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3 - Should Marxists be interested in exploitation?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2009

John E. Roemer
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Summary

To work at the bidding and for the profit of another… is not… a satisfactory state to human beings of educated intelligence, who have ceased to think themselves naturally inferior to those whom they serve.

J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy

The capitalist mode of production… rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal conditions of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically.

Karl Marx, Selected Works

Motivations for exploitation theory

Marxian exploitation is defined as the unequal exchange of labor for goods: the exchange is unequal when the amount of labor embodied in the goods which the worker can purchase with his income (which usually consists only of wage income) is less than the amount of labor he expended to earn that income. Exploiters are agents who can command with their income more labor embodied in goods than the labor they performed; for exploited agents, the reverse is true.

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Chapter
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Egalitarian Perspectives
Essays in Philosophical Economics
, pp. 65 - 96
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1994

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