Tim replied very well:
Isn't this the wrong question, though? Maybe in some hypothetical world of free exchange and no force, there would be no exploitative class - but, getting a system of "free exchange" _in the first place_ requires force. One of the main things that Marx is trying to show in volume one of _Capital_ is that free exchange depends on approaching the world and other people in particular ways (seeing diverse things as being capable of exchange as equivalents), and that approaching the world in this way has certain material presuppositions (especially, making all human labor power equivalent and exchangeable).
According to Marx's analysis, free exchange requires that workers be considered as separable from the means of production (otherwise, you couldn't have formally free labor, which underpins free exchange), and, furthermore, this separation has historically been accomplished by force. Hence free exchange has, as a precondition, the existence of an exploitative class.
"The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour-power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." (Marx, _Capital_, ch. 26 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm )
******************
Yes, it seems to me that the very existence of capitalist commodity production with a view to profit assumes alienation: the alienation of the means of production from the producers via private ownership and by extension, the alienation of humans from each other (aka: class society) by virtue of which commodity they own to sell or possibly alienate--capital (not the social relation Capital), land or skills over time. Under feudal arrangements, the alienation of a large portion of the product from the producers--agricultural surplus, turned over to the aristocrats, who are running a kind of protection racket, with the workers in guilds, giving away control over the product of their labour as apprentices to masters. And within slavery, the producers forced to work, getting bed and breakfast maintenance and some clothing (if they're lucky) for the parasitic ruling classes of aristos and other, smaller land owners. Alienation of human beings based on the alienation of what one owns or doesn't own for sale. Commodity production is corrosive to social solidarity of any kind. One only need read a few histories of the Kibbutz movement in Israel, the various utopian socialist experiements in the USA and Britain or even the attempts at creating communism in the former Marxist-Lenninst States to get an idea of just how corrosive the process of commodity production can be for the socialist project.
Seems to me that history has shown that an exploitive class always emerges from forms of minority ownership of commodities produced for sale, no matter the good or bad intentions of those minorities who become rulers.
For the end of pre-history, Mike B)
http://happystiletto.blogspot.com/
Skype mike.ballard66
____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't get soaked. Take a quick peek at the forecast with the Yahoo! Search weather shortcut. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts/#loc_weather