Exploitation

9 Key excerpts on "Exploitation"

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  Reasons for Welfare

  The Political Theory of the Welfare State

  • Robert E. Goodin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  As a result of pursuing that strategy, I am led to an analysis of Exploitation very different in its implications from the standard, economics-based one. On this analysis, the welfare state, far from being an inadequate instrument for preventing Exploitation, turns out actually to be an ideal one. The general notion of Exploitation, as I analyze it in section I, always consists in a certain sort of behavior in a certain sort of situation. The nub of the matter is invariably taking advantage, in one way or another. Exploiting a situation amounts essentially to taking advantage of some peculiar features of that situation. Ex-ploiting a person similarly involves taking advantage of some pe-culiar features of that person and his situation. 3 While exploiting a person is a special case of exploiting a situa-tion, it is, as I show in section II, a very special case. The former practice is inherently wrong, in a way that the latter is not. Built into the concept of exploiting a person is a notion of unfairness 1987; Wood 1972; and Wright 1984. Many of these authors make some effort to transcend that economistic starting point, but invariably it continues to exert a con-siderable influence over the whole analysis. 2 In analyses of economic Exploitation, for example, the emphasis naturally falls on the production and consumption of commodities carrying value: that tends to suggest that a theory of Exploitation should be parasitic upon a theory about the creation and distribution of valued commodities; and it further tends to suggest that only certain sorts of things (i.e., factors of production) are eligible candidates for Exploitation. Surely that is too narrow an understanding of Exploitation, how-ever. Lovers can exploit one another just as surely as can economic classes.

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  Contemporary Moral Dilemmas

  • Dorota Probucka, Seweryn Blandzi(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  Today, after dozens of years of Marxist experiments across the world, it is well-known, that this was an illusory and false solution, and that the issue of Exploitation is much more complex than Marx ever thought. In eco- nomic activity the generation of profit is as necessary as the remuneration of employees for the performed work. In terms of economics, today’s world is much more complicated than what Karl Marx saw in the 19th century, but the concept of Exploitation is still useful in all kinds of analyses of the philosophy of labour or, more broadly, social philosophy. It has a variety of meanings, at least some of which I would like to analyse in this chapter. But before I do this, I will try to establish a starting point, which will also be a reference point on the map of the various contemporary forms of Exploitation of man by man. The whole considerations will be conducted more on the ethical plane than the economic or the management plane, associated with the organization of work, without completely excluding the latter, however. Antoni Szwed 94 Exploitation occurs in cases where those who are socially, economically and politically stronger exploit those who are in some way weaker. The stronger person could be one who has power, capital, more knowledge, more developed contacts with other people; this also applies in cases where one individual is physically stronger or has greater self-confidence, is more ruthless and selfish in pursuing their interests, more brutal in their actions. They may act directly or indirectly through institutions whose power and importance they are able to use for their own goals.

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  Violence and Social Justice

  • V. Bufacchi(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  1 In what follows I suggest we restrict our analysis to Exploitation as a social and political act. Thus it is not the Exploitation of natural resources (exploiting a coal mine) or certain situation (exploiting the weakness of my chess opponent to win a game) that is at issue, but the Exploitation of one person by another person. The Exploitation of people can take different forms: some- times it is their weaknesses or vulnerabilities that are being exploited (as in the case of weaker bargaining position), while other times it is their strengths that are being exploited (a talented musician may end up being burned out by a gruelling schedule of concerts), and of course most often people are exploited for both their weaknesses and strengths. In terms of understanding the nature of social injustice, it is the issue of weaknesses and vulnerability that is our primary concern. It may be important to remember that human vulnerability can take many different forms, being both physical (child abuse or even child labour) and metaphysical (desires and emotional needs), although vulnerability always arises in a social context characterized by an unequal power relationship. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to exploit is ‘to employ to the greatest possible advantage’ or simply ‘to make use of’, therefore when A exploits B, A is using B to the greatest Exploitation, Injustice and Violence 147 possible advantage. The OED is right of course: to ‘exploit’ is essen- tially to ‘use’, although these two terms are not synonymous. I can say that ‘I’m using a computer to write this book’, but it would sound odd to say that ‘I’m exploiting a computer to write this book’; this suggests that there must be more to Exploitation than simply using someone. After all, we use people all the time, without doing anything wrong.

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  Social Injustice

  Essays in Political Philosophy

  • V. Bufacchi(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 The Injustice of Exploitation 45 Exploitation is perhaps the archetypal form of social injustice, ref lecting the three dimensions of social injustice discussed in Chapter 1: maldis- tribution, exclusion, and disempowerment. 1 The aim of this chapter is to explore the way Exploitation captures all three dimensions of injustice. There are two sides to Exploitation: its circumstances and its motives. The circumstances of Exploitation give rise to maldistribution, while the motives of Exploitation account for exclusion and disempowerment. I will argue that what makes Exploitation unjust cannot be reduced exclusively to its circumstances; instead it is also the motives behind the act of Exploitation that determine its injustice. In particular, I will argue that there are two sets of unjust motives that can give rise to exploit- ative relations: the (economic) motive to make a monetary gain from an unequal exchange, and the (non-economic) motive to morally insult or degrade the exploited party, not for monetary reasons but for the sake of identif ying with power. The former (economic) motive finds support in the vast Marxist literature on Exploitation, yet the latter (non-economic) motive has regrettably been neglected. The concept of Exploitation From a philosophical point of view, the two central issues about exploi- tation are ‘What is Exploitation?’ and ‘What is wrong with exploita- tion?’ Regarding the first question, the act of Exploitation is ‘to employ to the greatest possible advantage’ or simply ‘to make use of’. Of course, there is an important difference between ‘exploiting’ and ‘using’. Linguistically I can say that ‘I am using a computer to write this paper’, but it would sound odd to say that ‘I am exploiting the computer to write this book’. The difference between ‘exploiting’ and ‘using’ is not 46 Social Injustice simply a question of degree, where to exploit does not mean to use more fully or extensively.

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  The Ethics of the Market

  • J. Meadowcroft(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Exploitation and Coercion 89 hence . . . noncoercive. From another point of view, however, the landlord may be in such an advantageous bargaining position that he can impose highly unfair and exploitative terms. From this point of view the relationship is injurious to the sharecropper . . . Economic influence is best regarded as a form of coercion. It is argued that the claims to self-ownership and individual freedom that classical liberals and libertarians put at the heart of their moral case for the market economy are hollow because in reality a market economy enables those with more resources than others to use that economic power to exploit and coerce those who have less. ‘Exploitation’ and ‘coercion’ are notoriously slippery concepts that can give rise to a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations (Aarstol 1991; Howarth 1990, 1992; Nozick 1997; Wertheimer 1996), but in the context of the present discussion it is possible to arrive at definitions of each that satisfactorily express the sense in which they are used when referring to power and choice within a market economy. Following Wilkinson (2004) and Wertheimer (1996), Exploitation may be defined as ‘taking unfair advantage’, for example as has been claimed occurs when workers are paid less than the true value of what they produce or are paid less than the salary that a ‘perfectly competitive’ market would allocate. Coercion may be defined as ‘forcing a person to do something they would not otherwise do’, such as when a mugger forces a person to handover their money or face serious injury (an example of a ‘coercive offer’) or when a slave owner forces their slaves to live and work under their control.

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  The Logic of Capital

  An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory

  • Deepankar Basu(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Since there are, no doubt, many forms of distributive conflict, once we identify Exploitation with distributive injustice, we will have ‘manifold Exploitations’. Exploitation, as defined in the Marxist tradition, will be just one – albeit an important one – form of Exploitation. 400 Exploitation AND OPPRESSION The theoretical framework to understand Exploitation as distributive injustice, or ‘group-based economic inequalities’, is built on an understanding of production, in the broad sense discussed earlier, as cooperation between groups of human beings that generate gains from cooperation. The term ‘cooperation’ seems to give a misleading impression that we are referring only to voluntary cooperation. This is not the case. Some groups are, or might be, coerced in various ways to enter into the cooperative venture and, hence, it is better to refer to this as ‘coerced cooperation’. Looked at from the perspective of the outcome, such activities give rise to gains from coerced cooperation. Since it is difficult to precisely assess the contribution of different individuals or groups involved in the cooperative venture, the division of the gains from cooperation are determined by a process of ‘bargaining’. Unequal fall-back positions of the groups then lead to unequal distribution of the gains from coerced cooperation – arrived at through bargaining. Is the unequal distributional outcome Exploitation? We can identify the unequal distribution as Exploitation, argues Folbre (2020), when either the outcome or the process of bargaining or both are ‘unfair’. In a nutshell, Exploitation is distributive injustice. To pin down this analysis, one will need to define the meaning of the term ‘unfair’. What is an unfair distribution? Folbre (2020) offers no answer to this important question. The problem is that there is a circularity in the argument.

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  The Political Philosophy of G. A. Cohen

  Back to Socialist Basics

  • Nicholas Vrousalis(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The crucial question for Exploitation is, therefore, whether or not it is fair that capitalists have the bargaining power they do. If it is morally all right that capitalists do and workers do not own means of production, then capitalist profit need not be the fruit of Exploitation; and, if the pre-contractual distributive position is morally wrong, then the case for Exploitation is made. The question of Exploitation therefore resolves itself into the question of the moral status of capitalist private property. (Cohen 1988, pp. 233–234) The ‘because’ and ‘why’ in the first sentence are ambiguous: are they meant to express causal or noncausal conditions for Exploitation? The expression ‘resolves itself ’ in the last sentence, however, seems to imply a noncausal reading: Exploitation supervenes if and only if capitalist private property is unjustified. ‘Exploiting’, Cohen says, is a ‘kind of taking without giving’. But not all such unreciprocated takings are unfair, unjust or illegitimate (as when you give me back my coat). Thus: A flow of value … constitutes Exploitation only if the contract it fulfils arises out of an unfair bargaining situation, and regardless, moreover, of whether or not that situation precisely forces the worker to sell his labour to the capitalist. Once the truisms of the Plain Argument are to hand, the crucial question for Exploitation concerns the justice of the distribution of the means of production. (Cohen 1988, p. 234) The Political Philosophy of G. A. Cohen 88 Cohen’s early view of Exploitation, therefore, is that it constitutes a form of unreciprocated, though not necessarily forced, 6 exchange, whose justice or fairness depends upon the justice or fairness of the distribution in the means of production: (7) The labourer is exploited, and the capitalist exploits, if and only if the exchange in which they are engaged occurs against the background of an unjust distribution of alienable resources.

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  The First Marx

  A Philosophical Introduction

  • Peter Lamb, Douglas Burnham(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FOUR Exploitation

  Having examined the place of production and alienation in Marx’s early political philosophy, this chapter turns to the related but rather less prominent theme of Exploitation. It is not uncommon to find discussion of Exploitation as a theme in Marx’s later work, such as Capital (see, e.g. Holmstron, 1977; Cohen, 1988: 209–38; Laycock, 1999; Fine and Saad-Filho, 2010: 27–43). What is less widely acknowledged is that Exploitation and a number of related issues represent a theme which is intertwined with those of production and alienation in his work of the early to late 1840s – even though this is less pronounced than in the later works.

  In the 1840s Marx used the German term Ausbeutung when he referred to what is in English, which in turn follows the French, termed ‘Exploitation’. Before Marx’s time, ‘Exploitation’ had mainly been used to refer to the industrial use of land or materials (Williams, 1981: 130) – just as today we might talk about the ‘Exploitation of natural resources’ without necessarily implying anything negative about such activity. Indeed, Marx (EPM, CW3: 264–5 and 270) himself sometimes used the word in this way in 1844. This raises the question, which we will discuss later, concerning how to understand Exploitation in its newer, normative meaning. The concept is in play, though, much more often than the word Ausbeutung. So, like with ‘production’, we shall have to use the context in order to ascertain its presence.

  Our broad, initial definition of Exploitation is that Exploitation occurs when one individual or group uses another for the former’s ends. Such a formulation obviously evokes one key version of the Kantian moral law, about treating others as ends in themselves and never as means. In that sense, Exploitation designates a very broad moral category indeed, and as we shall see, this is where the very early Marx begins. However, such Exploitation is easy to identify; Exploitation becomes a problem requiring some other, more subtle form of analysis only when it is the condition of alienation that lies behind it, permitting some act to serve the interests of one group at the expense of another. Indeed, for Marx, as the mutable element of human nature undergoes change, the contradictions driving this change, and generating alienation, as well as the experiencing of these contradictions will vary. In this way, the condition of alienation appears and feels normal, and human beings individually and collectively thus become ripe for Exploitation. Some people in the powerful classes, moreover, take advantage of opportunities to exploit not only other individuals but also the system that enables them to help their own situation by in some way harming others. Of course, this Exploitation need not be conscious or malicious – it too will have been naturalized, and may even bear the banner of, say, liberalism.

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  Labour and Value

  • Ernesto Screpanti(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Open Book Publishers

    (Publisher)

  A lessening of Exploitation implies a cutback in capitalist power. Exploitation would be zeroed, L * = 0, if commodities 7 Normalization in wage units may also be useful in macroeconomic analysis. Not by chance, it was used by Keynes in The General Theory (1973, chapter 4). Among its properties, the following two are worth noticing: first, when the price level varies with labour costs, the wage standard turns out to be a deflator of monetary variables that works better than index numbers; second, it can be used to convert the determination of national income into the determination of employment. This latter property is also obtained with the labour productivity standard. 8 The young Croce (2001, 50) had an intuition about this “elliptical comparison”: “Does Marx offer an explanation connecting ground and consequence, or does he not rather draw a parallel between two different phenomena, by which the diversities illuminating the origins of society are set in relief?” Croce thought the labour theory of value was aimed at criticizing the capitalist extraction of surplus value. Gramsci (2007, 192) found “a grain of truth” in his notion of “elliptical comparison”, which he interpreted as implying a comparison between capitalism and a future socialist system. 85 5. Measures of Exploitation were exchanged at labour values, as would occur in a hypothetical socialist economy. Finally note that, whilst reduction of the Exploitation rate to a ratio between two quantities of living labour holds true only in the aggregate, its reduction to a ratio between two quantities of commanded labour holds true at the microeconomic level too. 5.3. Back to the Real World Having proved that production prices are better than labour values as instruments to measure Exploitation, I must now say that not even the classical theory of prices should be taken at face value.

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