• freagle
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    5 months ago

    Exploitation is not a spectrum

    • bunbun
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, right, because children in the cobalt mines, prisoners stamping out license plates, and underpaid middle managers are sure exploited equally.

      • freagle
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        You don’t know what exploitation means in this context.

        Exploitation, Marx’s term, is the mechanism by which the owning class reproduces their living via the labor of others. It is not a spectrum, it is a phenomenon with an unambiguous boundary. As an owner of stocks, you are benefiting from the increasing value of the property which is created by the people who work in those companies. As an owner of rentable properties, you are benefiting from the labor of workers who produce the value that built the property and the workers who produced the value that is converted to cash to pay the rent. As a middle manager, sales person, or marketer, your entire salary comes from the value produced by others, most often those laboring in extraction and manufacturing.

        Exploitation is the phenomenon in which value is taken from the people producing it and used to reproduce a way of life for someone else.