Exploitation. A Socio-economic approach

Exploitation is a paradoxical notion: both widely used to characterize imbalanced or extractive economic relations, and little discussed within social sciences. For socio-economics, exploitation offers three attractive properties, as compared to more commonly used concepts — inequality, domination, and discrimination — in that it is simultaneously distributive, relational and openly counterfactual. In order to answer what makes a labor contract, market transaction or social relation exploitative, we suggest an extended counterfactual approach, moving beyond strict Marxist and neoclassical baselines, that should strive to be institutional — paying attention to the variation of exploitative arrangements —, multi-scalar — their imbrication —, and bottom-up — through grounded normativities. This toolkit allows to move from the traditional focus either on the worker-employer dyad or rent capture, to a typology of four main exploitative forms — within the production unit, on the market, in the domestic sphere, and by the State — and the notion of chains of exploitation, since most real-world configurations involve layered relations, where many agents can stand both as exploiters and exploited.