To exploit somebody is to take from him/her something that is "theirs." I believe -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- that Marx took from Locke the notion of ownership by virtue of creativity. The worker creates the product, which in turn makes the product "belong" to him/her. Now, in a commodity producing society the capitalist takes from the worker part of what the worker produces. For this reason, Marx says that the worker is being exploited. And, indeed, ownership per se produces nothing, so I think that we can both agree that capitalist owners, as a group, "exploit" the rest of society. Furthermore, in a hypothetical fully capitalist society, where all human activity is carried through the market and paid for in $, we can compute the overall "rate of exploitation." This rate would be the ratio of all capitalist income to all non-capitalist income.
But that is it.
In order to compute exploitation in ANY SUBSET of that society, we need to know precisely "how much" each worker contributed to the product in question (a contribution measured in units of "abstract labor"). Unfortunately, this is knowledge that we neither have, nor can we have (neo-Ricardians have shown just the tip of the iceberg on this issue; the problem goes much deeper into what is creativity and whether or not it could be broken down into quantitative inputs in the first place). Now, unless we can identify individual contributions, we cannot know whether a Microsoft engineer (or a poor peasant, for that matter) is being "exploited," or rather is himself "exploiting" other workers (you cannot exploit capitalist owners, by definition). By the same token, we cannot derive the "profit margin" of any capitalist or group of capitalists (save all capitalists) by "knowing" the extent to which they exploit their workers -- simply since this "extent" is unknown, and indeed unknowable.
This is why we say that if the notion of abstract labor goes, so does the notion of exploitation.
Clearly, workers usually are far less powerful than capitalists; that is what makes the world we live in run to the tune of capitalists rather than workers. We all know that workers struggle to survive and that in many parts of the world their conditions are not different from Marx's England. Furthermore, in our data on differential accumulation we show that, over the past century, the relative power of capitalists has grown exponentially. But the growth of this relative power cannot be connected to the Marxist concept of "exploitation" (save in the overall sense noted above).
Jonathan Nitzan
Michael Dawson wrote:
>"We can quantify the architecture of power, but we cannot denominate this
>architecture in units of 'abstract labour' and definitely not in units of
>'surplus value.' And without abstract labour and surplus value, a whole host
>of derivative concepts - [including] 'exploitation'- lose their analytical
>meaning."
>
>Here's my criticism:
>
>You treat exploitation as a conceptual derivative of Marx's "surplus-value"
>concept. If that concept's not valid, then exploitation disappears, in your
>view.
>
>In the real world, meanwhile, exploitation is a real fact caused by real
>power relations. Most people have nothing to sell but their labor-power.
>Because of this fact, the minority of wealthy investors is able to pay for
>labor-power (working time) while retaining ownership of labor's products.
>In the real world, this crucial gap is known as the profit margin on
>workplace production, and it is the object of immense managerial attention,
>which is designed to maximize the size of the gap.
>
>You say this reality, the core of exploitation in Marx's terms, doesn't
>exist.
>
>Really?
>
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