--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> John B:
>
> 2. According to Marx, exploitation occurs when the
> surplus generated by
> labor is not returned to the laborer but retained by
> someone else. So it
> does not matter whether that surplus is retained by
> a capitalist or
> "society" or rather its representative - in each
> case it is 'exploitation.'
> It can be of course argued that 'society' returns
> the surplus back in the
> form of providing public good, but so does the
> capitalist i.e. by funding
> extravagant consumption, the arts, or by plain
> reinvestment.
>
Your account of Marxisn exploutation is erroneous. Exploitation for Marx is not mere surplus transfer from producer to nonproducer, It is _wrongful_ surplus transfer. The wrongfulness may be, as some people believe, theft, although I do not think Marx thinks so. It might be injustice, which is more plausible, but stll in my view nor Marx. I think Marx's view is that the wrongfulness is deprivation of freedom -- coerion, dominatio9n, and the like.
No matter. The point is that exploitation is surpplus transfer + wrong. This is made very clear in lots of ways. At the very minumum Marx Amkes it clear that he does bot consoder proving for children, the sick, the aged, the severely disabled, "those unable to work," to be exploitation. Thus in a good society, it's not exploitauion when society keeps what the worker produced and gives it to another in the form of public goods,
More generally, when he talks about exploition, he never says just, the exploiter ends up with stuff others produced. That could be just fine. He talks about slavery, aabout how the factory is is a prison, sometimes about how the relation is one of robbery. This is realy important, otherwise you will miss the guts of MArx's notion of exploitation -- any any intelligent notion of exploitaion.
The class dimension is key here. Exploitation occurs, for Marx, because one class has the power and the resources to take what it wants by law or might. You make it seem as if class doesn't matter in exploitation, that it is mere transfer of surplus.
You may say that a socialist state can function as a class does and exploit workers. You would be right -- in the FSU it did. But in a democratic socialist society, at the first stage of communism, the choices about spending are genuinely collective and democratic, and so not exploitative.
jks
jks
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