Position
Exploitation
A social structure is unjust when its ordinary workings transfer the fruits of one group's labour to another, however voluntary each transaction within it appears.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Political Philosophy
Overview
The exploitation account locates the wrong beneath the transaction rather than in it. A wage bargain can be freely entered, fully honoured, and paid at the going rate, and still transfer to the employer the value the worker produces beyond their own wage.
What makes this structural is that no participant need intend it and no rule need be broken for it to operate. It is a feature of who owns the means of production and who must sell their labour to live, which is why the account treats the arrangement rather than the conduct within it as the object of criticism.
Position on
Held by traditions
- Marxism
The subject is the tradition rather than Marx alone: his own texts analyse surplus extraction without explicitly calling capitalism unjust, while later Marxists state the wrong itself as unjust appropriation.
Question scope: Structural Injustice
References
- Karl Marx, Capital vol. I (1867), Part III chs. 7–9, on surplus value as unpaid labour appropriated through an exchange that is formally free
- Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), ch. 2 'Five Faces of Oppression', which names exploitation as an injustice carried by social processes that transfer the results of one group's labour to another