Exploitation enters the picture only with the use of the extracted and capitalized surplus. If the surplus is used for essentially private consumption and transaction costs of capitalists - it is exploitation. However, if it is used for general benefit of society as a whole (investment in public goods, etc.) - it is a mechanism of social progress.
Wojtek
^^^^ CB: Yes, the more the socially produced is socially appropriated and less privately appropriated, the more today's society moves into the realm of freedom.
[WS:] Yup. That is the argument for the public ownership of the means of surplus extraction, accumulation and distribution (e.g. financial and non-financial corporations.) And, to be honest, it is a far more realistic prescription for a progressive social change than utopian dreams of an anarchistic and forcibly egalitarian society.
Wojtek