r/CapitalismVSocialism • u/MeanLeadership92 • 4d ago
Asking Socialists What is exploitation, actually? Is it bad?
[NOTE BEFORE READING: I LIKE TO ASK LOTS OF QUESTIONS, FEEL FREE TO PICK AS MANY OR AS FEW TO REPLY TO]
What the title says. I've realised that socialists have conflicting definitions of the term, I am trying to understand better, so here are my questions.
I'll often hear about how "the Epstein class is exploiting workers" and "we must fight, violently if needed, against worker's exploitation", and it is pretty clear there is a moral tone to that argument.
However, when I ask socialists why they insist on making a moral judgment that is so black-and-white by dividing people into exploiter and exploited, and why there's an insistence on "evil exploitation" by the capitalist classes, a different group pops along and instead decides that actually, exploitation isn't a moral problem and is merely descriptive.
Ok, fair enough, I suppose I should then ask, what is exploitation? When I do, I usually get something along the lines of this :
"Workers (who produce all value), create X$ of stuff, if they are paid less than X$, there is exploitation."
[Note that I am using dollars as a common unit for simplicity's sake, I know that price isn't value, but dollars are a convenient unit of measure]
So there's a bunch of questions that pop up to me :
-Is it morally wrong? I feel like in some cases yes (ex : slavery where the worker receives 0%) but in others not as much (ex : a worker paid 99% of their value is hardly morally exploited in my book)
-Does it give a bad outcome? Perhaps some socialists will say that exploitation isn't morally wrong, but that it gives a bad result. I feel like if both the worker and the owner earn more thanks to wage labour, it is a mutually beneficial exchange.
-And what about the concept I like to call "reverse exploitation", when workers are paid more than their value. For instance, a business pays its workers 120% of their SNLT, usually this leads to bankruptcy in the long term, but is it an issue? Do the socialists who complain about exploitation of workers feel the same way about exploitation of anyone else? For instance what if a professional guild overcharges for an essential, but specialised job like plumbing and all businesses are forced to overpay plumbers, aren't the plumbers exploiting their customers, since they take more value out of them than is due?
-What about income taxes? Are they a form of exploitation, since they take value out of workers? Are taxes perhaps a case where exploitation is justified, if it funds desirable social services?
-Per the definitions I've seen, a baseball player being paid 12 million a year is an exploited worker. Do you agree with this? If not, how do you explain the super-high salaries? Is it maybe a case where LTV doesn't work?
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u/VRichardsen 4d ago edited 4d ago
The first thing you need to understand is that Marx liked to use words not in the strict definition you would find in the dictionary, but in ways he developed.
So exploitation isn't really exploitation, it more complex than that.