How Marx justifies the move from market distribution to the ultimate welfare state constitutes the topic of my article. Having once sided with the prevalent view that Marx defends the choice of communism over socialism (the transition period with its market in consumption goods) by appealing to communitarian values (DiQuattro 1978), I have now come to encourage an interpretation attributing to Marx a sense of justice that does not differ fundamentally from that found in egalitarian versions of liberal theory. Communism is assuredly beyond markets, but it is not beyond liberal justice, as followers of Hume's criteria of justice have it. Indeed, for Marx, communism is the perfectly just society, and it is from this ideal that Marx works up his theory of exploitation and assesses the status of justice in precommunist societies. In what follows, I elucidate the liberal and individualistic roots of Marxian justice by focusing on the Marxian concept of exploitation. I set out the view that Marx has a general normative theory of exploitation derived from a model of a perfectly just society in which everyone, by virtue of personhood, is deserving of equal welfare. Accordingly, societies that deny this by permitting morally arbitrary factors to determine distributive shares stand condemned as exploitative and unjust. I begin clearing the path of analysis by dismissing the thesis that the labor theory of value, as a technical theory of exploitation, has an important bearing on Marx's general normative theory of exploitation. Having dispensed with the labor theory, I proceed to delineate and defend a "property rights matching power" account of the general technical theory. And though this account draws on the work of John Roemer, it differs importantly by rejecting both his interpretation of Marx and his game-theoretic approach to exploitation. My aim is to bring Marx's general normative theory into line with contemporary theories of distributive justice advanced by liberal egalitarians, theories that stress the ideal of equal concern and respect for persons qua persons and require implementation of the ideal consistent with what historical circumstances permit. I conclude with some speculative comments about Kantian influences in Marx's sense of justice. I should add that I do not start from scratch in my consideration of Marx on the topics of morality, justice, and exploitation. In the debates over whether Marx believes exploitation is unjust, I am on the side that argues he does, and in this article I pursue and sharpen this interpretation, in particular in my analysis of Marx's criticism of the distributive principle of socialism.(4)