[WS:] I guess you can, but to what end? To resuscitate a 19th century sacred script? Exploitation might have been a useful concept in explaining, say, a slave economy but I do not think it very useful in explaining how the modern US economy works. I fully agree with Shane on this.
BTW, treating any "operating surplus" i.e. market sales less intermediate consumption and employee compensation as "exploitation" is sheer nonsense. You have to have surplus aka savings to replace machinery, provide public goods, collective security, contingency management, R&D, etc. One can talk about "exploitation" in any meaningful way only if a large operating surplus obtains and a large share of that surplus is diverted to other than the above listed uses.
But this creates new conceptual problems - e.g. how large these share must be to qualify as "exploitation" and what exactly are these other uses (mind that defense and law enforcement are public goods inasmuch as used to provide collective security.)
I think the concept of exploitation should be put to a well deserved rest - it is not very useful in explaining modern economy and it evokes mainly laughs in most non-Marxist folk, so it does not even cut as a good rallying cry.
Wojtek