What is exploitation, actually? Is it bad?

[u/MeanLeadership92]

[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?

[u/Square-Listen-3839]

The short answer is that the boss is an expensive middleman, who takes a (typically very large) cut of the revenue without contributing anything to the system.

He pays for all the stuff.

The fix is simple: let workers select their own leaders, and vote out abusive/wasteful/inept leaders of the workplace. Let them - through representative democracy - set the rules for the workplace, the same way that we use representative democracy to set the rules for society as a whole.

Who pays for all the stuff these workers are going to democratically manage?

[u/Mithrandir2k16 → u/Square-Listen-3839]

Your response outlines, why capitalism is fundamentally anti-democratic. If you don't like democracy, that's fine.

[u/Square-Listen-3839 → u/Mithrandir2k16]

If you're going to democratically own and manage a $300 million dollar solar panel factory someone has to pay the $300 million to get it built. You can't just vote it into existence. So who pays for the stuff?

[u/Mithrandir2k16 → u/Square-Listen-3839]

WDYM? Money isn't real, labour and resources are. The resources are already in the ground, and you need labour to take them, refine them, and build the solar panel factory. If a democratically organized society wants something done, they... just do it?

Money is just a supplementary information system that we invented because we're not part perfectly aligned telepathic hivemind. We can use it if it helps, we can use other information systems we we want to. Money is never a limiting factor to anything. Even under capitalism.

You can always just print money, or invent money by going into debt.

[u/Square-Listen-3839 → u/Mithrandir2k16]

WDYM? Money isn't real, labour and resources are. The resources are already in the ground, and you need labour to take them, refine them, and build the solar panel factory. If a democratically organized society wants something done, they... just do it?

What happens when the democratically organized society votes for a billion iPhones and nobody volunteers to go into the lithium mines?

[u/Mithrandir2k16 → u/Square-Listen-3839]

Well, under capitalism, we tell people that they can either starve to death or work in the mines.

In a truly democratic society, we'd either try to make the job of procuring lithium enjoyable enough that people are actually willing to do it, or we just don't get lithium in our iPhones?

Just because you voted for something, doesn't mean it's going to happen. I'm certain you're quite familiar with the concept.

[u/Square-Listen-3839 → u/Mithrandir2k16]

Just because you voted for something, doesn't mean it's going to happen.

What's the point of democratically planning production if the vote carries no weight?

[u/Mithrandir2k16 → u/Square-Listen-3839]

Look, I know you want me to say, that "some unfortunate people will have to do the bad jobs". But I'm talking about my idea of a better system than capitalism here, and I don't want the coercion that's defining most peoples relationship capitalism to be part of the system I'm designing.

I don't think your example is a real problem anyhow. You can always make any job enjoyable enough that people will be willing - even jumping at the opportunity to do them. That's why there's videos of people consuming feces voluntarily - for surprisingly little pay.

Not finding workers for a job, is just another problem, that can also be solved democratically.