Is what's going on in Venezuela today "a strike (workers' refusal to furnish labor)" or "a lockout (employers' refusal to allow workers to labor) and a capital strike (capital's refusal to invest)"? I don't think that's what Catherine has in her mind, but, in the case of reporting on Venezuela, how the reporter defines what's going on, how s/he describes it, and how s/he explains it are closely linked, though it is not impossible for the reader of reports to separate them.
At the more abstract level, in Marxist explanations of capitalism, "the working class" are by definition exploited (as classes in Marxist explanations stand in dialectical contradiction to each other, rather than being categories of inequality), whereas in non-Marxist explanations of capitalism, they are not, the term "exploitation" signifying different phenomena in the two kinds of explanations; "the working class" in Marxist explanations and "the working class" in non-Marxist explanations do not refer to the same people either, the latter explanations' "working class" often referring to blue-collar and pink-collar workers and/or (ill-defined) low-wage workers and/or workers without college degrees exclusively. (I'm setting aside for a moment a number of Marxist writers who oscillate between Marxist and non-Marxist definitions of classes.) I doubt that this is what Catherine has in her mind either, but putting the debate in more concrete terms might serve to clarify it. -- Yoshie
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