Marx and exploitation

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 105-120

  Wolff, Jonathan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Coercion; Definition; Exploitation; Exploitation of circumstances; Marx; Vulnerability

Indexed keywords

EID: 12844253827     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009811416665     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Much of this paper derives from my 1985 University of London MPhil thesis: Exploitation. I should repeat here the thanks given there to G.A. Cohen, W.D. Hart and Chris Hull. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the University of Virginia and I would like to thank the participants on that occasion for valuable discussion, and especially Talbot Brewer for his detailed and extremely helpful written and oral commentary.
2. Some of the best recent work has been collected in Kai Nielsen and Robert Ware (ed.), Exploitation (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997)
3. and in Andrew Reeve (ed.), Modern Theories of Exploitation (London: Sage, 1987).
4. In addition to the papers collected in these volumes, Richard Arneson, "What's Wrong with Exploitation?" Ethics 91 (1981), pp. 207-227
5. Allen Buchanan, "Exploitation, Alienation and Injustice," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 9 (1979), pp. 121-139 have helped shape my thought on this topic.
6. John Roemer, "Should Marxists Be Interested in Exploitation?" in Nielsen and Ware (ed.), Exploitation, p. 127.
7. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974) pp. 253-262.
8. G.A. Cohen argues that the relation between the labour theory of value and the concept of exploitation is one of "mutual irrelevance," G.A. Cohen, "The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept ofExploitation," in Nielsen and Ware (ed.) Exploitation, p.94.
9. Roemer, "Should Marxists Be Interested in Exploitation?," p. 122.
10. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 53-58.
11. Indeed I shall suggest later that Roemer himself goes wrong in failing to understand the nature of the definition he offers.
12. Note that if we accept this example then exploitation is not always a matter of goods flowing from one person to another. For in this case one person's harm - following "rigid rules" - does not directly correspond to another's benefit, for the exploiter's economic gain comes from an outside source.
13. I thank Talbot Brewer for insisting on the importance of this.
14. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, in The Moral Law,ed. H.J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), pp. 90-91.
15. As an account of the moral community all of these suggestions have well-known disadvantages. Not one of them can account for the common assumptions that all human beings have equal moral standing; the higher animals rather less; but mammals more than fish, and fish more than plants, which may have none. However this difficulty is not specific to the analysis of exploitation and so a failure to solve it here is not especially embarrassing, and indeed the flaw may be in common sense morality.
16. David Miller, "Exploitation in the Market," in Reeve (ed.), Modern Theories of Exploitation, pp. 149-165.
17. Jonathan Wolff, "The Ethics of Competition" in A. Qureshi, G. Parry, and H. Steiner (eds.), The Legal and Moral Aspects of International Trade, Freedom and Trade, Volume III (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 82-96.
18. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 353-358 and elsewhere.
19. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), p. 111.
20. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts," in L. Colletti (ed.), Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975), pp. 279-400.
21. See also Jonathan Wolff, "Playthings of Alien Forces," Cogito 6 (1992), pp. 35-41.
22. Aesop's Fables (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1994), p. 12.
23. In combination these limitations mean that one has to be very careful in proposing counter-examples to the definition. It may be possible to come up with examples where the "reference-fixing" feature (unequal exchange) becomes detached from the other features which normally accompany it (vulnerability, degradation, etc). If so, no particular conclusions can be drawn. Allen Wood makes related points in explaining why Roemer's attempted counter-examples to the Marxian definition
24. [in Allen Wood, "Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation?" "Exploitation," in Nielsen and Ware (eds.), Exploitation, fn. 15, p. 23] are "beside the point.
25. Talbot Brewer points out a methodological difficulty with the approach adopted here: essentially an ordinary language analysis of the English term "exploitation" is used to attempt to illuminate Marx's use of German term "ausbeutung" which does not translate perfectly into English. Some uses of the term "exploitation" - those concerning noncoercive advantage taking - would normally be translated by "ausnutzung." Thus my attempt to provide a more general understanding of exploitation may, from the point of view of the German language, simply run together two different concepts. To complicate matters further, when Marx uses the notion of exploitation in the German Ideology he uses neither German term but the French expression "exploitation de l'homme par l'homme" (p. 110) which seems a fairly direct equivalent of the English. In the end, though, I make no claims about what was going through Marx's head. Rather I want to provide a way of sympathetically elaborating his insight, while explaining the assumptions upon which it is best read as depending. I do not think that these (real) methodological worries about translation affect this main project.