Exploitation, together with alienation, is a main item in Marx's indictment of capitalism. (As Marx explains in Selection 12B, however, it is not unique to capitalism: all class societies rest on exploitation.) The meaning of exploitation can be stated, somewhat simplified, as follows: workers are exploited if they work longer hours than the number of labor hours embodied in the goods they consume. This, at least, is the meaning of exploitation in the mature economic writings. In The German Ideology (Selection 10) Marx uses the term in a different sense: people exploit each other if they mutually treat each other as mere means to their own selfish ends.

Selection 11 sketches some important differences between exploitation in precapitalist, early capitalist, and fully mature capitalist economies. Selection 12A offers a formal definition of capitalist exploitation while Selection 12B compares capitalist and precapitalist forms of exploitation. Selections 12C and 12D describe the nature and consequences of exploitation as it arises in, respectively, the struggle over the length of the working day and in the capitalist factory. Selection 13 argues that correspondence between work contribution and consumption is sufficient only to bring about the lower stage of communism. In the higher stage, consumption will be totally dissociated from contribution.

This early text is a critique of the cash nexus, of one-dimensional man and of utilitarian philosophy, not an analysis of exploitation in the sense of the later economic writings. […]