Abstract: This short essay was written as a stream of consciousness back while rigorously studying Marx's "Wage Labor and Capital." This segment was part of Robert Tucker's essential guide to historical materialism. I tried to mix in Marx's assessment with more contemporary understandings of world-systems. Enjoy.
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It
is with no small amount of irony that throughout the 19th, 20th,
and early 21st centuries the verbs to exploit and to capitalize
on share virtually the same meaning.
The concept of exploitation extends far back before the 19th
century, but following the publications of Karl Marx in the 2nd and
3rd quarters of the century, the concept took on a more direct and
commonplace meaning. But just what
exactly does exploitation mean? How are people exploited by a system in which they are both born into and
dependent upon? To what extent does exploitation relate to servitude? The most essential answer to these questions
is also the most basic: exploitation occurs specifically in one
realm of social existence, the workplace.
All other forms of exploitation are in many ways extensions of this
specific and rooted antagonism between the employer and the employee.
In
his 1847 lectures on Wage Labor and
Capital, Marx presented the “economic relations” that “constitute[d] the
material foundation of the present class struggles and national struggles.”[1] In order to understand these struggles in
both their economic (class) and national forms, the formal presentation of the
relationship between the antagonistic groups is necessary. For Marx, these relations expose an internal
contradiction between the relationships, which are portrayed as equal due to
the exchange of one service (labor) for a value (payment, money, means of
subsistence; wage). In order to try and
break down the illusion of equality between the exchange, Marx asks the direct
question: “What are wages?” In referring to the position of the worker,
wages and payments are those paid by an employer (capitalist) “for a particular
labour time or for a particular output of labour.”[2] The employer thus buys labor-power, whereas the laborer sells labor power. In this
way, the exchange is laid out as a transaction, and “labour power” becomes itself
a commodity in the same way that any item that is produced and sold is also a
commodity.
Marx’s
next question refers to the purpose of this transaction altogether: Why does the laborer sell his labor? The answer is given as “in order to live.” Straightforward as this may seem to the
average reader, Marx flips the portrayal on its head by addressing the concept
of alienation: “But the exercise of labour power…is the
worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life.” The process of selling one’s labor for a
wage, or “in order to live”, remains fundamentally attached to the
life-activity of the laborer as his “necessary means of subsistence.”[3] The laborer, thus, remains alienated from his
own life-activity because “he does not even reckon labor as part of his
life.” Instead of being seen as a
critical element of one’s life, “life begins [for the laborer] where [his work]
ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed.”[4] While the laborer is at work, he is not living; while he is not at work, he
thus is living. This process of alienation removes the result
of his actions, the commodities he produces, from his life entirely. The products he makes at work are consciously
removed from his life-activity in the same way that his work is consciously a sacrifice of his life.
In
order to relieve the notion that this form of transaction had occurred
throughout history, Marx asserts that labor-power was not historically
commodified. In slavery for example, the
power of the laborer is sold as the form of the slave itself. It is a packaged
deal, so-to-speak, in the same way that an ox is used for services by a
peasant. Serfdom as well is a
partially-commodified form of labor, where the serf “sells only a part of his
labour power” but “does not receive a wage from the owner of the land; rather
the owner of the land receives a tribute from [the serf].”[5] In this way, Marx has attributed commodified
labor power as endemic to a specific set of social relations, those being
between a capitalist and the possessor of labor power in a capitalist society,
the worker.
The
process of commodity production through labor power in capitalism functions
“only by co-operating in a certain way” where men “mutually exchange their
activities.” The relations that people
enter into become the defining elements of their existence, which “are
transformed with the change and development of the material means of
production, the productive forces.” In
this way, Marx is able to categorize historical epochs by social relations and
the material means of production that subsequently arise from these
relations: “Ancient society, feudal
society, [and] bourgeois society.” These
material means of production are “totalities of production relations” which
denote distinguishable and temporal “stages of development in the history of
mankind.”[6] Capital
however, as a social relation and “bourgeois production relation,” breaks from
previous forms by its inclusion of a value for exchange, or “exchange value.”
Exchange
values are a quantifiable “sum of commodities….of social magnitudes.” In this way Capital differentiates itself from all other forms of commodities
due to its dual nature: it is made up of
both utility, in the form of labor,
instruments, and raw materials, as well as exchangeability
in the form of a quantifiable relation to the totality of all other commodities
(money, gold, or the ‘universal exchange equivalent’). For Marx now, the only thing remaining to do
is explain how Capital is produced.
In
the exchange between the worker and the capitalist, “the worker receives means
of subsistence” while “the capitalist receives…the productive activity of the
worker.” This difference is critical
because the worker “gives to the accumulated labour a greater value than it
previously possessed”[7]
because the value of the commodity produced includes the value needed to
provide the worker (it’s use value) and
the stored up-exchange value of the materials on which the laborer works. The worker however, as we’ve seen, is paid a
wage according to his means of subsistence, not
to the value of what he has produced.
Whereas the worker receives a consumable
commodity (the wage can be used, and then destroyed through consumption of
products, food..etc), the capitalist receives an exchangeable commodity, which retains its value through exchange up
until it is eventually consumed/destroyed.
It is in this
process directly that the concept of exploitation
comes to the front. The worker is exploited by the capitalist because of
the deception of equal exchange in the process of capital production. How does this deception take place? Through formal contract. The worker sells his labor according to an agreed upon wage, which takes place
in the workplace. The worker does this
every day of his life up until the point that he ceases to work in the
workplace. The alienation of the
workplace from “life-activity” provides the conscious explanation for
exploitation, while the exchange relations between the capitalist and the
laborer provide the material explanation for exploitation. In this manner, we can see that the workplace contains the totality of
these relations, both in their conscious and material forms.
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