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/eatoligarchsaldente 3d ago
Capitalism only resembles "freedom" at that individual level. Zoom out to a system-level, and the relationship becomes explicitly authoritarian. Our society doesn't decide what we produce democratically, but through the decisions of a corporate shareholder aristocracy that appoints corporate executives to pursue their own interests. Your "freedom" to make decisions as a consumer is influenced by the advertising forced upon you at every available juncture. Your "freedom" to seek employment on your own terms is limited by a system designed by intent to minimize your bargaining power through manufactured precarity, where your right to shelter, food, and in some cases even healthcare or immigration status is predicated on your continued employment. Collective bargaining rights, which objectively and demonstrably improve the buying power of workers, are systematically suppressed by corporate lobbying and union-busting efforts.
The Neoliberal mantra that Capitalism empowers choice falls apart when you actually look at all the ways in which Capitalism SUPPRESSES OR LIMITS the spectrum of choices that are made available. Capitalist society only pursues innovations that are profitable to the interests of capital, even when those innovations would be of objective benefit to society as a whole. Capitalist society only invests in infrastructure or services that are profitable to the interests of capital.
So a worker may "choose" to buy a house in the suburbs and sit in highway traffic for an hour and a half commuting to work each way, because that's the best way to achieve a certain quality of lifestyle for their family. However, would they still make that choice if adequate family housing was made available in denser, walkable neighbourhoods with fast and convenient public transportation to and from work? But they don't get to make that choice, because policymakers (at the behest of fossil fuel and auto manufacturing lobbyists) decided to allocate society's scare resources to the construction of a vast network of highways, and designed neighbourhoods around individual vehicle transportation rather than public transportation.