--- On Thu, 6/18/09, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> important to remember that "exploitation" in the Marxian
> sense is quite
> compatible with the life style Joanna describes. It is a
> technical term,
> not a description of standard of living: workers are
> exploited, Marx
> does say, whether their pay be high or low. I would guess
[WS:] True. They are exploited because they do not receive the full value they produce - some of it skimmed off by capitalists for their own profit.
But that raises the questions whether _any_ deductions from the value produces by direct producers qualify as 'exploitation'? Marx addresses that in his Critique of the Gotha Programme http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
and concludes that in a socialist society it would not be exploitation because in the end labor would receive the full value it produced. But that solution strikes me as rather trivial - it may be true at the aggregate level i.e. labor in general getting back from society what it produced in the long term.
However, an individual worker of group of workers received less than they produce because the surplus was invested in the productive potential of society as a whole, and the benefit of that investment will be realized by future generations of workers 9as it was the case of EE). So on the macro long-term level, labor is not exploited but on the micro level it is. Or what?
Frankly, I do not think that concept of exploitation is very useful in a complex economy other than a metaphor denoting standards of living.
Wojtek