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Second Thoughts on Property Relations and Exploitation*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
The definition of capitalist exploitation that I put forth was as follows. Let a society be divided into a coalition S and its complement S’. S is exploited and S’ is exploiting if: (1) S would be better off if it withdrew with its per capita share of productive, alienable assets; (2) S’ would be worse off if it withdrew with its per capita share of productive, alienable assets; and (3) S’ would be worse off if S withdrew from society with its own assets. Call this the property relations (PR) definition of exploitation. I favored the PR definition over the traditional approach, which focuses upon the relationship between capitalist and worker mediated by a labor market and consummated at the point of production, because the classical approach fails to locate the source of exploitation in the unequal and unfair distribution of the productive assets.
- Type
- III Marxian Exploitation
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 15: Analyzing Marxism , 1989 , pp. 255 - 266
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1992
Footnotes
*
I am grateful to my critics, who have helped to clarify, for me at least, what exploitation really means. This work has been supported by a research grant from the National Science Foundation.
References
1 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982
2 ‘Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation?’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985)
3 ‘Roemer on Dependence,’ Dept. of Philosophy, California State University at Fresno
4 Elster, Jon, ‘Roemer vs. Roemer,’ Politics and Society 11 (1982), 368Google Scholar
5 Personal correspondence, October 10, 1987
6 See my ‘Should Marxists Be Interested in Exploitation?’ 58-9, for my original discussion of this example.
7 ‘Exploitation, Force, and the Moral Assessment of Capitalism: Thoughts on Roemer and Cohen,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (1987), 3-41
8 ‘What is Exploitation? Reply to Jeffrey Reiman,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1989), 90-7
9 Here is an example. Andrea has a big machine, and Bob a small one; I postulate this unequal distribution of the capital stock to be unjust. Bob could produce his subsistence needs on his small machine, but Andrea offers to hire him, to work her machine, at a wage that permits him to earn his subsistence needs, and by expending less labor than he would require were he to use his machine. Her profits from hiring Bob finance her consumption as well. Thus Bob is not forced to work for Andrea, but chooses to, and she lives off his labor. I consider Bob to be exploited; but this verdict depends upon the injustice of the initial distribution.
10 With Kagan, personal correspondence, August 13, 1984; with Taylor, a conversation, some years ago.
11 In my Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988), I used this definition of exploitation, in part because of its simplicity.
12 See GTEC, ch. 8.
13 I now take up the issue, postponed above, of whether (formerly) Poor exploits (formerly) Rich.
14 J. Roemer and J. Silvestre, ‘Public Ownership: Three Proposals for Resource Allocation,’ Dept. of Economics Working Paper No. 307 (University of California, Davis 1989); see also my ‘On Public Ownership,’ Dept. of Economics Working Paper No. 317 (University of California, Davis 1988).
15 Marxists might object to the distribution of output in proportion to labor performed, because some workers are more able or skilled than others. In this paper, I am discussing only what in GTEC I called capitalist exploitation, the inequality that results from a person’s lack of access to ‘his fair share’ of society’s alienable means of production. The issue in question here is whether ‘fair share’ means an equal per capita share, or a share equal to the fraction of social labor that he performs.
16 The proportional allocation discussed above can be defined and shown to exist in more complicated economics, where there are many produced goods and different kinds and skills of labor. See Roemer and Silvestre, ‘Public Ownership.’
17 In non-cooperative game theory, there are some 26 proposals for the equilibrium concept. No concept performs well in all games, but for every game, there is a concept that performs well. Robert Aumann uses the tool analogy in ‘What is Game Theory Trying To Accomplish?’ in K. Arrow and S. Honkapohya, eds. Frontiers of Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1985).