Class and Exploitation in General Convex Cone Economies

In this paper, we examine what appropriate formulations for labor exploitation are, in order to explain the emergence of class and exploitation status in capitalist economies. Given the well-known controversy on plausible formulations for labor exploitation in joint production economies, we propose an axiom, Axiom for Labor Exploitation (LE), which every formulation of labor exploitation should satisfy to be considered 'Marxian.' Using this axiom, the necessary and sufficient condition for plausible formulations of Marxian exploitation is characterized to verify Class-Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP) [Roemer (1982)]. According to this, if some labor exploitation formulations, such as the well-known formulations of Morishima (1974) and Roemer (1982; Chapter 5) are applied, CECP no longer holds in general convex cone economies. Based upon this argument, we propose two new definitions of labor exploitation, each of which verifies CECP as well as Fundamental Marxian Theorem (FMT).