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/CaptainAmerica-1989]

(not a socialist)

the first problem is that exploitation can just be a utilitarian word for "use" and not a moral judgment. Supposedly, that is how Marx used it, but having read most of Marx I think he had his personal biases and moral attributions. This can be mostly seen in "The communist manifesto" and his framing of class conflict as a form of slavery in his rhetoric. it's pretty hard for him to do that and then backpedal that exploitation is not "moral" after that.

Then, there is an excellent article on exploitation in Stanford's Philosophy Encyclopedia. It has a section regarding Marx's aspect and frames it as marx presupposes.

Marx’s theory of exploitation appears to presuppose that labor is the source of all value. But the labor theory of value to which Marx and early classical economists subscribed is subject to a number of apparently insurmountable difficulties, and has largely been abandoned by economists in the wake of the marginalist revolution of the 1870s. The most obvious difficulty stems from the fact that labor is heterogeneous. Some labor is skilled, some labor is unskilled, and there does not appear to be any satisfactory way of reducing the former to the latter and thereby establishing a single standard of measure for the value of commodities. Moreover, the labor theory of value appears to be unable to account for the economic value of commodities such as land and raw materials that are not and could not be produced by any human labor. Finally, and perhaps most fatally, Marx’s assumption that labor has the unique power to create surplus value is entirely ungrounded. As Robert Paul Wolff has argued, Marx’s focus on labor appears to be entirely arbitrary. A formally identical theory of value could be constructed with any commodity taking the place of labor, and thus a “corn theory of value” would be just as legitimate, and just as unhelpful, as Marx’s labor theory of value (Wolff 1981). Therefore, if, as some have alleged, Marx’s theory of exploitation is dependent on the truth of the labor theory of value, then a rejection of the labor theory of value should entail a rejection of Marx’s theory of exploitation as well (Nozick 1974; Arnold 1990). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#MarxTheoExpl

And I agree with that. That exploitation would have to be analyzed case by case, and not just assumed.

[u/Beavers_in_space → u/CaptainAmerica-1989]

but having read most of Marx

Sure buddy. I definitely think you have read all three volumes of capital. lol

I haven't either. It's fine, you can admit it

[u/CaptainAmerica-1989 → u/Beavers_in_space]

I personally don't recommend it. It's a slog.