Roemer's attempt to undermine the normative reasons that Marxists have thought exploitation important (domination, alienation, and inequality) is vitiated by several crucial errors. First, Roemer ignores the dimension of freedom which is Marx's main concern and replaces it with an interest in justice, which Marx rejected. This leads him to misconstrue the nature of exploitation as Marx understands it. Second, his procedure for disconnecting these evils from exploitation, or denying their importance, involves the methodological assumption that exploitation must strictly imply (...) these evils. He thus fails to see that exploitation may 'cause' domination, alienation, and inequality; this assumption and the focus on justice also lead him to overlook the sort of alienation that is most important to Marx and the way exploitation, as Marx understands it, does imply coercion. Roemer's alternative conception of exploitation thus fails to capture basic Marxist normative and explanatory concerns. But Roemer's insistence on the importance of justice and the need for an articulated alternative to capitalism are a necessary supplement to a Marxist account. (shrink)

In his book A General Theory of Exploitation and Class, John Roemer employs the tools of mainstream general equilibrium and game-theoretic analysis to develop a fundamental critique and broadbased reformulation of Marxian economic theory. Perhaps Roemer's most striking departure from traditional Marxian tenets lies in his explanation of the material basis of exploitation in capitalist economies. Roemer argues that capitalist exploitation must be understood as essentially the consequence of exchange given differential ownership of relatively scarce productive assets. In particular, Roemer (...) concludes that capitalist exploitation does not fundamentally depend on capitalist domination of production, or what Marx termed the subsumption of labor under capital. (shrink)

In a series of recent writings, John Roemer has made a provocative claim: exploitation and class are merely second-order concepts within Marxian theory, because both phenomena derive directly from differential ownership of productive assets ; indeed, exploitation remains a consistent index of economic injustice only if a “property relations” conception of exploitation replaces the common “labor-value” view. In sum, property relations, not the labor exchange, the labor proces, labor values, or even capitalist accumlation should bethecentral concern of Marxian theory.

This paper offers a new answer to an old question. Others have argued that exploitation is wrong because it is coercive, or degrading, or fails to protect the vulnerable. But these answers only work for certain cases; counterexamples are easily found. In this paper I identify a different answer to the question by placing exploitation within the larger family of wrongs to which it belongs. Exploitation is one species of wrongful gain, and exploiters always gain at the expense of others (...) by inflicting relative losses on disadvantaged parties. They do harm to their victims, even when their interactions are mutually advantageous, by failing to benefit the disadvantaged party as fairness requires. This failure is the essential wrong in every case of wrongful exploitation. At the end of the paper I assess how wrong this failure is as a way to gain at another's expense. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal Charles B. Saunders et al. argue that corporations have no social responsibility regarding alienation in the workplace in that there is no significant degree of alienation in the workplace, at least in white collar and management level positions in corporate America.Contrary to Saunders et al., this paper defines the concept of alienation. Having done that, it proceeds to show that the argument Saunders et al. make flounders on logical grounds. I conclude that Saunders (...) et al. provide no evidence for the claim that alienation is lacking (in any degree) in corporate America. (shrink)

Informing others about the world is often a helpful act. In this paper, I study agents who conduct experiments to gather information about the world, committing in advance to fully disclose the nature of the experiment together with all experimental findings. While this appears to be a benign activity, I characterize a type of exploitative informing that is possible even within this restricted setup. I show how exploitative informants use public experiments to predictably manipulate interlocutors’ beliefs and actions to their (...) own advantage. I discuss epistemic and practical grounds on which it may be permissible for agents to resist acts of exploitative informing, then conclude by discussing implications for epistemic injustice and duties to gather evidence. (shrink)

In this collection, the editors again bring together papers that either exemplify the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, or that allow us to do so in and through the conversations they create. The chapters were chosen based on their relevance to similar themes as were discussed in the first volume. By reviewing historical developments in the literature around gender and organization, and by drawing on recent scholarship that disrupts the traditional masculine imaginaries that plague leadership constructs, this book challenges us to (...) radically revise our gendered thinking about leading in organizations. The authors included in this volume offer alternative, interdisciplinary perspectives on the gender constructs that inform the organizing that takes place in business and society. The book delves deeply into how ‘relationality’, as concept and practice, can help us frame a more inclusive approach to gender within contemporary organizations. (shrink)

This paper offers a normative exploration of what exploitation is and of what is wrong with it. The focus is on the critical assessment of the exploitation of workers in capitalist societies. Such exploitation is wrongful when it involves a contra-solidaristic use of power to benefit oneself at the expense of others. Wrongful exploitation consists in using your greater power, and sometimes even in making other less powerful than you, in order to get them to benefit you more than they (...) ought to. This account of exploitation is appealing because it simultaneously captures three morally significant dimensions of exploitation—its material and social background, the relational (interpersonal and systemic) attitudes it enacts, and the final distributive results it generates. Exploitation is indeed a multidimensional social process. The flipside of the proposed critical characterization of this process is a positive ideal of solidaristic empowerment in the allocation and use of economic power, which the paper articulates in terms of the socialist Abilities/Needs Principle (“from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”). The Abilities/Needs Principle is grounded in human dignity. (shrink)

What has come to be called ‘analytical Marxism’ is to be celebrated when properly understood. It is a phenomenon that has engaged some of the best people in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. In the last fifteen years there has been a blossoming of anaytic studies on Marx and on Marxism in the mainstreams of academic disciplines, with the first impetus coming from philosophers who had been working in the analytic tradition. During the previous sixty years of (...) analytic philosophy virtually nothing was said about Marxism. It was not even considered worthy of philosophical attack. Bertrand Russell, who did write on Marxist topics, confined his considerations on Marx to popular texts. Karl Popper, who did take Marxism seriously philosophically, concentrated on criticisms which were in any case ignored by analytic philosophers. (shrink)

If Third World women form ‘the bedrock of a certain kind of global exploitation of labour,’ as Chandra Mohanty argues, how can our theoretical definitions of exploitation account for this? This paper argues that liberal theories of exploitation are insufficiently structural and that Marxian accounts are structural but are insufficiently intersectional. What we need is a structural and intersectional definition of exploitation in order to correctly identify global structural exploitation. Drawing on feminist, critical race/post-colonial and post-Fordist critiques of the Marxist (...) definition and the intersectional accounts of Maria Mies and Iris Marion Young, this paper offers the following definition of structural exploitation: structural exploitation refers to the forced transfer of the productive powers of groups positioned as socially inferior to the advantage of groups positioned as socially superior. Global structural exploitation is a form of global injustice because it is a form of oppression. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Corporate social responsibility has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved are (...) engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about women and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to empower them ‘from’ or ‘to.’ Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR. (shrink)

Research Articles Matt Zwolinski, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

:This paper explores the foundations of the theory of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour. The key intuitions behind all of the main approaches to UEL exploitation are explicitly analysed as a series of formal axioms in a general economic environment. Then, a single domain condition calledLabour Exploitationis formulated, which summarizes the foundations of UEL exploitation theory, defines the basic domain of all UEL exploitation forms, and identifies the formal and theoretical framework for the analysis of the appropriate definition (...) of exploitation. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen and John Roemer, two of the most influential of the ‘Analytic Marxists,’ have argued convincingly that the Marxian concept of exploitation must include injustice as part of its definition. ‘Exploitation’ is more like ‘murder’ which includes injustice in its very meaning, than like ‘killing’ which describes a fact which is often unjust but need not be. ‘Forced extraction of unpaid or surplus labor,’ then, is not sufficient for exploitation. The extraction must be unjust to be exploitative. Otherwise (...) we would have to call it exploitation if people were forced to labor without pay as just punishment, or if people-selected by lottery-were drafted to fight a defensive war and provided no more than subsistence for their trouble, or if initiators of an unjust war were forced to labor to repair the damages they had caused. (shrink)

Corporate freedom is the freedom of a collective agent to perform a joint action. According to a reductive account, a collective or corporate agent is free exactly if the individuals who constitute the corporate agent are free. It is argued that individual freedoms are neither necessary nor sufficient for corporate freedom. The alternative account proposed here focuses on the performance of the joint action by the corporate agent itself. Subsequently, the analysis is applied to Cohen’s (1983) analysis of proletarian freedom. (...) Cohen claims that proletarians are individually free but collectively unfree to leave the proletariat. I argue that, pace Cohen, such a contrast between individual and collective freedom can only exist if collective freedom is interpreted in terms of corporate freedom. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved (...) are engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about ‘women’ and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to ‘empower’ them ‘from’ or ‘to’.Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the Self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR. (shrink)

This article advances what it calls the ‘Impossibility Result’: it is impossible to claim that the reduction of exploitation leads to the improvement of efficiency. The Impossibility Result is the inevitable result of the proposed conceptual difference between ‘injustice’ and ‘exploitation’. Injustice occurs when one member of a society deviates from the norms and the legal rules concerning how one should treat other members of that society. Exploitation occurs when one member of a society takes advantage of entities such wild (...) animals, cattle, a field of vegetables, or other people that lie outside the boundary of that society. In many cases of exploitation, the exploited may derive some benefit, as in the case when enslavement is better than death. In other cases of exploitation, the exploited may derive zero benefit, called here ‘harm’, as in the case when a deer is hunted. (shrink)

The aim is to defend the starting?point of Marx's theory of class, which is located in a definition of the working class in the Communist Manifesto. It is a definition solely in terms of separation from productive resources and a need to sell one's labour power, and it is closely connected with Marx's thesis that the population in capitalism has a tendency to polarize. That thesis conflicts with the widely?held belief in the growth of a large middle class, unaccounted for (...) by Marx. Moreover, recent critics such as Elster, Roemer, and Cohen have argued that this definition fails even in its own terms. The definition is refurbished so as to withstand these objections. But is there any point in using it? Does it serve to pick out the exploited producers as Marx intended? It does, once due attention is given to the idea of the collective worker, which is central in the volume of Capital which Marx himself published. That idea makes plain that it is an irreducibly corporate entity which is productive and subject to exploitation. The structural conditions for membership of that entity remove Marx's view from any simple identification of working?class membership with manual or lowly labour. (shrink)

In this paper I shall discuss various philosophical theories of collective punishment: marxian annihilism, metaphysical collectivism and methodological individualism. After refuting metaphysical collectivism and its modified version, I defend a modification of methodological individualism.

In her recent work, Nancy Folbre undertakes an ambitious effort: constructing an intersectional political economy that aims to identify the common mechanisms and logic underpinning the many wrongs that characterise capitalism. In this paper, we focus on what we deem the three fundamental theoretical pillars of her approach. First, she challenges the oppression/exploitation distinction within Marxian political economy and proposes a broader definition of exploitation that can take manifold forms. Second, she questions the Marxian concept of class, and emphasises the (...) variety of forms of subordination and exploitation related to social identities that cannot be reduced to Marxian classes. Finally, she advocates a more comprehensive notion of the economy beyond a focus on capitalist relations of production. It is difficult to understate the theoretical relevance of these claims, which highlight the importance of various contemporary forms of injustice—of which the exploitation of workers by capitalists is only one. As a complement to the Marxian theory of exploitation and class, Folbre’s approach would broaden our understanding of oppressive social relations. Yet as an alternative to Marxian political economy, it is ultimately unconvincing: a shift of emphasis to ‘manifold exploitations’, social groups, and the economy does not yield a gain in analytical insight but rather an impoverishment of our conceptual toolbox. The struggle against capitalism is different from the struggle against patriarchy and racism, even if the ultimate aim should be the removal of all structures of oppression and domination. (shrink)

Divided into eight sections, each with introductory essays, the selections offer rich and detailed insights into a diverse multinational philosophical landscape. Revealed in this pathbreaking work is the way in which traditional philosophical issues related to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, for instance, take on specific forms in Africa's postcolonial struggles. Much of its moral, political, and social philosophy is concerned with the turbulent processes of embracing modern identities while protecting ancient cultures.