Exploitation

[Brady]

Is it capitalism if there's no exploitation? Example a farmer who works his land completely by himself, or a shopkeeper who runs his shop on his own with no staff. I know we argue for the abolition of private property but is this doing any harm?

I've been reading Proudhon's 'What is Property' recently and he argues that only land which is worked on by a worker himself can be considered his property and only tools made by your own labour can be 'owned'. He is opposed to owning several factories/shops/houses etc because that would mean exploiting others.

Interestingly he is also opposed to collective ownership, believing each worker should own his own land.

Go easy on me, I'm new here. :blush:

[Gold Against The Soul]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27, 2007 08:04 pm
Is it capitalism if there's no exploitation? Example a farmer who works his land completely by himself, or a shopkeeper who runs his shop on his own with no staff. I know we argue for the abolition of private property but is this doing any harm?

I've been reading Proudhon's 'What is Property' recently and he argues that only land which is worked on by a worker himself can be considered his property and only tools made by your own labour can be 'owned'. He is opposed to owning several factories/shops/houses etc because that would mean exploiting others.

Interestingly he is also opposed to collective ownership, believing each worker should own his own land.

Go easy on me, I'm new here. :blush:
An interesting question.

I would say, no, it isn't exploitation (but still capitalism) but people who work their own land, work in their own shop etc are becoming more and more rare. They invariably become workers.

Just to take one example in the UK - A company like Tesco is now becoming so dominate that they're driving more and more small businesses under because they simply can't compete. They actually have 30% of the entire UK grocery market and there doesn't seem to be any moves to stop them expanding.

[abbielives!]

i dissagree, he still has to compete with other farmers and whoever offers the lowest price will be able to sell their stuff. this will be at a lower price than the products actual value.

[Brady]

Originally posted by abbielives!@May 27, 2007 09:38 pm
i dissagree, he still has to compete with other farmers and whoever offers the lowest price will be able to sell their stuff. this will be at a lower price than the products actual value.
So he's exploiting himself if he sells his stuff for less than their actual value?

[Rawthentic]

Is it capitalism if there's no exploitation?
By its very nature, capitalists extract surplus labor from the working class.


So he's exploiting himself if he sells his stuff for less than their actual value?
No, its just that market forces are chaotic, thats capitalism. Only with the democratic control of the workplace can we end this force.

[la-troy]

Here is my utopia.

A simply guy wakes up one morning to a beautiful sunrise. He lives in the country side so theres nothing put hills and plains. he heads to 'work', his work place is a plot of land that he and a couple of other people around him farm. He goes about is task it is hard but it is necessary and real rewarding. at harvest the crop is divided among those who worked the land, probably they send off some to the city for his fellow men who help to produce his pitch fork and clothes.

Now lets talk. the guy is still working on his farm for technically he owns it with his fellow workers it is theirs they produce what they eat. They do not sell the surplus they distribute it to those who need it.

so we will not be troubling him and as Marx said we should side with the peasants they are our brothers our gain is theirs we are on in the same

[Rawthentic]

Marx never said we should side with the peasants, for they are by nature a reactionary class.

Nothing can change that, Maoists sure didnt!

[Rawthentic]

This seems a bit more practical:

You get up in the morning around 9 a.m., have some breakfast (if that's your thing) and turn on the television or computer to find out what's going on today. You scan through the headlines and news reports about this or that. During your morning routine, you happen to notice you are running low on milk, eggs and paper for your printer. So, you make yourself a shopping list, put it in your pocket and head out to your workplace. When you arrive, you take your labor-time card out of your wallet and swipe it through the meter. After that, you meet with your co-workers and spend a few minutes talking about what you're going to produce today. "Well, it's only the second week of the month and we've already produced half of what we need to do this month, so how about we scale back a little?" says the representative from the last shift. "We could do that," says a co-worker from your shift, "or we could finish our run for the month and be off until next month?" It gets debated around for a while, and it is decided that, instead of closing for the month, you'll just slow the pace and shorten working hours for the rest of the month. You're not worried, as long as the work gets done this month, everything is fine.

So, after finishing with your few hours of work, you stop by the supermarket to pick up the items on your list. You come to the register, swipe your labor-time card again, pass the items you picked up across the barcode reader, bag them up and head home. After eating a little lunch and catching up on e-mail and other correspondence, you realize it's almost 3 p.m., and you have to be at the university by 4 p.m. to make your archaeology class. It's about 7 p.m. after class and now you're really happy. You're on your way to the cooperative studio downtown to continue working on that handcrafted end table for your parent's anniversary. On the way, you stop by an Internet café and check on your plans for this winter. "Yes, they're all set," you think to yourself. You had wanted to do a little migratory labor — working up north in the summer months and in warmer, southern climates in the winter — for some time, and now it looks like everything is set. From now on, as long as you want to do it, you'll be spending November through March working with a woodcarvers' cooperative in Florida, and the rest of the year you'll be where you are.

While you're at it, you log in to the labor-time website, just to see where you're at. "Wow! That soon, huh?" You realize that volunteering to take those extra shifts at work shaved close to a year off the time you have until you can retire and not have to worry about working any more. "Four more years to a blue card … cool!" (Note: I'm using "blue card" as a reference to the labor-time card someone would have if they had worked all of their socially-necessary labor time, effectively having paid for all of their needs throughout their lifetime.)

On your way home for the day, you stop by the laundry and pick up the clothes you dropped off the day before, stop and get a bite to eat and pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper. As you scan through the information, you see that the next Assembly meeting is going to be discussing improvements to the transit system in the area where you work, and is asking for representatives from each workplace to come and discuss the best way to handle it. About that time, you get a call on your cell phone. You talk for a couple of minutes, say you'll agree to do it and hang up. "Well, it looks like I have something to do tomorrow."

Seems relatively normal, right? It should. It seems normal because, in our view, virtually everything needed to build a communist society exists today. Technologically, we not only have the industrial capacity to provide for the needs and wants of everyone on this planet (if we re-open idle workplaces and employ people to work there), but, thanks to the development of Information Technology and the global communications system, which has spawned a global supply-chain and accounting system, we also have the means to make sure that goods people need are produced and delivered in a timely and efficient manner.

Moreover, if we were to spread out the workload among all those who live on this planet, the amount of time someone would have to work — daily, weekly, yearly, lifetime — in order to "pay" for all their needs over the span of their lives would be drastically reduced. Through working together and planning things out, production itself becomes little more than an exercise in bookkeeping: filling the orders as they come in, restocking when and where necessary, keeping track of what is consumed. We can do all of this now, and more. With the advances in technology, customization is becoming more commonplace and a part of the mass economy, which means that it is even more possible to provide according to each person's individual needs and wants.

A communist system would eliminate the bulk of the waste that goes into this capitalist society — from over-bloated military budgets and CEO "compensation" to layers and layers of overpaid officials and bureaucrats that we find in all the dark corners of the government and economy. Those resources can be put to better use in areas like healthcare, education, housing and community rehabilitation, municipal planning, parks creation, etc. In turn, this reorganization of resources adds to the alleviating of the burden on the individual person, freeing them up to pursue interests they otherwise would not have thought they could.

The key to a communist society working, however, is not in the technology or industrial capacity, but in the human beings that live in it. The achievement and continued success of a communist society depends on human beings that are both critically-thinking and self-acting. That is a matter of education, which can begin now.

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27, 2007 09:58 pm

So he's exploiting himself if he sells his stuff for less than their actual value?

no, it leaves the producer open to exploitation from the buyer.
so you have control over the production aspect of it but not the distribution.
michael albert really influenced me put is this way " markets destroy solidarity"

i would suggest readng this:
Looking Forward:
http://www.zmag.org/books/lf.htm

[Vargha Poralli]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 28, 2007 06:32 am
Marx never said we should side with the peasants, for they are by nature a reactionary class.

Nothing can change that, Maoists sure didnt!
Still bigoted against Peasants it seems.

Grow up and learn some thing. Your hatred of Maoism and Maoists making you stupid day by day.

The usual bullshit that Peasants are reactionary is refuted in this post. (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=53689&view=findpost&p=1292132301) and also in the post about Kautsky in History forums.

BTW Hastalavictoria/Voz de la Gente Trabajadora better learn what Communism really is. Marx is not the holy father and communism is not a religion.

[BobKKKindle$]

I agree with g.ram. The economic and social relationships that exist between the peasantry and those that assert ownership of and sell the goods that they produce (possibly a feudal lord) is similar and even possible identical to the relations which exist between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and this would suggest that peasants are important allies in the revolutionary struggle, especially in developing countries where the proletariat is not sufficiently powerful to take power independently. It should be noted that during the Spanish Civil war some of the most revolutionary and progressive advances were made in rural communities, often independent of the intervention of political groups such as Anarchists.

In relation to the original question - it is possible for exploitation not to occur within Capitalism. The main situation in which this would occur is in developed countries as part of Imperialism - Capitalists do (or rather may) pay their workers above the value of their labour in these countries because they generate surplus value through production in the developing world.

[la-troy]

Marx and Engels, who very soberly regarded the role of the peasantry in the realization of a social revolution never underestimated its role as a revolutionary factor in the struggle against the large landowners and the feudal masters. They understood very well that the more the peasantry falls under the leadership of revolutionary classes which unite it, the more capable it is of general political actions. Led by the revolutionary proletariat, supporting its struggle against capitalism in the city and the village, the peasantry appeared to be a very important ally. This is why Marx and Engels, during the revolution of 1848-49, mercilessly exposed the cowardly conduct of the German bourgeoisie, which, currying favour with the Junkers and afraid of the proletariat, had refused to defend the interests of the peasantry.

I refute you

you have a very nice utopia by the way

[abbielives!]

Originally posted by [email protected] 28, 2007 08:49 am
It should be noted that during the Spanish Civil war some of the most revolutionary and progressive advances were made in rural communities, often independent of the intervention of political groups such as Anarchists.



further proof that a vanguard party is unessisary.
leninism=idealist conception of history

[Rawthentic]

BTW Hastalavictoria/Voz de la Gente Trabajadora better learn what Communism really is. Marx is not the holy father and communism is not a religion.
Oh yeah, I didnt know that it was a stateless, classless society. Thanks.


While agree that peasants, or landless peasants, must unite with the proletariat, the proletariat is the class that is capable of creating communism.

[Vargha Poralli]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 29, 2007 04:09 am

BTW Hastalavictoria/Voz de la Gente Trabajadora better learn what Communism really is. Marx is not the holy father and communism is not a religion.
Oh yeah, I didnt know that it was a stateless, classless society. Thanks.

Don't try to be ultra smart. You quoted Marx like Quoting bible which I pointed out.



While agree that peasants, or landless peasants, must unite with the proletariat, the proletariat is the class that is capable of creating communism.

See you are repeating it. At least did you clicked the link I gave you ?

We need to ally with peasants if at all we want to eat after revolution.And peasants are also exploited by Capitalism.




(bobkindles @ May 28, 2007 08:49 am)
It should be noted that during the Spanish Civil war some of the most revolutionary and progressive advances were made in rural communities, often independent of the intervention of political groups such as Anarchists.



further proof that a vanguard party is unessisary.
leninism=idealist conception of history

Yeah and those things were really undermined by Republicans who had been supported by Anarchists and Stalinists.

Which further proves Anarchism=Useless thing of History.

[Janus]

Originally posted by Brady
So he's exploiting himself if he sells his stuff for less than their actual value?
No, you can't exploit your own labor. His labor and produce are devalued due to market forces.


Example a farmer who works his land completely by himself, or a shopkeeper who runs his shop on his own with no staff. I know we argue for the abolition of private property but is this doing any harm?
Throw in the accruement of capital and the free market and it's quickly degenerates back into an exploitative system.

[drain.you]

Just reading this got me inspired.
Theres factories/farm/etc. When you need something, you go to the communal factory and make it. You live near a certain factory where your skills are best suited. You have to supervise people that come into your designated factory for say, 5hours a day, just sit around, help anyone that needs help. If you are designated to a workshop that makes guitars, someone will come in with a vague idea of what they're doing, read some basic instructions and get to work, you (as a skillful guitar maker) must assist anyone who is having difficulties and put your skills to use.
Now say, you want a new desk. You go to the local lumberjack place and meet up with some other workers who want to make some wooden furniture and together you cut down a tree or two. And you help each other cut the wood and make your furniture, again your work is watched over by the people who are skilled at performing this work so you dont injure yourself or ruin your creation.

Just an idea.
If you had a workshop that could be used by thirty people at a time for example. You would have at least 2:10 ratio of supervisors (as such). That would mean 6 supervisors at all times. If the workshop is open from 10am-10pm, thats 12hours, say 4hour shifts? That needs 18people to supervise per day. So those 18people are responsible for keeping the workshop running.
Perhaps things such as producing food and drink and keeping the city clean are things that people have to put certain amount of hours work in everyday, complusory. And as a result meals are available to everyone a certain amount of times a day or something.

I dunno. Jus thinking.

[apathy maybe]

AH! Petit-bourgeois! Help! Oh shit they are exploiting themselves, we must stop them!

There are two sorts of petit-bourgeois, those who employ others (and thus most probably exploit them) and those who don't. Those who don't, well there is no worries, the only thing they are doing is not being a proletariat (which of course makes them automatically the enemy to some people...).


Originally posted by Janus

Example a farmer who works his land completely by himself, or a shopkeeper who runs his shop on his own with no staff. I know we argue for the abolition of private property but is this doing any harm?
Throw in the accruement of capital and the free market and it's quickly degenerates back into an exploitative system.Certainly, however, if you prevent the accumulation of capital (as put forward by a some anarchists, and I believe Adam Smith, yet I continue not to be able to find a reference for that claim...), then you also prevent capitalism from being recreated.

How would you do this? The same way that a communist system would prevent the accumulation of capital.

[yns_mr]

Individual workers can't compete with big companies. So this is impossible i think...

[Tiparith]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30, 2007 02:34 pm
Individual workers can't compete with big companies. So this is impossible i think...
Big business can't exist without individual workers.

[BobKKKindle$]

Those who don't, well there is no worries, the only thing they are doing is not being a proletariat (which of course makes them automatically the enemy to some people...).

How them do small business owners expand their enterprises over time or maintain financial solvency? Profit is necessary to expand production and, in most cases, to re-pay the loans that may have been used to start the enterprise, yet if profit can only be generated through the exploitation of labour, it appears we have encountered a difficult economic problem.

Tell me what you think of this. It may be possible that 'profit' in this case is not surplus value as such. By this I mean that profit - taken to mean simply the difference between total cost and total revenue - arises not from employment of labour (given that no workers are employed -if this were the case it would be considered surplus value) but instead from the economic transaction with the purchaser of the finished commodity. To illustrate what I mean - In chapter 19 of Anti-Duhring, Fred wrote :

"It cannot come either from the buyer buying the commodities under their value, or from the seller selling them above their value.. it cannot from cheating, for though cheating can enrich one person at the expense of another, it cannot increase the total sum possessed by both, and therefore cannot augment the sum of the values in circulation"

In this context Fred is refferring to 'normal' Capitalist production and suggests that this 'method' - 'cheating' selling cannot exist in developed capitalist industry

However, is it not possible that this could apply to the petty-bourgeois capitalist enterprise - that profit arises from, as he described it 'cheating' the purchaser - or alternatively, 'cheating' the supplier of non-labour factor inputs? It may even be possible for surplus value and this 'cheating' to exist together especially in the monopoly stage of Capitalism where firms are not subject to compeition to keep their prices linked to surplus value (not that it is within my abilities to try the transformation problem!)

It is possible that petty-bourgeois entrepeneurs generate profit in this manner until their enterprises have reached a size and level of development that allows for or necessitates the employment of workers after which the forces of production develop through surplus value-capital accumulation.

[syndicat]

It is actually much more likely that the self-employed will be ripped off by the big capitalist firms. Consider the complaints from small gas station owners about how the practices of the big oil companies don't allow them to make an adequate living. Or the way that companies create arbitrary categories of "self-employed" so as to avoid legal rights of unionization, as among owner-operator truckers in the USA, or "independent" cab drivers who rent their cars from big leasing operations. Prices in a market will be shaped by the relative bargaining power of seller and buyer. The greater bargaining power of the big corporations will enable them to push down the living of the small contractors. When a huge mass of small farmers in the "third world" producing basic commodities for the world market face big multinational combines, they are at a disadvantage in terms of what they will receive.

[RedArmyFaction]

i see exploitation happening all the time where i work. bourgorsie care nothing for us

[More Fire for the People]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 27, 2007 07:02 pm
Marx never said we should side with the peasants, for they are by nature a reactionary class.

Nothing can change that, Maoists sure didnt!
I disagree comrade. The peasantry is not a reactionary class — the Morelos Commune, '¡Tierra y Libertad!', and the Zapatistas would prove otherwise. However, the peasant is a class whose existence is bound up in the access of cultivatable land. There are two tendencies within the peasantry — a tendency towards communal ownership and a tendency towards private ownership — and the higher the contact of the peasantry with wage-labor and wage-laborers the higher the prevalence of the former tendency. If the proletariat establishes strong and good contacts with the peasantry it count them in favor of communal ownership and revolution but if it accepts the peasantry as a revolutionary class in and of itself then it makes a great mistake that inevitably leads to counter-revolution (http://marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch02.htm).

This policy is not always applicable in such cases as the United States and Western Europe. In Western Europe through the various bourgeois revolutions the peasantry had ceased to exist as an independent class and turned into a part of the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois classes. In the United States the Dust Bowl led to the rapid proletarianization of most peasants [either by the westward movement of the Okies or the Northward movement of the sharecroppers ] and petty-bourgeoisification of the remainder [ primarily in places were ranching outweighed crop-growing or in places that were neither significantly impacted by sharecropping nor Dust Bowl destruction ].

[RedKnight]

The petit-bourgeois tradesmyn and shopkeepers gradualy sink into the proletariat, because of there diminuative capital.

[Tatarin]

I'd say that society is dependant on each other. What if the farmer's child wants to be a doctor? Or a teacher? What if the farmer, or a member of his family, requires medical care?

Also, since the farmer still lives in a capitalist system, what is there to stop other farmers (who somehow earn more money than him) decides to buy his farm? In any way, capitalism lingers, and most probably will develop into the huge corporate owned chains it is today.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27, 2007 08:04 pm
Is it capitalism if there's no exploitation? Example a farmer who works his land completely by himself, or a shopkeeper who runs his shop on his own with no staff. I know we argue for the abolition of private property but is this doing any harm?
"Capitalism", as a word, does not describe productive units taken aside from society. "Capitalism" is the name for a society, as a whole, which is based on exploitation. Your farmer, himself, is not a capitalist - but if he lives in a capitalist society, he is probably being exploited. Isn't there a bank that lends him money? Isn't there a corporation that sells him pesticides, inseticides, soil correctives? Isn't there a corporation that sells him seeds and biotechnology in general? All those - capitalist - companies dig deep into your farmer's excedent, in a relation that can only be called "exploitation".


I've been reading Proudhon's 'What is Property' recently and he argues that only land which is worked on by a worker himself can be considered his property and only tools made by your own labour can be 'owned'. He is opposed to owning several factories/shops/houses etc because that would mean exploiting others.

Interestingly he is also opposed to collective ownership, believing each worker should own his own land.

Proudhon was a petty-bourgeois reactionary; he dreamed of a world in which labour division would be abolished, and workers/proprietaries would again gain control of the whole process of production. This impossible given the current technological level.


Go easy on me, I'm new here. :blush:

Welcome!

Luís Henrique

[PRC-UTE]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 28, 2007 01:02 am
Marx never said we should side with the peasants, for they are by nature a reactionary class.

Nothing can change that, Maoists sure didnt!
I think the problem with this approach is that you're not considering how the peasants as a class have a lot of stratification. There are rich peasants and poor peasants, peasants who exploit landless peasant labourers and peasants who scratch out a living on a small patch of land.

Anyway, if we applied your doctrine, or rather carried it out to its logical conclusion, all the revolutions that have occured would've been impossible...

____


Re the original topic, I'm glad you thought of bringing this up, comrade. This is an issue I've often speculated about myself and reading this thread I learned a fair bit.

[Thirsty Crow]

I've decided to revive this topic.
The reason for doing so is the following: hod do you exactly define exploitation?

There is one argument related to exploitation in the contemporary Western world in favour of the existing mode of production and social relations which accompany it, and one can hear it all to often. This one prompted me to ask this question regarding the concrete definition of exploitation.
On one hand, some people would claim that revolutionary leftists are stuck in the 19th century - that real, brutal exploitation doesn't exist nowadays, that only glitches and individual aberrations within the system which offers almost everyone willing to work a good life by means of decently paid labour.
I'm really interested in hard facts and studies which deal with the real existing conditions of work and labour of workers - blue collar, white collar any-color-collar - in the West. I'd be grateful if someone could post a link or recommend a book.

[Common_Means]

I wish people would stop examining the concept of exploitation from a normative perspective (not that everyone here does). Exploitation, or the employee/employer relationship is not inherently negative. When it becomes negative is when the worker's wage, the amount required to reproduce themselves, reaches the point when they can no longer do just that - reproduce themselves.

[CartCollector]

"Exploitation" in the Marxist sense means that the bourgeoisie, when it sells proletarian produced goods, takes surplus value off of the goods, paying the proletariat less than the value of the labor they put into the good while taking the remainder for themselves. It doesn't necessarily mean that a worker is being forced to work in extremely dangerous conditions for extremely little pay (although that does happen, especially in third world countries)- it means that the worker isn't paid what s/he deserves, which allows capitalists to grow their capital without doing any work, and once they have more capital to grow that, on and on and on, ad infinitum, in a process called "primitive accumulation." And as this capital grows, so does the competition between capitalists, which leads to the workers being paid less and working in cheaper, worse conditions just so the capitalists can stay in business. This is one of the reasons people support Marx's ideas- they don't just say that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and leave it at that, they give an empirically backed reason why.

Back to the original point: All this means that workers are exploited by the mere act of working, even if they are currently paid well. To use an analogy, a workplace that pays average or less wages is like a dictatorship, and a workplace that pays above average wages is like a benevolent dictatorship. Sure the benevolent dictatorship is preferable, but it's still a dictatorship. Marxists don't just want to make nicer dictatorships, they want to get rid of dictatorships entirely and replace them with democracies.

[RotStern]

Is it capitalism if there's no exploitation? Example a farmer who works his land completely by himself, or a shopkeeper who runs his shop on his own with no staff. I know we argue for the abolition of private property but is this doing any harm?

I've been reading Proudhon's 'What is Property' recently and he argues that only land which is worked on by a worker himself can be considered his property and only tools made by your own labour can be 'owned'. He is opposed to owning several factories/shops/houses etc because that would mean exploiting others.

Interestingly he is also opposed to collective ownership, believing each worker should own his own land.

Go easy on me, I'm new here. :blush:

I believe this is a hypothetical question, but so long as there is capital there is exploitation.

[Common_Means]

"Exploitation" in the Marxist sense means that the bourgeoisie, when it sells proletarian produced goods, takes surplus value off of the goods, paying the proletariat less than the value of the labor they put into the good while taking the remainder for themselves. It doesn't necessarily mean that a worker is being forced to work in extremely dangerous conditions for extremely little pay (although that does happen, especially in third world countries)- it means that the worker isn't paid what s/he deserves, which allows capitalists to grow their capital without doing any work, and once they have more capital to grow that, on and on and on, ad infinitum, in a process called "primitive accumulation." And as this capital grows, so does the competition between capitalists, which leads to the workers being paid less and working in cheaper, worse conditions just so the capitalists can stay in business. This is one of the reasons people support Marx's ideas- they don't just say that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and leave it at that, they give an empirically backed reason why.

Back to the original point: All this means that workers are exploited by the mere act of working, even if they are currently paid well. To use an analogy, a workplace that pays average or less wages is like a dictatorship, and a workplace that pays above average wages is like a benevolent dictatorship. Sure the benevolent dictatorship is preferable, but it's still a dictatorship. Marxists don't just want to make nicer dictatorships, they want to get rid of dictatorships entirely and replace them with democracies.

Good post, but again, as you implied, a worker being exploited is not a means to itself in regards to revolutionary activity. To argue such would be to state that things should be this way or that way - a normative argument, or a subjective argument - significantly dampering Marx's work.

I'm not trying to beat a dead-horse here, but this point has to be stressed.

If the world worked as Adam Smith envisioned it, where all means would eventually be distriputed evenly between capitalist, labourer and land-owner, then it would be difficult to argue against the exploitation of the worker. After-all, the capitalist - the catylsist in the circuit - needs to survive as well.

However, it is because of the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production (which you touched on) that value can never even out. As the capitalist grows bigger, the proletariat (in terms of value) becomes lesser.

Basically, when presenting a Marxian argument to neo-liberal or what-have-you, exploitation must be placed in its proper context. Without doing so, you'll come off as a utopian schmuck that has done little to offer insight.

[bailey_187]

Basically, when presenting a Marxian argument to neo-liberal or what-have-you, exploitation must be placed in its proper context. Without doing so, you'll come off as a utopian schmuck that has done little to offer insight.

YESSS

Too many people rely on moral arguments against Capitalism.

[Thirsty Crow]

I agree. That's why I asked the question regarding the strict contextual definition of exploitation, and that's why I'd very much like to see a comprehensive empirical study which would show certain groups of people (basically, the privilegded and the fanatically oppossed to anything resembling communism) how other people live and work, and most importantly, the reasons behind the phenomena.

[syndicat]

Too many people rely on moral arguments against Capitalism

"Exploitation" is a moral concept. It's the distributive form of injustice. It implies that a dominating group, people with power over others, have used this to obtain benefits to which they are not entitled.

When workers fight against their exploitation and mistreatment, it is precisely their sense of justice that often motivates the fight.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Marx never said we should side with the peasants, for they are by nature a reactionary class.

Nothing can change that, Maoists sure didnt!

Please help me understand how peasants are reactionary...because as a Marxist, & someone who'e studied marxism for quite a while now, the idea of peasantry being a reactionary class, compared to the exploited working class, is reactionary in its own sense to me. I'm not even a Maoist & I understand the need for the peasants to be on the side against the bourgeois.

[anticap]

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[anticap]

"Exploitation" is a moral concept. It's the distributive form of injustice. It implies that a dominating group, people with power over others, have used this to obtain benefits to which they are not entitled.

When workers fight against their exploitation and mistreatment, it is precisely their sense of justice that often motivates the fight.

Correct. Though I'm a materialist, it is a simple fact that material conditions cannot account for why I care in the first place. The answer is, moral outrage at injustice. It appears sometimes that this is difficult for some comrades to accept, as though there ought to be something more concrete than squishy moralism behind all this.

Of course, "injustice" is something everyone has to define for themselves -- it isn't written in the stars. That's where propaganda comes in. Our enemies are hard at work defining "injustice" as the violation of private-property. Part of our job is to convince people that private-property is the injustice.

(The stickler would argue that our moral outrage is materially caused, and of course that's true, given that it doesn't spring from thin air, but from chemical reactions, yadda yadda -- I'm no biologist --; but still we're left with the subjective evaluation of what constitutes injustice.)

[syndicat]

Of course, "injustice" is something everyone has to define for themselves -- it isn't written in the stars. That's where propaganda comes in. Our enemies are hard at work defining "injustice" as the violation of private-property. Part of our job is to convince people that private-property is the injustice.


Yes. Class domination is a very material condition. We can explain this...being forced to work for employers, why under capitalism they are driven to intensify work pace, get more out of us, dump costs onto us such as workplace injuries and illnesses, and so on. They can make a profit only because of our vulnerability without the jobs they control, which gives them the power to impose on us the wage agreement. Domination and exploitation are basic forms of injustice. No matter what elaborate philosophical theory the academics spin, this is the reality.

[CartCollector]

Please help me understand how peasants are reactionary...because as a Marxist, & someone who'e studied marxism for quite a while now, the idea of peasantry being a reactionary class, compared to the exploited working class, is reactionary in its own sense to me. I'm not even a Maoist & I understand the need for the peasants to be on the side against the bourgeois.
Peasantry own land- they aren't alienated from the means of production. This has interesting effects on their political desires. A good example was provided by Fox News a couple of months ago. Some Democrats wanted to raise the estate tax, so Fox complained about it. How did they try to get their viewers to oppose the estate tax? Simple! They pointed out that it would hurt the poor little family farmer. This proves that the peasantry and the proletariat have separate desires, based on (what else?) relations to the means of production.

[syndicat]

This is a bad argument. Growers in the USA aren't peasants. They're capitaliists. The typical farm, even if it is owned outright by descendants of old line family farmers, is a large operation, often with multiple sites and multiple crops. They also employ and superexploit farm workers.

Peasantries exist in third world countries. They are often involved in struggles against the free trade regime that is driving them off the land, such as NAFTA which drove 2 million farmers off the land in Mexico.

There is also an international peasant movement, Via Campesina, who are involved around the world in many major struggles against the dominant system. An example would be the landless workers movement in Brazil, which has organized a million people to seize and farm land.