Exploitation FAQ

part one:

part two:

Common questions about exploitation.

Q. I don’t make anything in my job. Am I still being exploited?
Good Question. My videos on exploitation all state that workers produce surplus value for capitalists through the production of commodities. Commodities can be either physical goods or services which are sold by a capitalist. But there are a lot of jobs that don’t produce goods and services- police men, bank clerks, cashiers. The distinction that is usually made is referred to as the difference between productive and unproductive labor. There are many different opinions as to how to make this distinction. I will be making a video on PUPL soon. The big question then is… if labor is unproductive, are the workers not being exploited. I, personally, waver back and forth on this question. In my video on PUPL I will venture an interpretation. STay tuned.

Q. Are basketball players exploited?
top 5 07-08 salaries:
1) Kevin Garnett $22,000,000
2) Shaquille O’Neal $20,000,000
3tie) Jermaine O’Neal $19,728,000
3tie) Jason Kidd $19,728,000
5) Kobe Bryant $19,490,625
average top 200 CEO’s make 11.3 million a year.

Basketball players work. They work for large capitalist enterprises. But they make way more money than most workers. It is really hard to believe that they are being exploited.
Well, those large capitalist enterprises are still making a profit above what is paid to the players. The sports industry is a gigantic industry grossing gargantuan profits. They wouldn’t pay players those profits if they couldn’t make a profit from them.

And indeed there is class conflict in the sports industry. Basketball players, hockey players go on strike. This points to the blatant fact that no matter how big the outlays on wages (variable capital) there is always a battle over how much surplus the capitalist takes.

But there’s another angle to the sports question. Basketball players aren’t the only ones who work for their team. From trainers, coaches and pr men to the guys that clean the seats after the game and hose down the locker room, or the guys that work the cameras- there is a massive amount of labor that goes into a basketball game before it is delivered to you via TV. Many of those people are not paid well.

It seems that ball players- because they have a monopoly over a highly prized skill, are able to command much more of the surplus created in a sports franchise than any other worker. Some class theorists refer to this as skill exploitation- that highly skilled workers get some of the surplus value created by less skilled workers. In that sense the skilled workers benefit from the low pay of the unskilled workers. This drives a wedge between the workers in a particular firm, putting them at odds with each other instead of being united against a capitalist class.

This tells us some important things: 1. workers can have different relationships to surplus value due to skills and or their relation to the coordination of production (ie. managers). 2. these different relationships affect objective things like their wages, and subjective things like their class solidarity.

Q. Nobody works at my laundromat. How is profit made?
Good question. I have said that profit comes from the exploitation of workers. But in an example of a laundromat there is no worker. Yes, someone had to make the laundry machines- but nobody works at the machines. And the owner comes in once a day to sweep up and empty the quarters out of the machines, and occasionally a machine needs to be fixed…. but by and large, laundromats are entirely automated. How then can profit be made if there are no workers to exploit?

The answer to this question brings up the concept of automation. You see, the laundromat isn’t really selling a commodity to you. Instead you are renting the use of a machine for 30 minutes. No value is being produced. The same is true for a landlord. A landlord owns a house and charges you to live in it. You aren’t producing a commodity and the landlord isn’t producing a commodity. You are just paying the landlord for the use of his property. Landromats and rental housing can generate a lot of income for their owners. But these owners aren’t engaging in the production of commodities, thus they are not creating new values.
So where does their income come from if they don’t create value? Their income comes out of the wages of workers who pay out a portion of their wages for the use of the landlord’s property. These wages come from their work- productive work which creates value. In a sense landromat owners and landlords are leeches- sucking some of the wages out of society without contributing to the creation of value.

Q. The clothing company Patagonia seems to refute your theory of profit. Patagonia charges more than most clothing companies. But some consumers are willing to pay more for their clothes b/c Patagonia is a model company for environmental and labor standards. Isn’t it possible for profit to be made through exchange, and for workers to be paid fairly?

A.You’ve proposed a more ethical system of capitalism in which profit comes about by charging more for products than they are worth. People then have to be convinced to buy these products at inflated costs because it is more ethical. Assuming you could convince all people to shop ethically instead of in their own economic interests, this would entail some new vision of capitalist competition- somehow capitalists couldn’t compete anymore by lowering prices… or maybe you are proposing that all industries be monopolized, or severe restrictions to competition be enforced by states.

On a more fundamental level our disagreement over this issue highlights a crucial distinction between bourgeois and marxist economics, that is that bourgeois economists consider profit to be a result of different preferences in exchange (marginal utility theory), while marxists consider profit to be a result of the exploitation of labor.

If we take the entire social product (W) we can both agree that workers produce all of W. From a marxist perspective, W is divided into v (variable capital-the amount workers are paid for producing w) and s (surplus value- the amount appropriated by capitalists (W=S+V). S is the profit. You seem to be advocating a system whereby the prices of commodities are all inflated above the value of W so that commodities exchange at W+S.

If the price of all commodities are inflated, isn’t that the same as the prices of no commodities being inflated? (isn’t that like saying that printing more money would create more wealth? It just changes the monetary expression of wealth, but doesn’t create more actual wealth.)

But how do we measure V relative to W and S anyway? In other words, how do we know workers are being paid for the entire social product? We need some way of measuring V and W. They are both expressions of the amount of labor that goes into them, but they are only quantified in society through money prices (with all of the day to day distortions of money prices.) In other words, in your model where the price of the commodity is W+S, how do we know how much of that money price should go to the laborer and how much should go to the capitalist? All we have really done is to change the variables in the equation in order to end up with the same equation…. profit= W+S is the same as saying profit=S+V. The question is always: “how much of the prices of a commodity belong to the capitalist and how much to the laborer?” or “How much is a worker being exploited?”

The only real way to avoid exploitation is for the workers to own the means of production, thus eliminating surplus (s) altogether.

I hope this is not too algebraic and/or academic and answer. I am really glad you asked that question.

Q. I steal shit from my boss. Does that cancel out exploitation?
No. Stealing shit from your boss doesn’t change the fact that you are producing more value than you are paid for. It’s very unlikely that you could steal enough from your boss to make up the difference. If everyone did this the company would cease to make a profit- so this isn’t really a long run strategy for economic justice.

The more important point though is probably this: there are lots of ways in which workers resist exploitation. They work slower, they don’t let their managers know how fast they could work, they sabotage things, they milk the clock, in short they play lots of little games that give them the subjective sense that they are maintaining some of autonomy and dignity within the degradations of wage labor. These games are a double-edged sword: on one hand workers are carving out autonomous space that allows them to survive psychologically in a realm where they have little control over their labor; on the other hand, this works as a temporary pallative that gives workers a false sense of control and comfort, keeping them from addressing the real problem: capitalism.

Q. The bars downtown charge more for the same beer than the ones in west philly. Does that mean they are exploiting their workers more even though those workers do the same amount of work?

Differences in price can be attributed to many things. Exploitation needs to be seen as an underlying process expressed in prices which fluctuate around an equilibrium. In your case rent is probably the biggest factor in the difference in price. Rent is another big issue that I hope to address at length elsewhere.

Q. I am self-employed. Do I exploit myself?
A:No. You are not creating value for a capitalist who then pays you for only a portion of that value. Self employed people are an autonomous class separate from workers and capitalists. Of course, many people who are are nominally self-emplyed sub-contract or do part-time work as wage laborers. Self employed people are often put in the same category as the petit bourgeois. There are many types of self employed people: carpenters, piano teachers, house servants,

Q. I work for the government. Am I exploited?
Surely your experience as a government employee is similar to the lived experience of those of us employed by capitalists: you work for a wage and your employer wants to maximize the amount of labor he/she gets out of you. The government seeks to raise productivity relative to labor cost. Yet the government is not making a profit from you when it does this because it isn’t selling your product as a commodity. (unless you work for a government run enterprise.) Thus many government employees- teachers, secretaries, cops- do not produce surplus value for a capitalist. However their jobs are essential to the process of surplus value creation that happens elsewhere in the economy. (teachers train future workers. cops protect private property. etc.) The question then is whether these people who don’t produce surplus value but whose jobs are crucial to the economic order can be considered exploited. I think this depends on our definition of the concept of exploitation and what we are using it for. But I will venture, for now, that the answer should be a “qualified yes”. I hope to go into this further in my future video on Productive and Unproductive labor.

Q. I work for a non-profit. Am I exploited?
Many non-profits still make a profit. Many sell commodities. Others- social services, churches, etc. pay their employees with donated or government money. Though the employees may do useful, purposeful work, they don’t create profit for a capitalist and thus fall outside of the scope of capitalist production relations- they don’t produce surplus value. This then leads to the same answer as the previous question about government employees. But still the bigger question is: if you don’t produce surplus value does that mean you can’t be exploited? Stay tuned for a future video entitled “Who is exploited?” that will address these questions more deeply.

Q. How can I not exploit my employees?
Turn your enterprise into a cooperatively owned and run workplace. Employees vote on their salaries, on reinvestment strategies, etc. Everyone has a say in decisions equal to the degree that those decisions effect them. Then go get a book called Parecon by Michael Albert. Use your vast powers as a capitalist to create the society he describes.