Lecture 10 Sociology 621 October 10, 2005 EXPLOITATION Exploitation is a complex and fascinating concept. It is probably foolhardy for me to attempt to explain this concept in a single lecture. My notes will be much more comprehensive, since in earlier years this topic took up three lectures, so you can read them and fill out your understanding – I will put them on the web. In any case, I think that my exposition about this concept in my writings are pretty clear. The first part of this lecture explores the logic of the labor theory of value as a way of thinking about exploitation. I will then turn the conception of exploitation proposed in Class Counts, which shows how we can have a concept of exploitation without the LTV. I. 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.Sociology 621. Lecture 10. Exploitation 2 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 designed to insure that everyone has relatively equal access to the books in the library (no one can hoard masses of books) while still allowing everyone to satisfy their needs. When you go into a bookstore, you go to the place where the books you want are located and find the book or books that satisfy your needs. But that is not all there is to it: instead of checking out the books, you check out their price and the money you have available to buy books. You then ask yourself whether each book is “worth it” given other possible uses of your money and how much you want the book, and then, depending upon how all of these factors balance out, you either put the books back on the shelf or give the cashier money in excahnge or them. There are no restrictions on how many books you can buy. If you have enough money, you can buy every book in the store. But to gain access to the books you have to exchange money for them. In the bookstore, books are commodities; in the library, they are not. In the bookstore they are distributed according to the ability to buy books; in the library they are distributed according to need. The same physical entity -- a book -- is a commodity in the case of the bookstore, but simply a product that satisfies a human need in the library. More formally, a commodity can be defined as a product which: (1) satisfies some kind of human want, or what is often referred to as a “use-value”; (2) is produced for exchange, rather than simply for its use (consumption) by the producers thsemlves, by the community or by a class which appropriates it; and (3) is distributed through a market of some sort. 3. The social presuppositions of Commodity Production Commodities are a socially specific way of producing and acquiring usevalues. As such there are certain general structural conditions that must be present in a society for commodity production to play an important role in social life. Among these social prerequisites are: $ a division of labor sufficiently developed to make production for exchange a rational activity; $ a market with sufficient scope and institutional stability that people can more or less count of being able to exchange the commodities which they produce;Sociology 621. Lecture 10. Exploitation 3 $ a medium of exchange -- money -- which makes it possible for peole to sell their commodities to general consumers rather than simply to those people from whom they want to purchase commodities. Without money, exchange must take the form of immediate barter which greatly restricts the possibility of commodity production. These conditions have existed to a greater or lesser extent for millennia. Commodity production existed prior to capitalism and it exists in varying degrees in all post-capitalist societies as well. What makes capitalism distinctive in these terms is not the fact of commodity production, but the degree to which commodity production has penetrated all aspects of social life. Not only are virtually all areas of consumption satisfied through commodity production, but both means of production and labor power have become commodities. While there was commodity production