Exploitation and Structures

It is commonly claimed that workers in sweatshops are wrongfully exploited by their employers. The economist’s standard response to this claim is to point out that sweatshops provide their workers with tremendous benefits, more than most workers elsewhere in the economy receive and more than most of those who complain about sweatshop exploitation provide. Perhaps, though, the wrongfulness of sweatshop exploitation is to be found not in the discrete interaction between a sweatshop and its employees, but in the unjust political and economic institutions against which that interaction takes place. This paper tries to assess what role, if any, consideration of background injustice should play in the correct understanding of exploitation. Its answer, in brief, is that it should play fairly little. Structural injustice matters, of course, but it does not typically matter for determining whether a sweatshop is acting exploitatively, and it does not typically matter in a way that grounds any kind of special moral responsibility or fault on the part of sweatshops or the MNEs (Multinational Enterprises) with which they contract.

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2014

This paper proposes four concepts of exploitation that encapsulate common uses of the word in social interactions: unfair advantage, unequal exchange, using persons as means, and free-riding. It briefly discusses how these concepts appear in the literature (the first two are prominent in Roemer’s classical work), and then examines how these forms of exploitation are related and how they can occur.

2009

© 2009 Mikhail Valdman T ypically, we consider mutually beneficial transactions between consenting adults to be legitimate and binding, especially if third parties are unaffected. Yet such transactions can be deeply exploitative. Suppose, for instance, that I fall over the side of a cruise ship and the sole witness demands an exorbitant price for throwing me a life preserver. If I accept his offer, this transaction would be mutually beneficial and, arguably, consensual. Still, it would be deeply exploitative and deeply wrong, and our agreement’s bindingness would be open to question. In this paper I attempt to explain what exploitation is, when it is wrong, and what makes it so. I argue that exploitation is not always wrong, but that it can be, and that its wrongness cannot be fully explained with familiar moral constraints against harming people, coercing them, or using them as a means, or with familiar moral obligations such as an obligation to rescue those in distress or not to t...

I focus on exploitation from the point of view of those who suffer from it, and so I take exploitation as a category of subjective experience. Adopting a subjective perspective on exploitation highlights important conceptual aspects about it and suggests important methodological rules on how to critically discuss social forms of exploitation. I start by introducing some key conceptual distinctions in the first two sections. These distinctions lead me to formulate a first, general definition of exploitation as a subjective category, in the third section of the paper. In the fourth section, I ask what relationship there is between the objective and subjective senses of exploitation, and I turn to the work of Marx. This is because, as I try to argue, Marx's approach is exemplary for tying together an objective and a subjective sense of exploitation. Based on a schematic rendition of Marx's use of a dual perspective on exploitation, in the last sections of the paper, I draw a number of conceptual and normative conclusions. In this paper, I propose to focus on exploitation from the point of view of those who suffer from it, to take exploitation as a category of subjective experience. The reason for such an undertaking is that adopting a subjective perspective on exploitation highlights important conceptual aspects about it and suggests important methodological rules on how to critically discuss social forms of exploitation. These conceptual and methodological features might not be as apparent when exploitation is considered objectively, from an external point of view. I start by introducing some key conceptual distinctions in the first two sections. These distinctions provide the conceptual background to the more substantive subsequent discussions in the later sections. They also help me to make explicit in succinct fashion some of the key methodological assumptions

This is a volume of essays on exploitation in theory and practice. Contributors include Charles Mills, Anne Phillips, Ruth Sample, Jeremy Snyder, Heather Widdows, Richard Miller, and many others. The book seeks to push past the impasse between liberal-transactional and marxist-structural understandings of exploitation.

Exploitation: Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, 2024

This chapter argues that in some cases of wrongful exploitation, individuals who are not parties to the relevant transactions are as seriously and as directly wronged as the exploited parties to those transactions. Section I presents two cases that provide intuitive support for this claim, and offers an initial explanation for it that relies on considerations that are similar to those that motivate the Nonworseness Claim. Section 2 describes some central components of an account of the wrong-making features of wrongful exploitation that is suggested by the argument in section 1, and suggests some reasons to find this type of account plausible. Section 3 notes what the arguments in sections 1 and 2 seem to imply with regard to the remedial duties of wrongful exploiters, contrasts this view with one that has recently been defended by Malmqvist and Szigeti, and argues that there are important reasons to prefer the former.

(Forthcoming in Social Scientist. This is a draft copy) I present a theory of exploitation from a Marxist perspective. To situate my theory within existing literature, it is useful to make a couple of contrasts. One, Marx discusses exploitation primarily as a phenomenon in the capitalist mode of production. I generalise the account so that it applies to all class societies. And I flesh out the normative and philosophical aspects of exploitation which are missing in Marx’s Capital since it is a work in political economy. Two, there is a literature in analytic political philosophy that engages with exploitation and distributive justice. This includes both liberal accounts which treat exploitation as a sort of unfairness, and the somewhat older literature from ‘Analytical Marxists’ which develops selected ideas from Marx in a framework of thought familiar to liberal thought. The Analytical Marxists discuss exploitation within the employer-employee relationship, whereas I broaden the discussion to include other aspects of Marx’s political economy. The liberal accounts treat exploitation as primarily a moral phenomenon, while I treat it as primarily a sociological or political economic phenomenon, albeit with moral ramifications. Analytic philosophy in general has tended to understand the moral upshot of exploitation as a matter of unfairness, whereas I take the moral upshot to be a matter of rule.

Marxists claim capitalists unjustly exploit workers, and this exploitation is to show that workers ought to hold more than they do. This paper presents two accounts of exploitation. The Theft Account claims that capitalists steal some of the value to which workers are entitled. The Underpayment Account holds that capitalists are not entitled to pay workers as little as they do, even if the workers are not entitled to the full value they produce. This paper argues that only the Theft Account can explain why workers ought to hold more than they do. The Underpayment Account cannot yield this conclusion. The Theft Account is superior to the Underpayment Account insofar as exploitation is to be an injustice—a wrong that requires the exploited party to hold more.

Annales. Etyka w Życiu Gospodarczym

The paper refers to selected issues of exploitation in the face of justice. The analysis is based on the definitions of exploitation contained in the Polish Penal and Civil Codes. The main goal is the identification of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the recognition of exploitation as being unjust. A supplementary question will refer to a specific type of justice which should be considered in this case. In this respect, we should consider retributive, distributive and social justice. Another important factor in this regard is the accepted theory of value. In the presented considerations, we will focus on the labour theory of value. The principal issue can be expressed by the questions whether exploitation is ipso facto unjust and how the phenomena of exploitation and justice are related to each other.

If Third World women form 'the bedrock of a certain kind of global exploitation of labour,' as Chandra Mohanty argues, how can our theoretical definitions of exploitation account for this? This paper argues that liberal theories of exploitation are insufficiently structural and that Marxian accounts are structural but are insufficiently intersectional. What we need is a structural and intersectional definition of exploitation in order to correctly identify global structural exploitation. Drawing on feminist, critical race/post-colonial and post-Fordist critiques of the Marxist definition and the intersectional accounts of Maria Mies and Iris Marion Young, this paper offers the following definition of structural exploitation: structural exploitation refers to the forced transfer of the productive powers of groups positioned as socially inferior to the advantage of groups positioned as socially superior. Global structural exploitation is a form of global injustice because it is a form of oppression.