Clarity about exploitation (Letter to People's Voice)

Clarity about exploitation

(Letter to People's Voice, Sept. 1-15, 2011)

Clarence Torcoran’s “Who’s exploited, and does it matter?” in the July issue’s Marxist Theory section makes a good point that exploitation is about the relationship to accumulating capital and not the physical working conditions or pay. But his claim that if some workers are exploited and others are not then this would mean capitalism can be reformed misses a major point of Marx’s analysis. While the working class is exploited as a class, only workers who produce surplus value (anything commodified, including services) are exploited in the Marxist sense, and this matters because it shows us both the relationship between, for example, public sector and retail workers with manufacturing and service workers, and also helps us realize the true magnitude of the exploitation of the whole class.

Marx observed in Theories of Surplus Value “What a convenient arrangement it is that makes a factory girl to sweat twelve hours in a factory, so that the factory proprietor, with a part of her unpaid labour, can take into his personal service her sister as maid, her brother as groom and her cousin as soldier or policeman!”

The insight that some workers are exploited and their exploitation pays for the non-commodified services of other workers has nothing to do with one group of workers being more important or needing more reforms, but helps us to understand where the wealth that we produce as a class comes from so that we can take it back from the capitalists. Torcoran said as much in his People’s Voice article “Wages facing downward pressure” five years ago (“Workers at the `point of production’ ... have the power to choke off the generation of profits”).

S. Saleh Waziruddin, Niagara Falls, ON