Three Approaches to Exploitation: Markets Products, and Communities

Exploitation is a normative concept applied to economic processes and, by extension, to other spheres of human interaction. That it has to do with losses suffered by economic actors, such as persons, regions, classes, and nations, is generally accepted; beyond that, its meaning and relevance are strongly disputed.We distinguish three principally different ways of regarding economic justice, each leading to a different interpretation of the exploitation con cept : Market reasoning uses the market as an implicit standard for evaluating all economic activities, and dominates economic theory in all capitalist countries. Exploitation occurs only as a deviation from the ideal market situation and can be corrected for by restituting the balance. The market ideal has, however, built into it skewnesses stemming from the division of labor: products have effects far beyond their sales value. Product reasoning starts with the creation of values. In its marxist form, only labor can truly be said to produce and have rights to the product, while the shares going to land and capital are— by definition—exploitative of the workers. The problem of unequal wages, however, cannot easily be solved by arguments concerning 'contributions to production'.The community approach has a factual as well as a normative component. Most economic systems are so complex that the individual actors do not benefit (or lose) from their own actions only: economic outcomes are caused by actors everywhere in the system. This factual inter dependence should then be a basis for extending solidarity throughout the system, i.e. taking as a goal that the interrelated actors be treated as a community. The concrete manifestations of solidarity would depend on community norms, but should at least lead to decreasing economic distance between the actors. If the opposite is occurring, exploitation is present, even though the mechanism by which it works may be obscure.