressed this, its precondition.
Bourgeois, capitalist law is a general law that ensures that every–
body is equal before it: it is abstract and applies
to
all cases and all
persons . As the political theorist Franz Neumann writes: "A mini–
mum of equality is guaranteed, for if the law-maker must deal with
persons and situations in the abstract he thereby treats persons and
situations as equals and is precluded from discriminating against any
specific person. " In writing further of the concept of political freedom
with which the bourgeois concept of equality is very closely linked,
Neumann continues
to
analyze this particular capitalist notion of law
in these terms:
The generality of the law is thus the precondition of judicial
independence , which, in turn, makes possible the realization of
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