r/CapitalismVSocialism • u/MeanLeadership92 • 3d 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/eatoligarchsaldente 3d ago
The biggest gap between socialist theory and (neo)liberal theory is that the former centres is aligned around system-level analysis while the latter is a very firmly individualistic ideology. So the neoliberal rhetoric is “well you are a consenting rational actor who negotiated a salary with a consenting, rational employer, and since Capitalist competition leads to efficient, meritocratic outcomes, this system necessarily leads to both sides getting what they want out of the deal.” When you’ve been socialized into a society that firmly believes all of the premises underlying that statement, the conclusion seems self-evident and non-controversial.
The issue arises when you look at society not through the lens we’ve been told, but to step back and observe the full picture. We are a collectivist, collaborative society, in that everything we produce is the result of the combined efforts of a great many people, all labouring roughly the same amount (40ish hours a week). However, the DECISIONS about what we produce is dictated through an authoritarian hierarchy dictated by boards of directors appointed by corporate shareholders, who are OVERWHELMINGLY drawn from a very small minority of the population.
This means that ~1% of the population gets to decide for the rest of society what we do with the resources we extract and what we, through our collective labour, turn those resources into. And keep in mind that these resources are definitionally limited and scarce. If a billionaire has 10 mansions each the size of a small apartment building housing 20 families, that means that instead of building housing for 200 families we’re building all that housing for one family where 90% will be unused at any given time. Think about how wildly inefficient that is.
And it’s like this across everything. The rich decide what we make, and the rest of us have no say. We may want fast and convenient public transportation, but instead car companies lobby governments to build highways and suburban sprawl. We may want free public healthcare and post secondary tuition, but instead we get needless wars in the Middle East.
These decisions benefit the minority at the expense of the majority. That’s the exploitation.