Exploitation

Superexploitation

Workers paid above a living wage are exploited to the extent that surplus value exceeds the time workers need to work to cover necessities, but workers paid less than a living wage is what post-Marxists call superexploitation. Superexploitation is an elevation of exploitation to what Marx said was vampire-like. Capital sucks the living blood out of labor, and the vampire lives the more it sucks labor dry. Every last drop of blood and every nerve and muscle is exploited. That is how labor power purchased from labor is consumed.

Ethics

The ethics of superexploitation can be researched. Superexploitation includes slavery, colonialism, and contemporary global systems of sweatshop supply chains. Superexploitation violates Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative because humanity is treated as a means to an end: maximizing surplus value through superexploitation, rather than treating humanity as an end unto itself. Greed that harms one segment of humanity while ceding surplus value to another is legitimated by practical reasoning ethics; overworking a class of workers is the means to benefit another segment or class (lower prices at the retail store for consumers; higher dividends to shareholders; humungous salaries for executives).

Superexploitation of one class, race, or gender over another means that there is a racism, sexism, or ethnocentrism ideology in force legitimating inequitable pay for equal work. For example, Pakamani Basebanz reports that in 1986, average monthly earnings of an African worker were 28% of those of a white worker; people of color and Indian workers earned 35% and 52%, respectively, of monthly earnings received by whites.

Performativity

Performativity, defined by Marx as working labor unto death, can also be researched. Calculating systems are set up to use up the life of a worker within a set number of years. Performativity is embedded in the calculating system multinational corporations contract with subcontractors, in terms of production quotas, time-to-complete tasks, and so forth. Do these calculating systems perpetuate the performativity of superexploitation? Farm and garment-sweatshop workers often work at piece rates set by a contracting food or retail corporation. The piece rates and daily quotas are preset so workers can supposedly earn a subsistence wage in 8 or 10 hours, but often it can take 12 to 16 hours, and there is no pay for overtime. Jim Rosenbaum reports tomato workers picking in the field and processing in canneries get 4%, the farm owners get 9%, while the canneries get 83%. It's all about the calculations. In the United States, the EPA estimates that each year, 300,000 farm workers fall ill from toxic pesticides and herbicides used in the fields. Besides cancer, there are chronic skin rashes and kidney, liver, and chest cavity problems. Rosenbaum says women workers on these farms are seven times more [Page 496]likely to have miscarriages compared to women not working on farms. The small firms who hire immigrant works are often contracted by large global monopolies to avoid paying union workers.

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