Exploitation and Economic Justice in the Liberal Capitalist State

Abstract

Thanks also to Dominic Byatt, an editor's editor, who guided the manuscript deftly through the review and publication process, and to three anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press, each of whom made many helpful comments and suggestions. As a result of their assistance, the book you have before you is much better than the manuscript that they were sent.My final thanks go to my wife Della Davidson, whose loving support and encouragement I was lucky enough to enjoy for twenty-seven years. Her faith in me and her enthusiasm for my work never faded, even when she was forced to embark on a merciless battle with breast cancer during the last year of the book's creation. I could not have written this book without her. I miss her very, very much.

The market, competition, and structural exploitation

“…Consider the case of cheaply offering a base good while reaping profits from costly add‐ons; the typical example being affordable printers combined with expensive ink cartridges (Gabaix & Laibson, ). Or, finally, taking advantage of negative externalities is also a possible strategy: producing a good may create toxic waste that is expensive to dispose of properly, so imposing these costs on unrelated third parties, who are often in a vulnerable position due to their geographical or temporal dispersion, is another way of benefitting unfairly (Reiff, , p. 117).…”

“…This is because the perfectly competitive market would not warrant fairness of transactions, as it would be indifferent to more fundamental principles of justice, such as need (Sample, , pp. 73–84), desert (Hahnel, ), or cost of production (Reiff, , pp. 100–109) .…”

The Theory of Exploitation as the Unequal Exchange of Labour

“…According to Claim 1, however, the agents' overall exploitation status should also be identified taking into account all of their economic activities. 15 In principle, Claim 1 may apply to any definitions of exploitation, including those that focus on fair pricing (such as Joan Robinson's [30] classic approach and, more recently, Reiff [28]) or property relations (e.g. Roemer [32], chapter 7).…”

“…be on the budget line, nor does it constrain the way in which they should be chosen. By focusing on potential, rather than actual or realised income, Claim 6 allows for many different views concerning the 28 Because we are not assuming economic activities to be coordinated by competitive markets, (p, w, r) could be either actual or hypothetical (shadow) prices and we could further generalise the analysis by allowing for differential wage rates, profit rates and even prices of commodities. Yet this would significantly increase notational intensity without adding further theoretical insights.…”

Le travail à l’ère des « marchés où le gagnant rafle la mise1 »

“…On peut penser que non, puisque dans une loterie, 17. Sur cette question, voir : Pizzigati (1992 ;2004) ; Ramsay (2005) ; Blader et Castleton (2010) ; Kempf (2010) ; Giraud et Renouard (2012) ; Reiff (2013) ;et Cottey (2014).…”