EXPLOITED: EXPLOITATION AS A SUBJECTIVE CATEGORY (original) (raw)
I focus on exploitation from the point of view of those who suffer from it, and so I take exploitation as a category of subjective experience. Adopting a subjective perspective on exploitation highlights important conceptual aspects about it and suggests important methodological rules on how to critically discuss social forms of exploitation. I start by introducing some key conceptual distinctions in the first two sections. These distinctions lead me to formulate a first, general definition of exploitation as a subjective category, in the third section of the paper. In the fourth section, I ask what relationship there is between the objective and subjective senses of exploitation, and I turn to the work of Marx. This is because, as I try to argue, Marx's approach is exemplary for tying together an objective and a subjective sense of exploitation. Based on a schematic rendition of Marx's use of a dual perspective on exploitation, in the last sections of the paper, I draw a number of conceptual and normative conclusions. In this paper, I propose to focus on exploitation from the point of view of those who suffer from it, to take exploitation as a category of subjective experience. The reason for such an undertaking is that adopting a subjective perspective on exploitation highlights important conceptual aspects about it and suggests important methodological rules on how to critically discuss social forms of exploitation. These conceptual and methodological features might not be as apparent when exploitation is considered objectively, from an external point of view. I start by introducing some key conceptual distinctions in the first two sections. These distinctions provide the conceptual background to the more substantive subsequent discussions in the later sections. They also help me to make explicit in succinct fashion some of the key methodological assumptions
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(Forthcoming in Social Scientist. This is a draft copy) I present a theory of exploitation from a Marxist perspective. To situate my theory within existing literature, it is useful to make a couple of contrasts. One, Marx discusses exploitation primarily as a phenomenon in the capitalist mode of production. I generalise the account so that it applies to all class societies. And I flesh out the normative and philosophical aspects of exploitation which are missing in Marx’s Capital since it is a work in political economy. Two, there is a literature in analytic political philosophy that engages with exploitation and distributive justice. This includes both liberal accounts which treat exploitation as a sort of unfairness, and the somewhat older literature from ‘Analytical Marxists’ which develops selected ideas from Marx in a framework of thought familiar to liberal thought. The Analytical Marxists discuss exploitation within the employer-employee relationship, whereas I broaden the discussion to include other aspects of Marx’s political economy. The liberal accounts treat exploitation as primarily a moral phenomenon, while I treat it as primarily a sociological or political economic phenomenon, albeit with moral ramifications. Analytic philosophy in general has tended to understand the moral upshot of exploitation as a matter of unfairness, whereas I take the moral upshot to be a matter of rule.
Karl Marx argued that capitalist economies are necessarily exploitative. Nineteenth century classical liberal political economists agreed that exploitation was rampant, but blamed government grants of privilege rather than capitalism. This chapter argues that while both schools of thought produced genuine insights into exploitation in markets and politics, neither developed a tenable account of what exploitation actually is. Understanding exploitation in terms of the more basic concept of fairness allows us to appreciate when wage labor and government transfers are exploitative, and when they are not. The chapter concludes by arguing that exploitation is probably a permanent feature of a free society because the moral costs of attempting to eliminate it will often prove unacceptable. In particular, it might be impossible to ensure that a government invested with the power to stamp out one form of exploitation does not become a tool for an even more troubling form of exploitation itself.
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This paper proposes four concepts of exploitation that encapsulate common uses of the word in social interactions: unfair advantage, unequal exchange, using persons as means, and free-riding. It briefly discusses how these concepts appear in the literature (the first two are prominent in Roemer’s classical work), and then examines how these forms of exploitation are related and how they can occur.
Exploitation as Violence: Marx’s Objection to Capitalist Exploitation
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Exploitation as Theft vs. Exploitation as Underpayment
Marxists claim capitalists unjustly exploit workers, and this exploitation is to show that workers ought to hold more than they do. This paper presents two accounts of exploitation. The Theft Account claims that capitalists steal some of the value to which workers are entitled. The Underpayment Account holds that capitalists are not entitled to pay workers as little as they do, even if the workers are not entitled to the full value they produce. This paper argues that only the Theft Account can explain why workers ought to hold more than they do. The Underpayment Account cannot yield this conclusion. The Theft Account is superior to the Underpayment Account insofar as exploitation is to be an injustice—a wrong that requires the exploited party to hold more.
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Le concept de l’exploitation est au cœur de la philosophie du travail et constitue l'une des tensions les plus fondamentales au sein des sociétés capitalistes modernes. Depuis Thomas Aquinas, jusqu’aux philosophes plus modernes tels John Locke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx ainsi que ceux plus contemporains tels John Rawls et G.A Cohen, l’exploitation est un enjeu qui fut longuement discuté en philosophie politique. Néanmoins, il semblerait que nous soyons toujours confrontés à la question de savoir ce que signifie d’être exploité. Solliciter l’avis d’un libertarien et d’un socialiste afin de décortiquer le concept de l’exploitation laisserait place à un débat perpétuel en l’absence d’une base commune qui permettrait d’élaborer sur le sujet. Toutefois, il ne suffit pas de considérer uniquement la perspective qui repose sur la définition pour comprendre l’exploitation. Cela dit, ce projet se concentre sur deux approches distinctes du problème de l'exploitation afin de parvenir à érig...
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