Sociology 621. Lectures 4 & 5. September 16 & 21, 2009 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 socialSociology 621. Lectures 4 & 5. Exploitation 2conflicts 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,