Marx, exploitation, and socioeconomic justice: Analytical and strategic possibilities

Abstract

Marx's concept of exploitation, developed in Capital, retains the laissez-faire premises of classical liberal political economy, whereby capitalist wage labor denotes a contract between formally free, legally equal, employers and workers. Marx, though, inserts the political-economic conflict between capitalists and workers over surplus value, rendering the concept distinctively ‘Marxist’. Both liberal economists and ‘free marketeer’ politicians had long since distanced themselves, to varying degrees, from the classical laissez-faire construction, during the debates and campaigns leading to the UK's series of Factory Acts (1802–1853). A dialogue of socioeconomic justice had emerged, driven primarily by public outrage over employment conditions in the textiles industry. In engaging with this dialogue, Marx's critique of capitalist wage labor extends beyond the parameters of his own, political-economic concept of exploitation, intersecting with other, moral-economic critiques of capitalist wage labor. This paper examines these points of intersection, going on to evaluate the possibilities of analytical and strategic pluralism. It concludes by assessing the contemporary relevance of Marx's concept of exploitation: to what extent and in what ways might it retain analytical and strategic relevance, with respect to the achievement of socioeconomic justice?