Embed Notice

"...a theory of exploitation does not necessarily require the acceptance of any labor (or cost more generally) theory of economic value. Structural conditions, founded on historical and ongoing violence, force people to part with their dignity, autonomy, and time regardless of whether it is labor or something else that is the ultimate source of economic value... One needn’t make any claims about the inherent value (or lack thereof) of the human labor hour to notice that the global corporate marketplace has consolidated and that wealth has concentrated. That the old dichotomy between marginalism or subjectivism on one side and labor or cost theories of value on the other is a false one should be clear. ... our worries about exploitation do not depend on backward economic ideas." (https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/18/the-mechanics-of-exploitation/)

I think this is an excellent point to make. I don't really agree with either the Marxist or Proudhonian account of what exploitation is economically speaking, and I honestly just don't really care if exchanges are somehow metaphysically unequal or some metaphysical idea of value or whatever is getting misallocated. That sounds like a bit like a spook to me. What I'm interested in is the practical, material domination and oppression that the centralization and concentration of wealth in the hands of capitalists and the existence of private property creates, and the loss of autonomy and dignity and freedom that it results in for the people that have to deal with it, and the historical and ongoing structural violence the all of this is predicated on and perpetuates, and none of that has anything to do with metaphysical or economic theories of value.