Suffering Exploitation: Violence and Natural Right in Marx's 'Capital'

Abstract

This essay argues that Marx’s understanding of exploitation is profoundly rooted in a distinctly pre-modern understanding of natural right. Marx attempts, in Capital, to graft the existing socialist discourse about exploitation onto a much older view of wrong, according to which acts contrary to nature constitute the wrong of violence. In this way, Marx’s account of exploitation, widely considered to be the canonical statement, is actually an extreme outlier in relation to all other theories. Marx’s theory of exploitation is not rights-based, in the extreme sense that, on his account, what is exploited by capital is not a bearer of rights at all. Hence, capitalist exploitation is not a violation of rights. Rather, it is a violation of what has no rights – labour-power, labour, and the labouring class.

Keywords: Marx, exploitation, labor, capitalism, rights

JEL Classification: B14, D63, L22