And because man is a human being he doesn't care for a boot in the face. He wants no slaves below him and no masters above him.Bertolt Brecht "Song of the United Front" This article attempts to revive a research program by criticizing it. Its object of criticism is the powerful research agenda of analytical Marxism. I shall attempt this revival by criticizing the views of two of the most influential members of that research program, G. A. Cohen and John Roemer. I will argue that they are mistaken in their identification of exploitation with exchange against the background of injustice in the distribution of assets. Exploitation should be conceived, instead, as a form of domination, that is, domination for self-enrichment. The latter conception captures intuitions surplus to the traditional analytical Marxist view, provides a richer and more plausible understanding of socialist goals, is more amenable to integration into a rigorous Marxist social science, and brings Marxism closer to radical democracy. If I am right, then the idea of exploitation will have received a new lease on life, and the Marxist armory will have been enriched by renewed focus on vulnerability and domination.The article is structured as follows. Section I offers a general definition of exploitation as the self-enriching instrumentalization of Thanks to Dan Halliday, Faik Kurtulmus, Roberto Veneziani, and two anonymous referees for excellent criticisms of earlier drafts of this article; John Filling and Allen Wood for helpful discussion; and audiences at Bristol, Cambridge, Leuven, Manchester, and the Nordic Network for Political Ethics Conference at Vejle for comments and suggestions.
This paper reviews the recent literature on exploitation. It distinguishes between three main species of exploitation theory: (a) teleology-based (including harm and mutual benefit) accounts, (b) respect-based (including mere means, force, rights, and fairness) accounts, and (c) freedom-based (including vulnerability and domination) accounts. It then addresses the implications of each.
William Clare Roberts' new book undertakes to extract the critical kernel out of Marx's critique of political economy. Marx's Inferno is absorbing, wide-ranging, and original. Roberts enlists Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, to construct a structural analogy with the argument of Volume 1 of Capital. Roberts argues convincingly that Volume 1 (hereafter: Capital) is a self-contained work in political theory that mounts a freedom-based critique of capitalism. This critique, much like Dante's journey towards absolution, requires descent into a 'social Hell', the infernal depths of the capitalist mode of production. The book's overarching argument is that Capital must be understood as the 'self-consciousness of novel institutions of domination' and that 'therefore, if the laboring classes want to free themselves from this domination, they must get to the bottom of political economy itself, and destroy the social basis of its existence as a scientific discourse' (p. 17). In what follows, I take issue with three main themes of the book. The first theme deals with the 'impersonal' nature of domination embodied in the capital relation, the second with the putative connection between domination and republicanism, and the third with the political ramifications of this connection.
In a recent paper in this journal, Richard Arneson criticizes the domination account of exploitation and attributes it to me and Allen Wood. In this paper, I defend the domination account against Arneson's criticisms. I begin by showing that the domination view is distinct from the vulnerability-based view defended by Wood. I also show that Alan Wertheimer's influential account of exploitation is congenial to the domination view. I then argue that Arneson's own fairness-based view of exploitation generates false negatives and trivializes the concept of exploitation, rendering it entirely parasitic on the notion of unfairness.
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