The Ruling Ideas by Wendling Amy E.;

Author:Wendling, Amy E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

In Nozick’s appeals to the concept of value, and especially to the abstraction and division that such a concept will permit, we see why capitalism needs a concept like value in order to accommodate the particular forms of labor that occur within it. We will consider value in the next chapter. For now, simply observe that Nozick’s famed tomato juice example exhibits all of the problems of a fugitive resource. In addition, it ties us back to the association between labor and suffering that I explored at the end of chapter 1. The tomato juice example will also be important again later in this chapter, where Donna Dickenson will use it to describe bodily labor.

Later in the text, Nozick gives a gloss on the Lockean proviso of enough and as good. He writes, “[A] theory which includes [this proviso] in its principle of justice in acquisition must also contain a more complex principle of justice in transfer” (1974, 179). Here he appeals specifically to water as an example: “If the proviso excludes someone’s appropriating all the drinkable water in the world, it also excludes his purchasing it all. (More weakly, and messily, it may exclude his charging certain prices for some of his supply)” (1974, 179). In this way, Locke’s proviso continues to function once property is acquired. Here the resemblance to Honoré’s incident preventing inflicting harm with one’s property, including inflicting harm with depletions and absences, is very clear.

Nozick uses these, and other, examples, in service of a larger argument that the free operation of a market system will not actually run afoul of the Lockean proviso (1974, 182). I do not agree with this position, but I do not wish to dispute it here, where I lack the space to deconstruct the concepts “free” and “market.” The last chapter of this book, the chapter on crisis, will rectify this, to some extent, in its discussions of the market concept.[10] In this more limited context, what is instructive about Nozick’s examples is their exploration of the fundamental difficulties in conceptualizing water as property, at its origins and after, based on the foundational texts of Locke.

We can explore this issue further by returning to Nozick’s question about how, indeed, labor might mark water. What about maintaining a riverbank on land that I own? If water cannot be owned, then when I pay for water from the city, and so trade the symbol of my labor for it, what am I buying?

In both examples, it is ultimately infrastructure rather than the water itself that is being marked as property and purchased. This is very clear in the case of the riverbank. In the case of the water metered by the city, an illusion arises from its being directly measured. But the amount of metered water is as much an index for the amount of infrastructure and maintenance that I am absorbing as it is for the water itself.

The mixing of labor with water itself, say, in the case of the desalination or wastewater plant, or even with the simple example of pumping water, is more difficult.

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