For decades, a challenge has vexed socialist philosophers: coming up with a rigorous definition of capitalist exploitation that can withstand objections from the left and the right.
This is a genuinely useful survey of where the philosophical debate stands, and the progression from the Force View through the Distributive Injustice View toward the Domination framework is analytically sound. The Desert Desperation scenario is the right exhibit: the merchant's exploitation of the stranded traveller is intuitively clear regardless of how the water came to be distributed, and the domination relationship is the correct explanatory mechanism.
But the article has a structural gap that goes beyond the philosophical debate it is summarising, and it is the gap that matters most for anyone who wants to move from diagnosis to remedy. The entire discussion is conducted at the level of individual transactions and their moral evaluation: is this particular exchange exploitative, under what conditions, for which theoretical reasons? What is never asked is the prior political question: why has the democratic political system that is supposed to prevent systematic exploitation consistently failed to do so?
This is not a minor omission. If exploitation is as pervasive and systematic as the socialist tradition claim, and the empirical evidence strongly supports that claim, then in a functioning democracy, the majority of citizens who are being exploited should be able to elect representatives who constrain the exploitation. That this has not happened, consistently, across every Western democracy for the past forty years, while the share of GDP going to labour has fallen and the concentration of wealth has increased, is not explained by the philosophical debate about what exploitation is. It requires a different kind of analysis.
The answer is structural rather than moral. The political system that is supposed to translate the majority's interest in constraining exploitation into policy has been captured by the same concentration of economic power that the exploitation produces. This is the specific mechanism that the pleonexia principle, the ancient Greek concept of the insatiable desire for more than one's fair share, names: unconstrained accumulation generates the political power to prevent the institutional constraints that would limit further accumulation. The exploitation produces the political capture that prevents the remedy. This is not a contingent failure of democracy. It is the structural dynamic of a democracy whose institutional architecture has been progressively modified by the interests that domination generates.
The Citizens United ruling in the United States is the most precisely documented contemporary exhibit: a Supreme Court decision that defined corporate spending on political campaigns as constitutionally protected speech, removing the institutional constraint that had partially limited the conversion of economic dominance into political dominance. The ruling did not create the exploitation. It removed the mechanism that had been partially preventing the exploitation from translating directly into political capture. The result is what the empirical record shows: legislative outcomes that consistently favour the interests of the top income decile against the preferences of the majority of the population, documented by Gilens and Page in their 2014 study of American policy outcomes.
Nick French's Nozick scenario, Capitalism Reborn, where a fair initial distribution reconverges to exploitation through voluntary transactions, is actually the most important exhibit in the article, but not for the reason Nozick intended. Nozick uses it to argue that preventing exploitation requires prohibiting voluntary transactions. The correct response is that preventing Capitalism Reborn requires not individual transaction regulation but the specific institutional provisions that prevent the accumulation of economic dominance from converting into political dominance: the periodic reset of accumulated advantage that the jubilee tradition constitutionalises, the separation of economic power from political representation that sortition democracy provides, and the commons governance framework that prevents the progressive privatisation of what was collectively held.
Sortition, the random selection of citizens for governance roles, as practised in Athens, in medieval Italian communes, and in contemporary citizens' assemblies, is the institutional provision that directly addresses the capture problem. A randomly selected legislative chamber cannot be gerrymandered, cannot be bought through campaign finance, and does not develop the career interests that make professional politicians systematically responsive to concentrated economic power rather than to the majority of their constituents. It does not solve the exploitation problem by philosophical definition. It solves the political capture problem by institutional design, which is the prior problem that the philosophical debate about exploitation has consistently avoided.
The domination framework the article is moving toward is analytically correct as far as it goes. Domination is the right concept. But the full account of domination under contemporary capitalism requires naming not just the employer-employee relationship but the specific institutional mechanisms by which economic domination converts into political domination and thereby prevents the democratic remedy that a genuine majority would otherwise apply. The philosophical debate about what exploitation is has been running for forty years in parallel with the political science literature on democratic capture, and the two conversations have rarely been connected. That connection is where the actionable analysis lives.
The core of Capitalism and Capitalist Exploitation is the wage labor system, or more simply, the rental of humans. For the same reasons humans should not be bought or sold (slavery), we should not be rented. Renting a human being is exploitation by definition, as humans are ends to themselves, not tools or commodities. Remove slavery and human rental, end capitalist exploitation.
Exploitation is fundamentally the denial of basic human inalienable rights. The exploiter benefits by denying the rights of an individual. Dehumanization. This is the source of “injustice”
No, there is no moral argument. It isn't that socialism "should" happen in any objective sense. It's that the majority has an interest in making it happen. That's what makes it "scientific socialism". It's describing how the world actually works.
Usually, domination and exploitation imply a privileged minority and an opporessed majority. Therefore, usually, the particular interests of that majority also happen to be moral from a utilitarian POV. But again, I'm not saying other workers (let alone capitalists) **should** fight for socialism in any moral sense. I certainly hope so out of self-interest, and when I try to convince other workers thereof, I appeal to their self-interest, not morality.
You're making it harder than it needs to be by moralizing the issue. Exploitation isn't unjust, or morally wrong, or at least it needn't be in Marxist analysis. It is simply against someone's interest. Whoever that someone is, is the agent opposing it.
If you're voluntarily giving uncompensated labor to a child, you're not exploited.
If you voted for social security that will for the most part drain your individual resources but will aid you in your time of potential need, you're not exploited.
If you voted against it, you **are** exploited, because exploitation is not an objective, moral category, but one of particular interest. But applying this label subjectively doesn't constitute an argument for others to oppose it. We aren't telling people to oppose capitalism because we see it as exploitation, we're trying to get them to see it as exploitation on their own terms, with regard to their own interests. We aren't trying to get them to do what we want because we think it's moral.
I mean this as a question in good faith because I never quite understand how this argument is supposed to run and suspect it must bottom out in a moral argument *somewhere.*
You are saying the capitalist A has an interest in exploiting the worker B, who, conversely, has an interest in not being exploited by A. Thus, each party has an interest, it’s just that those interests are opposed or mutually exclusive. But if that is the case, on what grounds should we prefer B to maximize his interest rather than A? Put differently, if both “exploiting” and “not being exploited” can be described as sub-species of a broader category, namely, “interest-maximizing activity,” what reason do we have to prefer B’s interest-maximizing activity to A’s? Is it just a utilitarian argument that the greatest number should be able to maximize their interests? This is, you surely realize, also an argument about justice.
To be clear, my question assumes we accept that the capitalist will have his interests undermined by an arrangement in which the workers maximize their interests by not being exploited — so that, just as A maximizing his interest harms B, B maximizing his interest harms A. Of course, a Marxist that runs an Aristotelian argument about human flourishing need not accept this since he can say that the capitalist isn’t actually realizing his own interests *in a deeper sense* under capitalism. Something like this view seems to underpin the “universal class” argument in Marx (the argument that the self-emancipation of the proletariat would mean the emancipation of society as a whole), but it is also a moral — or, at least, profoundly normative — argument.
Or we could add the requirement of being founded on differential ownership of productive assets. In that case, the minority that opposed a certain public good but must still contribute to it, is not exploited because the coercion is democratic, founded on a mass of bodies, not unequally distributed MoP.
Sounds about right. I find it fitting that outright theft (robbery, burglary. etc.) which isn't founded on ownership of productive assets does not fall under exploitation.
I think these are all important aspects associated with exploitation. But they are not the essence of exploitation. These views all depend on the existence of a capitalist doing the exploiting, when in fact capitalism is an abstract impersonal machine. Imagine a scenario where all workers own the means of production equally - all profit from all firms is equally distributed to all. Otherwise everything is exactly the same as with capitalism. I contend that work in this economy can still be experienced as exploitative, even though I receive the full value of my labor. That is because I may not identify with the ends my labor is being put towards. Let’s say that it is democratically decided that everyone should labor towards building statues of deities which I don’t believe in. All the firms in the economy compete to build the best statues, and everyone is compensated the full value of the work which they put into them: tokens which can only be used to purchase more statues, because that is all that is produced. Actually let’s say food is produced too, because we have to eat. But it is democratically decided that the only food products created are junk food like Doritos, twinkies, twizzlers, etc. So I have to work in this economy to survive, working 8 hours per day. I of course cast my vote in the universal shareholder meetings to produce something else, but I am part of a small minority and outvoted. So I work my 8 hours a day, 4 of which to get my fair share of statues, and the other 4 for my fair share of junk food. If I don’t do this I starve, because if you don’t work in this society, you don’t eat. I would prefer to work just 4 then, but 8 is conventional and anyone working fewer hours is viewed as a slacker and insufficiently devoted to the deities. I claim that my labor is exploited in this scenario. And it’s not because someone is benefitting from my labor without my being compensated - I am compensated according to what is considered fair and valuable in this society. It’s not because there is an unequal distribution of resources. I’m positing that it is exactly equal. It’s not because I am being dominated - these decisions are the outcome of fair and participatory democratic practices. Rather, my labor is being exploited by an abstract system towards ends that have nothing to do with how I see myself and what I value, without respect to the ends I would prefer my labor to serve. I am sick and miserable and yet somehow have to find the motivation each day to make another meaningless statue, or craft another Dorito that’s going to keep me sick. My labor is totally alienated from me, and by virtue of that alone, I contend it is also exploited.
This is a genuinely useful survey of where the philosophical debate stands, and the progression from the Force View through the Distributive Injustice View toward the Domination framework is analytically sound. The Desert Desperation scenario is the right exhibit: the merchant's exploitation of the stranded traveller is intuitively clear regardless of how the water came to be distributed, and the domination relationship is the correct explanatory mechanism.
But the article has a structural gap that goes beyond the philosophical debate it is summarising, and it is the gap that matters most for anyone who wants to move from diagnosis to remedy. The entire discussion is conducted at the level of individual transactions and their moral evaluation: is this particular exchange exploitative, under what conditions, for which theoretical reasons? What is never asked is the prior political question: why has the democratic political system that is supposed to prevent systematic exploitation consistently failed to do so?
This is not a minor omission. If exploitation is as pervasive and systematic as the socialist tradition claim, and the empirical evidence strongly supports that claim, then in a functioning democracy, the majority of citizens who are being exploited should be able to elect representatives who constrain the exploitation. That this has not happened, consistently, across every Western democracy for the past forty years, while the share of GDP going to labour has fallen and the concentration of wealth has increased, is not explained by the philosophical debate about what exploitation is. It requires a different kind of analysis.
The answer is structural rather than moral. The political system that is supposed to translate the majority's interest in constraining exploitation into policy has been captured by the same concentration of economic power that the exploitation produces. This is the specific mechanism that the pleonexia principle, the ancient Greek concept of the insatiable desire for more than one's fair share, names: unconstrained accumulation generates the political power to prevent the institutional constraints that would limit further accumulation. The exploitation produces the political capture that prevents the remedy. This is not a contingent failure of democracy. It is the structural dynamic of a democracy whose institutional architecture has been progressively modified by the interests that domination generates.
The Citizens United ruling in the United States is the most precisely documented contemporary exhibit: a Supreme Court decision that defined corporate spending on political campaigns as constitutionally protected speech, removing the institutional constraint that had partially limited the conversion of economic dominance into political dominance. The ruling did not create the exploitation. It removed the mechanism that had been partially preventing the exploitation from translating directly into political capture. The result is what the empirical record shows: legislative outcomes that consistently favour the interests of the top income decile against the preferences of the majority of the population, documented by Gilens and Page in their 2014 study of American policy outcomes.
Nick French's Nozick scenario, Capitalism Reborn, where a fair initial distribution reconverges to exploitation through voluntary transactions, is actually the most important exhibit in the article, but not for the reason Nozick intended. Nozick uses it to argue that preventing exploitation requires prohibiting voluntary transactions. The correct response is that preventing Capitalism Reborn requires not individual transaction regulation but the specific institutional provisions that prevent the accumulation of economic dominance from converting into political dominance: the periodic reset of accumulated advantage that the jubilee tradition constitutionalises, the separation of economic power from political representation that sortition democracy provides, and the commons governance framework that prevents the progressive privatisation of what was collectively held.
Sortition, the random selection of citizens for governance roles, as practised in Athens, in medieval Italian communes, and in contemporary citizens' assemblies, is the institutional provision that directly addresses the capture problem. A randomly selected legislative chamber cannot be gerrymandered, cannot be bought through campaign finance, and does not develop the career interests that make professional politicians systematically responsive to concentrated economic power rather than to the majority of their constituents. It does not solve the exploitation problem by philosophical definition. It solves the political capture problem by institutional design, which is the prior problem that the philosophical debate about exploitation has consistently avoided.
The domination framework the article is moving toward is analytically correct as far as it goes. Domination is the right concept. But the full account of domination under contemporary capitalism requires naming not just the employer-employee relationship but the specific institutional mechanisms by which economic domination converts into political domination and thereby prevents the democratic remedy that a genuine majority would otherwise apply. The philosophical debate about what exploitation is has been running for forty years in parallel with the political science literature on democratic capture, and the two conversations have rarely been connected. That connection is where the actionable analysis lives.
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/basic-law-of-the-commonwealth-1ae
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/playing-devils-advocate
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/playing-devils-advocate-6b6
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-first-enclosure
squirrelbrain77.substack.com
The core of Capitalism and Capitalist Exploitation is the wage labor system, or more simply, the rental of humans. For the same reasons humans should not be bought or sold (slavery), we should not be rented. Renting a human being is exploitation by definition, as humans are ends to themselves, not tools or commodities. Remove slavery and human rental, end capitalist exploitation.
Exploitation is fundamentally the denial of basic human inalienable rights. The exploiter benefits by denying the rights of an individual. Dehumanization. This is the source of “injustice”
No, there is no moral argument. It isn't that socialism "should" happen in any objective sense. It's that the majority has an interest in making it happen. That's what makes it "scientific socialism". It's describing how the world actually works.
Usually, domination and exploitation imply a privileged minority and an opporessed majority. Therefore, usually, the particular interests of that majority also happen to be moral from a utilitarian POV. But again, I'm not saying other workers (let alone capitalists) **should** fight for socialism in any moral sense. I certainly hope so out of self-interest, and when I try to convince other workers thereof, I appeal to their self-interest, not morality.
You're making it harder than it needs to be by moralizing the issue. Exploitation isn't unjust, or morally wrong, or at least it needn't be in Marxist analysis. It is simply against someone's interest. Whoever that someone is, is the agent opposing it.
If you're voluntarily giving uncompensated labor to a child, you're not exploited.
If you voted for social security that will for the most part drain your individual resources but will aid you in your time of potential need, you're not exploited.
If you voted against it, you **are** exploited, because exploitation is not an objective, moral category, but one of particular interest. But applying this label subjectively doesn't constitute an argument for others to oppose it. We aren't telling people to oppose capitalism because we see it as exploitation, we're trying to get them to see it as exploitation on their own terms, with regard to their own interests. We aren't trying to get them to do what we want because we think it's moral.
I mean this as a question in good faith because I never quite understand how this argument is supposed to run and suspect it must bottom out in a moral argument *somewhere.*
You are saying the capitalist A has an interest in exploiting the worker B, who, conversely, has an interest in not being exploited by A. Thus, each party has an interest, it’s just that those interests are opposed or mutually exclusive. But if that is the case, on what grounds should we prefer B to maximize his interest rather than A? Put differently, if both “exploiting” and “not being exploited” can be described as sub-species of a broader category, namely, “interest-maximizing activity,” what reason do we have to prefer B’s interest-maximizing activity to A’s? Is it just a utilitarian argument that the greatest number should be able to maximize their interests? This is, you surely realize, also an argument about justice.
To be clear, my question assumes we accept that the capitalist will have his interests undermined by an arrangement in which the workers maximize their interests by not being exploited — so that, just as A maximizing his interest harms B, B maximizing his interest harms A. Of course, a Marxist that runs an Aristotelian argument about human flourishing need not accept this since he can say that the capitalist isn’t actually realizing his own interests *in a deeper sense* under capitalism. Something like this view seems to underpin the “universal class” argument in Marx (the argument that the self-emancipation of the proletariat would mean the emancipation of society as a whole), but it is also a moral — or, at least, profoundly normative — argument.
Or we could add the requirement of being founded on differential ownership of productive assets. In that case, the minority that opposed a certain public good but must still contribute to it, is not exploited because the coercion is democratic, founded on a mass of bodies, not unequally distributed MoP.
Sounds about right. I find it fitting that outright theft (robbery, burglary. etc.) which isn't founded on ownership of productive assets does not fall under exploitation.
I think these are all important aspects associated with exploitation. But they are not the essence of exploitation. These views all depend on the existence of a capitalist doing the exploiting, when in fact capitalism is an abstract impersonal machine. Imagine a scenario where all workers own the means of production equally - all profit from all firms is equally distributed to all. Otherwise everything is exactly the same as with capitalism. I contend that work in this economy can still be experienced as exploitative, even though I receive the full value of my labor. That is because I may not identify with the ends my labor is being put towards. Let’s say that it is democratically decided that everyone should labor towards building statues of deities which I don’t believe in. All the firms in the economy compete to build the best statues, and everyone is compensated the full value of the work which they put into them: tokens which can only be used to purchase more statues, because that is all that is produced. Actually let’s say food is produced too, because we have to eat. But it is democratically decided that the only food products created are junk food like Doritos, twinkies, twizzlers, etc. So I have to work in this economy to survive, working 8 hours per day. I of course cast my vote in the universal shareholder meetings to produce something else, but I am part of a small minority and outvoted. So I work my 8 hours a day, 4 of which to get my fair share of statues, and the other 4 for my fair share of junk food. If I don’t do this I starve, because if you don’t work in this society, you don’t eat. I would prefer to work just 4 then, but 8 is conventional and anyone working fewer hours is viewed as a slacker and insufficiently devoted to the deities. I claim that my labor is exploited in this scenario. And it’s not because someone is benefitting from my labor without my being compensated - I am compensated according to what is considered fair and valuable in this society. It’s not because there is an unequal distribution of resources. I’m positing that it is exactly equal. It’s not because I am being dominated - these decisions are the outcome of fair and participatory democratic practices. Rather, my labor is being exploited by an abstract system towards ends that have nothing to do with how I see myself and what I value, without respect to the ends I would prefer my labor to serve. I am sick and miserable and yet somehow have to find the motivation each day to make another meaningless statue, or craft another Dorito that’s going to keep me sick. My labor is totally alienated from me, and by virtue of that alone, I contend it is also exploited.