Exploitation

Marx: Surplus Labor and Surplus Value

Marx's account differed in two ways. First, Marx explicitly rejected the moral framing characteristic of the standard notion of exploitation. Second, he restricted the concept to the field of labor relations. Most disputes about the concept of exploitation center around these two issues. The first concerns the status of the concept of exploitation: what is the function of the notion of exploitation in social theory? The second issue concerns the range of social phenomena to which the concept of exploitation is applicable: which social relations can be exploitative?

Marx identified exploitation as the appropriation of another's surplus labor. Surplus labor is the amount of labor exceeding what is necessary for the reproduction of the worker's labor power, that [Page 233]is, for producing the worker's living conditions sufficient for the worker's capability to keep on working. Appropriation of surplus labor is by no means specific to capitalist societies. It is rooted in forced labor and just changes in form in relation to the different ways forced labor has historically been organized in societies. In slaveholder and feudal societies, exploitation as the appropriation of surplus labor occurred in the form of a direct appropriation of surplus labor or in the form of a requisition of the surplus product, respectively. Leaving aside that the institution of slavery disguises the fact that not all of the slave's labor is exploited insofar as the exploiter is interested in the reproduction of the slave's labor power, to Marx there is nothing mysterious about these historically prevalent forms of exploitation. What is enigmatic is rather how exploitation can occur within capitalist societies given that these societies, in principle, have abolished forced labor and rest on free labor, instead. The Marxian theory of exploitation is intended to solve this riddle.

Marx's analysis of capitalist exploitation centers around his notion of the “doubly free worker”: Under capitalist conditions, the worker is free in the first sense of being the owner of his labor power, legally uncoerced to work for another apart from contractual labor relations the worker enters into at his or her discretion; the worker is free also in the second sense of being free from any means of production, hence, undermining the worker's freedom in the first sense, necessitated to sell his or her labor power to make a living. Nonetheless, neither is the surplus labor nor the surplus product of the worker directly appropriated by another under capitalist conditions. The free worker is not exploited in the same way as the slave and the serf. How can the worker be exploited at all? How is it possible that capitalists appropriate free workers' surplus labor? The mystery resides in the fact that under capitalist conditions goods appear as commodities insofar as they are primarily produced for the market, and all goods can, in principle, be converted into each other (by monetary means) through economic transactions. Therefore, all these transactions have to take the form of an exchange of equivalents. The commodity of labor power is no exception to this rule. Marx argues that the capitalist economy functions in such a way that the workers are paid according to the value of their labor power. There is no robbery involved in capitalist labor relations. To explain how capitalist labor relations can embody an exchange of equivalents as well as the capitalists' appropriation of the workers' surplus labor, Marx focuses on the specific form surplus labor takes under capitalist conditions, namely surplus value. Capitalist exploitation, then, consists in the appropriation of surplus value.

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