Valentin Stoian

Abstract

The article aims to present the normative premises of a Marxist theory of justice and to argue that such an endeavor has, at its central pillar, the value of self-ownership. The article first undertakes a summary of the main strands in the literature on exploitation. It divides the literature into force-based and distributional-based conceptions of exploitation. Then, the article uses these insights in order to illuminate the Marxist texts and to argue in favor of a limited form of self-ownership combined with joint ownership of global resources and the absence of alienation as the main building blocks of a Marxist theory of justice. Finally, the article defends the idea of limited self-ownership as both internally coherent as a better approximation of Karl Marx’s works than the principle of need. While the full development of a Marxist theory of justice is left for a further work, the paper contributes an interpretation of the building blocks of such a theory.