Question

What was Marx’s theory of exploitation?

Answer 1

By far the most influential theory of exploitation ever put forward is that of Karl Marx, who believed that workers are exploited in a capitalist society insofar as they are forced to sell their labor power to the capitalists for less than the full value of the goods they produce with their labour.

Although, for Marx, inequality was a phenomenon characterizing all class-based societies, not just capitalism. In fact, it is feudal society, not capitalism, that is where the exploitative nature of class relations is most clear. Under feudalism, it is readily evident that serfs use some of their labor power to their own benefit, while another portion is used to the feudal lord's advantage.

Under slavery workers, on the other hand, appear to work solely for the benefit of their masters (although in fact part of their labor is to provide for their own livelihood). And under capitalism workers seem to work entirely for their own benefit, selling their labor to capitalists as free independent contractors In reality, Marx thought that the labor of the workers under capitalism is neither genuinely voluntary nor entirely for the benefit of the workers themselves

It is first necessary to understand Marx's analysis of market prices, which he largely inherited from earlier classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in order to understand Marx's charge of exploitation. Under capitalism, Marx argued, the labor power of the workers is treated as a commodity. And because Marx subscribed to a labor theory of value, this means that the price of labor power, like any other commodity such as butter or corn, is determined by its cost of production specifically, by the amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it. The cost of generating labor power is the benefit or labor cost required to maintain and replicate the labor power of a worker

Then, according to Marx, it is as if the working day is split into two parts. The laborer works for himself during the first quarter, generating goods whose value is equal to the value of the wages he earns. The labourer works for the capitalist during the second half, generating surplus value for the capitalist for whom he earns no equal salaries. In effect, during this second part of the day, the work of the laborer is unpaid in exactly the same way (although not as visibly) as the corvée of a feudal serf is unpaid

Capitalist exploitation thus consists in the capitalist forced acquisition of the surplus value created by the workforce. Workers under capitalism are compelled to sell their labor power to capitalists for less than the full value of the goods they produce, due to their lack of ownership of the means of production. Capitalists, in effect, do not need to generate something themselves but are able to survive off workers' productive resources instead. And the surplus value which the capitalist can thus acquire from the worker becomes the source of capitalist profit, thus "strengthening the very power whose slave it is

Marx's theory of exploitation seems to presuppose that labor is the root of all interest. But the labor theory of value that Marx and early classical economics subscribed to is subject to a variety of apparently insurmountable difficulties, and has been largely abandoned by economics in the aftermath of the 1870s marginalistic revolution. The most noticeable challenge is because of the heterogeneous essence of the work. Some labor is professional, some labor is unskilled, and there does not seem to be a reasonable way of reducing the former to the latter and thereby setting a common standard of measurement for product value.