Exploitation - Introduction to Sociology - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Introduction to Sociology

Download Exploitation - Introduction to Sociology - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Sociology EXPLOITATION Exploitation is a complex and fascinating concept. It has long been considered at the very core of Marxist social science. Historically it was closely identified with the Labor Theory of Value. More recently the concept of exploitation has been elaborated in ways that at least partially disengage from the LTV. In this and the next lecture we will do three things. First, we will very briefly discuss the relation of exploitation to social justice. Second – the main part of the first lecture – we will explore the logic of the labor theory of value as a way of thinking about exploitation. Third, mainly in the second lecture, I will explain the conception of exploitation proposed in Class Counts, which shows how we can have a concept of exploitation without the LTV. I. A BRIEF PROLOGUE: EXPLOITATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Before we begin, I want to say something about the moral standing of the concept of “exploitation”, particularly its connection to the problem of social justice. In capitalism, workers are exploited so long as it is the case that (a) they produce more value with their laboring effort than they receive in their wage, and (b) this difference – “surplus value” – is appropriated by capitalists. One interpretation of why this is an injustice is that people have a right to the full value of what they produce and thus it is unjust that any of this value is “taken” from them. This, ironically perhaps, is precisely the concept of justice adopted by most libertarians, who insist that everyone has a right to the full fruits of their own labor and thus claim that all taxation is a form of theft. Their disagreements with Marxists is simply the claim that the wages of workers are not the full fruits of labor, but they share this claim about the right to the product of one’s labor. I do not think this is the correct way to understand the moral issues connected to exploitation, or more broadly, the fundamental principles of social justice that are linked to the problem of inequality. If social justice required that workers retain the full value of what they produce, then forcing people to provide income for the disabled would constitute a form of collective exploitation of individual workers. The aphorism “To each according to need, from each according to ability” is an egalitarian principle for a just distribution, but it implies that value is extracted from people who work to support people who cannot. Even if such extract ion of surplus was controlled through democratic principles, there will always be people who do not agree with the level of such transfers and for whom, therefore, the appropriation of surplus value would be coerced rather than voluntary. This would not make it unjust. Exploitation, then, is not mainly a way of talking about an injustice; it is a way of talking about an antagonism of interests. In the example just given, there is an antagonism of interests between the selfish worker who does not want to support those who cannot work and the disabled, who need that support (and the collective body that democratically enforces the transfer), but there is no injustice by the standards of egalitarian conception of social justice. The concept of exploitation is sociological powerful because it helps understand the nature of social Docsity.com 2 conflicts rooted in such relations, and it does this because of the nature of the material interests that it generates. The moral objection to exploitation in capitalism, then, is mainly that it creates a social world within which a socially just distribution of burdens, benefits, and opportunities is blocked. Given that we live in a capitalist society, therefore, it is reasonable to identify exploitation as one of the moral objections to capitalism: capitalist exploitation is morally objectionable, and – even more critically – it underwrites morally objectionable features of capitalism. But this should not be confused with the idea that a just distribution is one in which everyone retains full ownership of the surplus which they produce. II. CLASSICAL MARXIST IDEAS ABOUT EXPLOITATION 1. LTV: Introduction At the core of the traditional Marxist analysis of capitalism as an historically specific mode of production is a set of concepts generally referred to as the “labor theory of value” (LTV). Indeed, many Marxists even today insist that the LTV is the cornerstone of Marxism and that the general social and political theory of capitalism developed by Marx and later Marxists depends upon its validity. Many critics of Marxism agree with this judgment about the importance of the LTV for Marxist theory, but argue that the LTV is invalid and thus Marxist claims about class relations and exploitation grounded in the LTV can be dismissed out of hand. More recently a growing number of Marxists have argued that the LTV is not such a vital component of Marxism in general or even Marxist political economics in particular, and that, as a result, it can be dispensed with little theoretical cost. Regardless of which of these arguments about the validity and ramifications of the labor theory of value one accepts, it remains the case that the concepts of the labor theory of value continue to be important in the idiom of Marxist discourse. Unless one understands the logic of these categories, it is very difficult to read a wide range of analyses in Marx’s own work and that of many contemporary Marxists. We will therefore devote several chapters to the elaboration of the conceptual elements in the labor theory of value even though the theoretical status of the theory itself is problematic. In this discussion of the labor theory of value we will dissect one of the pivotal concepts in Marx’s analysis of capitalism: the concept of the “commodity”. Marx described the commodity as the “cell” of capitalist society, the most basic concept for decoding the overall logic and dynamics of capitalism. After defining the nature of commodities we will examine the problem of the exchange of commodities, with particular attention to the issue of labor time as the determinant of the ratios at which commodities are exchanged. 2. What is a Commodity? When you go into a library to acquire books, you go to the place where the books you want are located, find the book or books that satisfy your needs, and check them out. That is all there is to it. You do not ask about its price; you take as many books as you need subject to the constraints of the library’s rules about how many books you can check out at the same time. These rules are Docsity.com 5 5.1 Socially necessary labor time The expression “socially necessary” is added to this definition to deal with the problem that in actual economies some producers will be more efficient than others and thus the amount of time it takes to produce identical commodities will vary across producers. The commodities produced by a lazy or inefficient producer do not embody more value than those of efficient producers even though they took longer to produce. The excess time spent by the inefficient producer of a commodity is wasted time from the point of view of the exchange value of the commodity (although not necessarily wasted from the point of view of the utilities of the producers since they may be happier working at a slower pace). The labor value of a commodity is thus determined by the normal or average amount of labor it takes to produce it under existing social and technical conditions. 5.2 Direct & Indirect labor time “Direct” labor time is the time used to produce the commodity itself. “Indirect” labor time is the time it takes to produce the raw materials and means of production that are used up in the production of the commodity and thus in a sense incorporated in it. The total value of a commodity is the sum of these two components and constitutes, in the labor theory of value, the common substance shared by all commodities which makes their exchange at determinate exchange value possible. Labor time is certainly a candidate for a common substance which varies quantitatively across all commodities. Even commodities which are “plucked from nature” require time for finding, plucking and transporting to market. Because of this ubiquity of labor in the production of commodities Marx, like nearly all classical political economists of his era, felt that labor was the substance of value. 6. Objections Two kinds of objections have been raised to this solution to the puzzle of exchange. 1. Subjectivist critique. First, and most critically, many neoclassical economists have always argued that the question itself is illegitimate, that there is no real puzzle to solve. There is no such thing as “the value of a commodity” which governs its exchange value. The ratios at which commodities exchange -- their exchange values -- are determined entirely by the subjective preferences of the actors engaged in the exchange, which determines how much they want particular commodities relative to others and thus the trade-offs they will accept to obtain given commodities. Value, in this perspective, is strictly a subjective concept. Subjectivist theories of value have generally been criticized by radical economists (even if they also criticize the LTV). Production involves real costs, the deployment of scarce resources, above all the deployment of scarce human resources (labor). In one way or another the “value” of a product is shaped by the amount of such scarce resources it embodies. While subjective preferences of actors may determine how much of a particular commodity is produced Docsity.com 6 given its real costs of production (costs in terms of use of scarce resources), and while these costs may vary depending upon how much is produced (because of the returns to scale) it is the real costs of production that determine its exchange value. 2. Materialist Critique. One can reject such subjectivist theories of value and believe that the material costs of producing a commodity determines its equilibrium value and still not accept the claim that labor time is the sole measure of value. Many Marxists now accept some version of what is sometimes called the Sraffian critique of the labor theory of value in which the value of a commodity is determined in a more complex way by all material costs of production, not just the labor time embodied in the commodity. The debates among Marxists over the labor theory of value have shown, I believe, that the classical formulations of the LTV are unsatisfactory. Except under very restrictive conditions, the LTV just does not hold. In a simple economy in which the capital-intensity of production (or what Marxists call the “organic composition of capital”) in every sector is the same, then (with a few other less important provisos) it can be shown that the socially necessary labor times it takes to produce commodities determines their exchange values. In more complex economies, however, this is not the case. While there have been defenses of the LTV in the face of these criticisms, and the technical complexity of both sides of the argument make it difficult for nonspecialists to make a reasoned first hand judgment on the issues, on balance I feel that the critics are probably correct. If the LTV strictly holds only under such restrictive conditions, why should we study it at all? First, as I have said earlier, the LTV is an essential idiom for Marxist discussions of political economics and class theory, and thus it is necessary to learn the language regardless of one’s assessment of its theoretical conclusions. Secondly, from a strictly didactic point of view, the (over)simplifications of the LTV are particularly useful in showing how exploitation can occur in an exchange economy and how such exploitation is grounded in class relations. In any case, throughout most of the rest of our discussion I will take the LTV as a tolerable first approximation for understanding commodity relations. 7. Other concepts needed for the labor theory of value 7. 1 Abstract vs. concrete labor. This distinction is parallel to the distinction between exchange value and usevalue. Concrete labor refers to the qualitatively distinct useful kinds of laboring activities in which people engage -- tailoring, building, writing, etc. Abstract labor on the other hand refers to pure laboring duration, labor abstracted from its concrete qualities. Value is measured by abstract labor time, not concrete labor time. The concept of abstract labor immediately raises the problem of how skilled labor should be treated in the labor theory of value (or more generally what is referred to as the problem of heterogeneous labor). This is one of the problems which has called into question the technical legitimacy of the LTV itself. One solution is to treat skilled labor as “complex labor” or “compound labor”. It takes labor time to produce skills. An hour of skilled labor thus transfers Docsity.com 7 two components to the commodities it produces: (a) an hour of new abstract labor; (b) some amount of previously expended labor, expended in the production of the skills. This includes the training labor of the skilled worker, plus all of the other embodied “costs” of producing the skill - - the labor of instructors, the raw materials used in producing the skills, etc. Skilled labor would thus simply be a compound form of simple abstract labor. 7.2 Unabstractable Labor. There is some labor which is, in a sense, unabstractable. The clearest case is the labor of an artist creating a unique masterpiece. The product, in this case, has a signature which retains its character as the product of a unique concrete labor. There is no mechanism to impose a socially necessary labor time equivalence on a Rembrandt; its value is determined by the subjective preferences of buyers of art. This is because, fundamentally, it is impossible to produce more Rembrandts in response to the high subjective value placed on it, and thus no mechanism to bring into line its market price and its embodied “value”. If all social production were like artist production, then value theory would have little relevance. What is crucial for the LTV (or any objectivist value theory) is the interchangeability and reproducibility of the labor that goes into making the product. Labor is interchangeable in the sense that one worker can be replaced by another, and it is reproducible in the sense that it is trainable. Abstract labor must be understood as an historically variable concept. It does not apply to peasant subsistence communities in precapitalist societies nor to the internal subsistence production within families in capitalist societies. In both of these cases only concrete labor is performed. For labor time to be “abstract” there must be a mechanism that does the abstracting, and this only occurs within fully commodified relations. Only under such conditions is there a mechanism -- the regular, repeated exchange between commodities -- which regulates the exchange value of commodities according to the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce them. 7.3 Exchange value, prices of production, market prices. When you go to a store to buy a commodity you observe empirical market prices. These are affected by all sorts of contingent factors: temporary shortages caused by fads which heighten the demand for a product or bad weather which reduces the supply, monopoly pricing, government regulation, etc. From the point of view of the LTV these are all random deviations from the relative prices specified by the theory. The distinction between exchange values and prices of production, however, refers to systematic deviations (rather than contingent market-induced deviations). Exchange values are the relative labor values of commodities, determined by socially necessary direct and indirect labor times. “Prices of production” are the prices these commodities would have in the absence of all contingent market deviations. The two are not identical for a range of technical reasons bound up with the fact that different kinds of commodities are produced with very different levels of capital intensity. This is commonly referred to as the “transformation problem”, in which prices of production will be above exchange value in cases where capital intensive production occurs and below exchange value in cases where labor-intensive production occurs. Docsity.com 10 a) the destruction of feudal bondage; and b) the dispossession of the direct producers from their means of production. 9.3 The value of labor Power If labor power is a commodity, than it must have a “value” just like every other commodity. What is this value? The value of any commodity is the total socially necessary labor time it takes to produce the commodity. For labor power this is the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce and reproduce the laborer, that is the socially necessary labor time embodied in the commodities that make up the “subsistence” of the wage earner. In short, the value of labor power is the value of the commodities purchased with the wage. In this specification of the value of labor time the most troublesome element is the definition of “subsistence”. Subsistence in the Marxist tradition is not merely the minimal level of consumption needed for biological or physical existence, but is generally defined by an historically and culturally defined level of living, which is itself a result of struggle. Marx referred to this as the historical and moral component of the wage. This is a most peculiar feature of labor power as a commodity, for its value is not definable by the technical conditions of production, but of necessity requires reference to class conflict. 9.4 Labor Power, Labor and Surplus Value Marx insists that capitalists do not cheat workers within the logic of market exchanges: workers are paid the full value of the commodity they sell, labor power. Capitalists in general do not pay workers a wage below the value of labor power. Where then do profits come from? Surplus value is produced, Marx argues, because capitalists can force workers to work for more hours than is embodied in the commodities which they purchase with their wages. The labor actually performed by workers is greater than the labor embodied in the commodities they consume. This appropriation of surplus labor is called “exploitation”. When it is converted into money through exchange it takes the form of profits. Exploitation in capitalism, therefore, involves a specific interconnections between the process by which commodities are exchanged and the process by which they are produced: this is the distinctive mechanism of capitalist exploitation which distinguishes it from other forms of exploitation. And this mechanism of exploitation also solves the riddle of where profits come from in a system of exchange. Docsity.com 11 9.5 The rate of exploitation It will be helpful at this point to introduce some simple notation commonly used in the discussions of the labor theory of value: P = the total value of the social product. C = the value of the means of production and raw materials used up in production: this value is already embodied in the raw materials, means of production, etc. used up in production and is transferred to the new products in the course of production. This is equivalent to depreciation in normal capitalist accounting. C stands for “constant capital”. It is constant in the sense that it contributes no new value to the product but merely transfers already existing value. V+S = the total amount of new value created = the total amount of new labor performed (L). Part of this total is returned to workers in the form of wages = V (for variable capital) which are used to purchase the subsistence bundle of commodities. The remainder is surplus value, S. By these definitions P = C + L = C + V + S. That is, the total value of the social product equals the value of the constant capital transferred to the product plus the new value added to production by “living labor”. Exploitation within the labor theory of value consists of the appropriation of surplus value from the workers who produce the social product. The rate of exploitation is generally defined as the ratio between between the part of the new labor performed in production that is appropriated by capitalists (S) and the part that is returned to workers in the form of wages (V): e = S/V. The rate of profit can then be expressed in terms of the rate of exploitation by dividing the numerator and denominator in the profit equation by V: r = S/(C+V) = e/(Q+1) where Q -- often called the organic composition of capital -- is equal to C/V. This formula for the rate of profit shows the crucial link between the rate of profit and the rate of exploitation: the higher the rate of exploitation, the higher the rate of profit, and thus the higher the maximum rate of accumulation. It is for this reason that Marxists generally describe capitalists as having a systematic interest in raising the rate of exploitation. This dependency of the rate of profit on the rate of exploitation provides the basic mechanism which links the problem of class struggle and the process of capital accumulation. 9.6 Absolute vs relative surplus value If the total amount of labor performed L = S + V and the rate of exploitation is the ratio S/V, then there are two basic ways that the rate of exploitation can be increased: Docsity.com 12 (1). Absolute surplus value: This involves lengthening L while holding V constant. This typically takes the form of lengthening the working day without increasing wages. Since S = L - V, this results in an increase the absolute amount of S. (2). Relative Surplus Value: This consists of reducing V while holding L constant. The most important form of relative surplus value comes from reducing the costs of wage goods through enhanced productivity. If workers have a constant subsistence in physical terms (amount of food, clothing, etc.) but technical changes mean that these subsistence commodities can be produced with less embodied labor time, then V will decline. Because of relative surplus value, it is not always possible to simply assume that workers who have lower standards of living are necessarily more exploited -- the degree of exploitation depends upon the productivity of labor and not just on the standard of living in physical terms. Historically, Marx and others have argued, the early phases of capitalist development are characterized by a heavy reliance on absolute surplus value. The working day is pushed nearly to its absolute biological maximum, thus maximizing the ratio of S/V for a given level of productivity. Gradually, both because of the success of working class resistence and because of technical changes, relative surplus value assumes greater importance, so that eventually the working day can even be reduced significantly without a decline in the rate of exploitation. III. RETHINKING EXPLOITATION 1. Exploitation vs. Oppression: conceptual distinction First: definition of material oppression: Material welfare of A is at the expense of B A materially oppresses B Note: this is a critical concept: it implies the existence of an alternative in which B’s welfare is improved when A does not materially exploit B. Is oppression also exploitatative? Two examples: peasant & land example: if peasants are excluded from the land are they exploited? unionization and unemployment example: if union rules exclude the unemployed from jobs, do unionized workers exploit unemployed workers? Refinement: elaboration of a distinction between oppression & exploitation. Let us define three conditions which might characterize the relationship between actors in an economic system Docsity.com 15 6. Roemer’s account of exploitation Two tasks: 1) show inadequacies of certain presuppositions of traditional marxist views ; 2) develop a general theory of exploitation 6.1 Roemer’s First approach Traditional Marxism: capitalist exploitation is intimately linked to labor markets. Roemer’s First task: demonstrating that labor transfers do not depend upon labor markets. Simple example of unequal exchange: the peasant with low capital intensity has to work harder than the peasant with high intensity for the same consumption-leisure bundle; and the high intensity peasant works fewer hours by virtue of the exchange of commodities. (key issue = exploiter would be worse off if he/she killed the exploited and took over the exploited’s assets). Similar stories for labor market and credit market islands. 6.2 Roemer’s Second Approach Second task: use of counterfactuals for testing exploitation-statuses. What is a counterfactual? = a thought experiment to test various claims about the existing world. Withdrawal rules = formalization of a counterfactual. Roemer’s test for feudal exploitation = withdraw with personal assets Roemer’s test for capitalist exploitation = withdraw with per capita assets Crucial substantive issue = there has to be a feasible nonexploitative alternative in order to call the existing arrangements exploitative = the critical aspect of the concept of class. Important problem = what constraints on feasibility? 1) politically feasible: issue of ignoring transition costs. 2) motivationally feasible: issue of ignoring incentives problems 3) feasible given “human nature”? Withdrawal rules are basically tests for economic oppression as defined above. To test for “exploitation” these rules must be supplemented by claims about ability to appropriate the surplus: Question: what mechanisms give individuals access to the surplus? Strategy = different withdrawal rules define different material bases for exploitation. Docsity.com 16 This is called a “property relations” approach to exploitation and class because the withdrawal rules are all specified with respect to property rights. 6. 3. Generalizing Roemer Assets that can be differentially owned or controlled, the control of which give people access to the surplus: 1. labor power feudalism. Note contrast with extra-economic coercion characterization 2. means of production capitalism. 3. organization statism 4. skills socialism 6.4 Some general issues/problems: 1. Meaning of ownership, property rights for organization assets. 2. Claims about the relational character of the classes built around these resources: especially skills 3. Is this list exhaustive? Other candidates: information, reproduction/sexuality, job assets (van Parijs) 4. Why restriction to assets in material production: direct control over violence (state) as mechanism of exploitation/appropriation 5. The claim about exploitation itself: problem of distinguishing a) mechanisms which reduce one’s own exploitation, from b) mechanisms for exploiting others. Perhaps skills simply reduce capitalist exploitation = a skilled worker is able to retain part of the surplus he/she produces. Docsity.com 17 Appendix to Exploitation Lectures SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES ON THE CONCEPT OF EXPLOITATION [Note: these more detailed notes were prepared for an earlier incarnation of this lecture. There is some overlap with the above lecture notes but also some additional clarifications, especially on the section on Roemer, which might be useful. I am including these here without editing to eliminate the overlap.] Perhaps the most distinctive property of Marxist concepts of class which differentiate them from various rivals is the link between “class” and “exploitation”. In this lecture we will try to develop a rigorous definition of exploitation and examine the relationship between exploitation so defined and class structure. Traditionally, the Marxist concept of exploitation has been closely linked to the labor theory of value. In recent years, as we discussed earlier, the labor theory of value has come under considerable attack, and these attacks have called into question the concept of exploitation as well. I will argue that the concept of exploitation need not depend upon the labor theory of value as such and that it is therefore possible to sustain the distinctive Marxist concept of class even if the labor theory of value is abandoned. What is Exploitation? As stated in the last session, as a first approximation, exploitation can be defined as a situation in which the exploiter’s material interests are satisfied at the expense of the exploited’s or to state it slightly differently, the welfare of the exploiter causally depends upon the deprivations of the exploited. By this definition simple inequality does not necessarily indicate exploitation. Consider the example of two subsistence farmers on adjacent plots of land. One works hard, one is lazy. At the end of a production cycle was is materially better off than the other, but since there is no causal relationship between their welfares, this would not count as an instance of exploitation. There are, however, certain problems with this preliminary definition. In particular, this definition does not consistently distinguish between a strictly redistributive problem and a real causal connection between the welfare of the exploiter and the exploited. For example, suppose that there is limited good land, and some subsistence farmers take all of the good land and prevent landless peasants from getting access to fertile land. The property-owning farmers’ welfare is at the expense of the landless, but would we want to say that they also exploit the landless? Or, to take another example, suppose workers organize to obtain job and wage security, which means that in a period of high unemployment employers are unable to lower their wages and hire more workers. There is a sense in which the welfare of the employed workers is at the expense of the deprivations of the unemployed, but again, do we want to say that unionized workers actually exploit the unemployed? These difficulties can be overcome by modifying our initial definition. In the revised definition, exploitation must satisfy two criteria: (a) the exploiting group benefits at the expense of the exploited group, and (b) the exploiting group appropriates at least some of the fruits of the Docsity.com 20 a) Everyone has sufficient assets to produce their means of subsistence, but some people have more assets than others, and different commodities are more efficiently produced with labor intensive vs. capital intensive technologies. b) There is a market for commodities, but not for labor power (no labor market) c) For simplicity, we assume that everyone wants to have the same standard of living and that everyone wants to work as little as possible to obtain that standard of living. (Other behavioral assumptions can be made and the results still hold, but this is the simplest form of the argument) With these conditions, then it is possible to show that if the agents are rational -- i.e. they adopt optimal strategies under these conditions -- then the asset poor producers will be exploited by the asset-rich producers. And this is true even though there is no surplus product, no market in labor and everyone owns their own means of production! Why? Roemer provides the technical argument, but the intuitive basis is this: the prices of the commodities in this system reflect the socially average conditions of production, which means that the prices of commodities produced with capital-intensive technologies will be above the labor time it takes to produce them and the prices of commodities produced by labor-intensive commodities will be below the labor time it takes to produce them. This is what is called “unequal exchange” -- it means that the asset rich benefit from the poverty and effort of the asset poor. If the poor were to disappear, the rich would have to work longer hours to obtain the same standard of living. Case #2: Commodity producing societies in which there are either labor markets or credit markets and in which the following conditions hold: a) There are three kinds of people: people with sufficient assets that they need not work; people with some assets; people with no assets. b) In one society there is a market in labor power; in the other there is a market in credit. c) There are the same behavioral assumptions as in previous case. Given these assumptions, individuals in each society will make basic economic decisions: in the labor market society, whether to sell one’s own labor, hire the labor of others or neither; in the credit market society, whether to borrow capital, lend capital or neither. These decisions define what kind of class positions people end up in. The analytical task in investigating these models is then to understand two relationships: first, between asset holdings (property rights) and class; and second, between asset holdings and labor transfers. Roemer’s most important general conclusion from this analysis is that these two relationships are isomorphic, that is, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the mapping of asset holdings into class positions and asset holdings into exploitation positions. This result he terms the Class-Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP). These correspondences are illustrated in the table on page #. Roemer’s formal mathematical analysis of the relationship between property, class and exploitation has a number of powerful implications. First, while class and exploitation are tightly related, exploitation is not part of the definition of classes. The linkage between class location within the social relations of production and exploitation is a deduction rather than part of the definition of class itself. Second, the labor market is not the most fundamental mechanism for Docsity.com 21 exploitation as such. The critical issue is the separation of workers from the means of production and thus the necessity for them to enter into some kind of exchange relation -- labor market or credit market -- with owners of the means of production. Finally, the labor process itself is not part of the definition of class or exploitation: domination at the point of production (in the labor process) is not central to the basic logic of the concepts. This does not mean that domination in the labor process is empirically unimportant for understanding exploitation and class in actual capitalist societies. It could well be under given historical circumstances that the decisive issue for capitalists is control over the labor process as a way of insuring surplus extraction. The point is simply that such control is not logically entailed by the very definition of exploitation. This is a similar situation to Marx’s argument that in analyzing capitalist competition and its distributional effects it was legitimate to assume away fraud and cheating among capitalists, even if these were empirically important. Fraud and cheating could be assumed away because they were not logically necessary for understanding the mechanisms of competition. In the case of the labor process, to claim that we can ignore domination within the labor process in our logical analysis of the concept of exploitation implies that we can assume away “cheating” by workers -- i.e. not delivering the amount of work that they promise in the labor contract. Towards a General Theory of Exploitation Once the labor theory of value is rejected as the appropriate idiom for exploring the problem of exploitation, some kind of alternative strategy is needed. Roemer has proposed a strategy which uses various elements of mathematical game theory for testing the exploitative nature of various kinds of economic arrangements. While this device is not without its own problems, it does constitute a promising framework for developing a rigorous theory of exploitation. The basic idea is as follows: imagine that we have two players, A and B, in an economic game. What does it mean to say that B exploits A in this particular game? Roemer argues that to say B exploits A implies that several conditions hold: 1. There must be some alternative game within which A would be better off. It makes no sense to say that A is exploited if under all conceivable alternatives A would be no better off. 2. B would be worse off if A withdrew from the initial game into the alternative game. 3. B would be worse off if it withdrew to this alternative under the same conditions as A. These three conditions are meant to convey the basic idea that B exploits A when B’s welfare is at the expense of A’s welfare. The analytical strategy is then to construct different kinds of counterfactual alternatives as a test if this is so. (Note that in the terms of the second approximation definition of exploitation discussed above, the kinds of counterfactual tests proposed by Roemer only demonstrate economic oppression rather than exploitation. All that is being tested is the fact of interdependency of interests, not the dependency of the exploiter on the effort of the exploited. To establish the claim that these oppressions are genuinely instances of exploitation, therefore, we have to look at the concrete social relaitons within which they take place for evidence of real appropriations of the fruits of labor). Docsity.com 22 Within this analytical strategy, different systems of exploitation can be defined with respect to the nature of the coalitions involved (the A and B in the game) and the nature of the withdrawal rules to alternative games. Roemer uses this logic to define three types of exploitation: Feudal, Capitalist, Socialist. Feudal exploitation. In feudalism, serfs own their own land and tools and, as the conventional story goes, they are coercively forced by the lord to hand over part of the surplus. The counterfactual alternative used to test for feudal exploitation, Roemer argues, is a withdrawl rule in which peasants leave the game of feudalism with their personal assets. If they did so, they would be better off, lords would be worse off, and lords would be worse off if they withdrew with the same conditions. To test whether or not a particular group of people is feudally exploited, therefore, we ask the following question: would the members of the group be better off and they compliment be worse off if they left the existing game with their personal assets. Capitalist Exploitation. In contrast to feudal exploitation, capitalist exploitation is tested by a withdrawal rule in which a coalition withdraws with their per capita share of “alienable assets” (capital in the usual sense -- land, machines, raw materials) rather than simply their personal assets. In the alternative game, socialism, everyone has one “citizen-share” of the means of production. With this criterion, propertyless wage-earners (workers) are exploited by property- owning capitalists. If one accepts these definitions of feudal and capitalist exploitation, then the traditional claim by neoclassical economists that there is no exploitation in capitalism becomes equivalent to the claim that feudal exploitation is absent in capitalism. Workers in capitalism are not feudalistically exploited since they would be worse off if they left the game of capitalism with their personal assets. Socialist Exploitation. Socialist exploitation is the hardest to specify and the least fully elaborated in Roemer’s analysis. It is tested by the withdrawal rule of a coalition leaving the economic game with its per capita share of “inalienable assets” (skills, knowledge), rather than alienable assets. The alternative game, then, is “communism” in which distribution is according to need rather than according to ability. This definition of socialist exploitation implies that ownership of skills/knowledge can be the basis for exploitation, i.e. for the appropriation of part of the surplus by skill-owners. The basic mechanism is that skill owners are able to obtain wages above the costs of acquiring their skills. This constitutes a “monopoly rent” component to the wage, a component which is both at the expense of unskilled workers and dependent upon their effort. In these terms credentialing becomes a particularly an important institutional mechanism for safeguarding skill-based exploitation. Credentials are what gives skill the property-like character that makes skill- exploitation possible. Extending Roemer’s Analysis One way of reformulating Roemer’s basic insight is as follows: Both exploitation and class relations are rooted in the way economic agents monopolize the control over different kinds of essential productive assets. The control over these assets generates two phenomena: 1) a structure of social relations linking those owning these assets to those who do not own them; 2) a Docsity.com 25 materialism, and as I suggested in the earlier analysis of the theory of history, many Marxists today no longer accept this aspect of classical Marxism. If this typology of social forms is abandoned, then it is hard to see on what basis the inventory of assets could be closed. Several other assets, in fact, might potentially constitute the basis for distinctive kinds of class relations. In particular, it is worth considering the following possibilities: information assets, biological reproductive assets and job assets. a. Information. Many people have characterized the present period as the “age of information”. In a society within which information was a crucial force of production, conceivably control (or ownership) of information could constitute the basis for both exploitation and class. Information control is quite distinct from either organizational assets or skill/knowledge. Organizational assets imply a position of decisionmaking responsibility within a complex division of labor; knowledge or skill assets imply restriction on the supply of training available for develop particular kinds of labor power. It is possible to control information without having any organizational assets or skill assets. A simple example is the possession of a “secret” (from industrial espionage, for example) or “insider information” (on the stock market), which the possessor may not understand at all and yet realize that it is valuable. Control over information flows, therefore, could conceivably become a basis of exploitation and class quite distinct from any of the other assets we have been analyzing. I do not think that such arguments are particularly persuasive. In general, the control over flows of information is so closely tied to either organization or skill (knowledge) assets that it seems unlikely that it constitutes an genuinely independent basis for exploitation and class. This does not mean that logically it could never become such a basis, but it does not seem to be such a basis in the world today. b. biological reproduction. If Labor power is a force of production, then the means of production of labor power would also be a productive resource. The control over the means of production of labor power, or perhaps less formally, of “people”, could therefore be a basis for material exploitation and class relations. Many feminists, in fact, have argued precisely this: that the control over biological reproduction is indeed a mechanism through which men exploit women and should be treated as the basis for a gendered class relation. (For an elaboration of this kind of argument, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, Oxford University Press, 1985. It is also the basic argument in Shulameth Fierstone’s The Dialectic of Sex). It is certainly possible that control over biological reproduction could constitute a basis for exploitation and class. I do not think, however, that in contemporary capitalist societies it is plausible to describe the complexities of gender relations in these terms. It is not clear that men as such own or control biological reproduction in the sense of being able to use and to dispose of this asset as they wish (in the way that they can use and dispose of their labor power as they wish). And it is not clear that the forms of domination linked to gender in contemporary capitalism are best theorized as class exploitation. We will discuss these issues in more depth in the section of Marxism and feminism. c. Job assets. Philippe Van Parijs has argued in an essay called “A Revolution in Class Theory” in the journal Politics & Society that the deepest division of material interests in welfare capitalism is between secure job holders and the unemployed. He then characterizes secure Docsity.com 26 employment as having an effective property rights in “job assets” and thus distinguishes between job-classes on the basis of their ownership of such assets. Van Parijs’ arguments are interesting, and they do point to an important source of social cleavage in developed capitalist societies. I do not think, however, that this cleavage can properly be thought of as a class cleavage since job holders cannot be viewed as exploiting the unemployed. At most, as I argued earlier, a relation of economic oppression exists between the employed and unemployed, but not exploitation. 4. Nonproduction asset mechanisms of material exploitation. One of the restrictions on the concept of class that has been assumed throughout this analysis is that classes must be defined by social relations of production. It could be argued, however, that the critical element in the definition of classes is that they simply be relationally defined categories linked to a mechanism of exploitation, whatever that mechanism might be. In particular, exploitation can be based on the control of the means of repression, particularly the state, rather than the means of production. The state is implicated in exploitation in two quite distinct ways. First, the state is the guarantor of property rights. In capitalism it uses its legal and coercive apparatus to protect capitalist property rights and thus make possible capitalist exploitation. But the state can also directly appropriate the surplus through taxation or other means. In such cases, one could argue, the control over the means of repression directly constitutes a mechanism of exploitation, and the controllers of these means of repression would accordingly constitute an exploiting class. Why, then, should the admissible mechanisms of exploitation underlying the constitution of classes be restricted to mechanisms rooted in production? I do not have a fully adequate answer to this question, and perhaps it would be a useful conceptual move to expand the horizons of the class concept by including all possible mechanisms of material exploitation (whether or not the mechanisms themselves were linked to production). My fear is that opening up the concept of class in this way would dilute its theoretical coherence and explanatory power. Class struggles would no longer be primarily about reorganizations of economic structures as such, but about all possible social transformations with distributional effects. At this point I am not convinced that this would add anything to the explanatory power of the concept, and thus I resist this theoretical move. Docsity.com