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    The document discusses Marx's theory of exploitation and how it differs from common conceptions. For Marx, exploitation is inherent in the capitalist system as workers are not paid the full value of what they produce. Their labor power is a commodity that is bought and sold, but in action it produces more value than required to produce it, with the surplus going to the capitalist as profit. This creates an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of capital and wage labor.

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    The document discusses Marx's theory of exploitation and how it differs from common conceptions. For Marx, exploitation is inherent in the capitalist system as workers are not paid the full value of what they produce. Their labor power is a commodity that is bought and sold, but in action it produces more value than required to produce it, with the surplus going to the capitalist as profit. This creates an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of capital and wage labor.

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    The document discusses Marx's theory of exploitation and how it differs from common conceptions. For Marx, exploitation is inherent in the capitalist system as workers are not paid the full value of what they produce. Their labor power is a commodity that is bought and sold, but in action it produces more value than required to produce it, with the surplus going to the capitalist as profit. This creates an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of capital and wage labor.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    8 views2 pages

    40

    Uploaded by

    E
    The document discusses Marx's theory of exploitation and how it differs from common conceptions. For Marx, exploitation is inherent in the capitalist system as workers are not paid the full value of what they produce. Their labor power is a commodity that is bought and sold, but in action it produces more value than required to produce it, with the surplus going to the capitalist as profit. This creates an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of capital and wage labor.

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    How Workers are Exploited

    In my last column I showed how for Marx classes and class struggle are created and shaped by exploitation. This
    reverses the way the matter is usually seen – that first classes exist and then, every now and again, one class exploits
    the other. It is also the case that Marx’s concept of exploitation differs fundamentally from what it is the dominant
    conception in our society.

    According to the dominant conception exploitation is either mainly a thing of the past – eg child labour was
    exploited in the Industrial Revolution – or exists today only by way of exception , practiced by rogue employers who
    pay especially low wages. For Marx, however, exploitation is the norm not the exception. Even relatively well paid
    workers employed by so-called ‘good’, even ‘generous’ employers are, nevertheless , exploited. Exploitation is
    inherent in the capitalist wage labour relation.

    ‘How can this be?’ cry the employers and their supporters with one voice. ‘When we employ workers it is a fair
    exchange, wages for work, and a voluntary contract freely entered into by both parties. Indeed they should be
    grateful to us for providing them with work and if they don’t like it, let them go and work somewhere else.’

    In reality this argument is false from beginning to end. Capitalists do not ‘provide work’ or ‘create jobs’. There was
    work before capitalism and there will be work after capitalism. Jobs, i.e. tasks that require performing, arise from
    human needs, and with 6 billion people on the planet, who all need feeding, clothing, housing, educating etc. etc.
    there is absolutely no shortage of work for those 6 billion to do. What the capitalists actually do, through their
    ownership and control of the means of production, is make it impossible for most people to work except by working
    for them. Nor, of course, do they employ people out of charity or civic duty, but in order to make a profit i.e. expand
    the value of their capital.

    But how is this profit made? Where does it come from? Obviously by not paying the workers enough. But how are
    the capitalists able to get away with this daylight robbery, day after day, year after year, decade after decade and
    why does it all look so fair on the surface? It was one of Marx’s greatest intellectual achievements to answer all these
    questions and to demonstrate that beneath the façade of a ‘fair exchange’ lay the systematic extraction of unpaid
    labour from the workers.

    The starting point of Marx’s answer is that under capitalism workers’ ability to work, their labour power, is sold as a
    commodity like every other commodity. The value of a commodity ( value is not the same as price but is the
    underlying point around which actual prices oscillate) is determined, Marx says, by the amount of socially necessary
    labour time required to produce it. The reason a loaf of bread sells for $1, while a shirt sells for $20 and a car for
    $10,000 is, in the final analysis, that it takes 10,000 times as many hours of labour (with current levels of
    technology) to make a car, and 20 times as many to make a shirt, as it does to make a loaf of bread.

    Not surprisingly, bourgeois economists deny this ‘labour theory of value’, but in practice all capitalists know it, if
    only by instinct. Consider a capitalist who consistently sold his products below their value – he would run at a loss
    and soon go out of business. Now consider one who tried to sell his products above their value – sooner or later a
    rival capitalist would be able to undersell him and he would again go out of business. Competition, therefore, forces
    capitalists to sell their products at prices which fluctuate around their value measured in labour time.

    Now apply this to the commodity of labour power and it follows that the value of labour power – its wages- is
    determined by the amount of labour time socially necessary to produce it, i.e. to rear, feed, clothe, train etc. the
    worker so that s/he is able to work. But if labour power is bought and sold like any other commodity, there is one
    vital respect in which it differs from all other commodities: it is creative – in action it produces more value than was
    required to produce it. The difference, this surplus value as Marx called it, is pocketed by the capitalist and is the
    ultimate source of all profit.

    What it means is that the worker who works 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, and is paid $40 dollars a day, $200
    dollars a week, produces goods or services equal to their wages in say, 5 hours a day, 25 hours a week and in reality
    works 3 hours a day, 15 hours a week, unpaid. Unpaid labour – exploitation in its strictest sense – is, therefore, alive
    and well under capitalism today, just as much as it was under slavery or feudalism or in the early Industrial
    Revolution.
    Marx’s theory of surplus value is of immense significance. It exposes the ideological, self – serving nature of the
    capitalist view of wage labour and opens the door to the scientific analysis of the laws of motion of the capitalist
    economy. But it does something else as well: it shows that at the heart of capitalist production lies a direct and
    irreconcilable conflict of interest. The longer the working day the greater the proportion of unpaid labour and of
    surplus value for the capitalist. The shorter the working day the lower the proportion of unpaid labour. The lower
    the level of wages, the higher the level of profit. The higher the wages, the lower the profits. Wages and profits,
    therefore :

    …stand in inverse ratio to each other. Capital’s exchange value, profit, rises in the same proportion as labour’s
    share, wages, falls, and vice versa. Profit rises to the extent that wages fall; it falls to the extent that wages rise… the
    interests of capital and the interests of wage labour are diametrically opposed . (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and
    Capital)

    This is how Marx’s theory of exploitation underpins his theory of class and class struggle.

    John Molyneux

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