RE: Re: Marx vs. Roemer

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Justin writes:>Roemer's point is logical, that on his notion of
exploitation, you can have
exploitation without corcion. I discuss this at length in my paper on the
subject; so dooes Jim in his and Dymski's now classic paper.<

BTW, in terms of purely normative issues, in my 1996 article in Bill
Dugger's book INEQUALITY (Greenwood Press), I follow Arjun Makhijani to
define "exploitation" as "taxation without representation." Capitalists
"tax" (coerce) workers using their class monopoly of the ownership of the
means of production and subsistence, the reserve army of labor (or similar
institutions), and thus the supervisor's credible threat of the "sack."
(Strictly speaking, it's not just the macro-level capitalist supremacy (the
producers' proletrianization) and the micro-level subjection of labor by
capital, but it's also the workers' conscious submission that allows this
state of affairs. Obviously, the power of the capitalist class is also
crucial.)

If one accepts this normative definition of exploitation, then the Roemerian
idea of exploitation without coercion doesn't make sense. If some people
surrendering a piece of the pie to others in a totally and utterly voluntary
way, it's not taxation (coercion) without representation. (Thus, what John
Elliott and Gary Dymski call "secondary exploitation" (redistribution of
surplus-value via markets) isn't really exploitation at all in these terms.)


Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine