How Exploiters Dominate
Forthcoming, Review of Social Economy
33 Pages Posted: 3 Jun 2019
Date Written: June 2019
Abstract
This paper argues that exploitation is a form of domination, domination for self-enrichment. In a slogan, exploitation is a dividend of servitude – a benefit the powerful extract by converting the vulnerable into their servants. The paper argues that what makes exploitation wrong is that it constitutes domination-induced unilateral service to others; that this form of servitude is necessarily cashed out in terms of labour time or effort; that competing accounts of exploitation fail to do justice to the servitude dimension; and that what distinguishes capitalism historically is the way it reproduces a structural dilemma between dominated work and no work.
Keywords: egalitarianism, exploitation, domination, Marxism
JEL Classification: B14, B51, P14
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation