Exploitation

Exploitation is a particularly important component of Marxian theory. Some observers would say that it lies at the very heart of Marx's theory. Marx was a humanist who saw capitalism as preventing people from achieving species-being, or their true potential as human beings. A major roadblock to species-being for Marx is found in the structure of the capitalist system and the way in which it is constructed. That system not only permits and exacerbates the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists, but is also, in fact, based on that exploitation.

Marx's labor theory of value asserts that labor is the source of all wealth. Hence, the surplus value of the capitalist is derived from that labor and therefore from the exploitation of the worker. Capitalists are able to purchase labor power from workers, who can bring to the market only their own labor power. Capitalists are then able to pay the worker less than the value they produce and can keep the rest for themselves. This is what Marx meant by “surplus value,” which he saw as “an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist” (Marx [1867] 1967:218). Although some of this surplus value extracted from the labor process is used by the capitalist to pay for overhead (rent, interest on loans, utilities, etc.), the most important component is profit.

Although some profit is used by the capitalists for personal consumption, its most important use is as reinvestment in the system to accelerate its growth. Therefore, the greater the exploitation of the worker, the more the system is able to grow and the more the worker becomes exploited, creating a vicious cycle of capitalist growth and heightened exploitation of the proletariat. At first, capitalists are driven to lengthen the working day to increase exploitation, since the proletariat ends up working the additional hours for the capitalist in the production of surplus value. However, this route to the heightening of exploitation is eventually closed off as the state is forced to intervene through the law to limit the increasingly long workday. Capitalists are then forced to look for ways of improving the production process (e.g., through technological advances). Such improvements make it possible for the proletariat to produce more in less time. It takes progressively less time for the proletariat to produce enough value to cover the cost of their subsistence, with the result that an increasing proportion of the workday is devoted to the production of surplus value.

Following Marx's idea that capitalism carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, the increased level of exploitation over time also leads the proletariat to resist the system. Marx foresaw a time when, eventually, the two classes would come into open conflict with one another, and given the enormous numbers of the proletariat and the declining numbers of the capitalists (many of whom over time would tumble into the proletariat as they lost out in the competitive world of the capitalist economic system), he felt that the proletariat would emerge the victors. Their victory would mean the end of capitalism and of the exploitation inherent in it, and the creation eventually of a communist system that, ideally, would be free of such economic exploitation, indeed, all forms of exploitation.

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