The Parallax of Labor: Marx as a Moralist

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to extrapolate an ethical paradigm from Marx's discussion of surplus value in the first volume of Capital. It sets out to put that discussion in conversation with certain “postmodern” approaches to ethics that focus on the ways in which particular acts of predation and violation are allowed to proceed precisely because they are invisible from the perspective of the prevailing legal-juridical discourses. It examines the Marxian notion of the nature of labor as a commodity by means of Slavoj Žižek's concept of a “parallax relation.” Ultimately, it argues that there is a fundamental affinity between Marx's analysis of labor and Lacanian ethics in that both rely on the location of a conceptual space in which the law coincides with its own transgression and that this is the space in which both (Lacan explicitly and Marx more implicitly) situate the ethical subject.