# The Chains of Exploitation: A Theoretical and Empirical Exploration

Simon Bittmann, Ulysse Lojkine

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# The Chains of Exploitation: A Theoretical and Empirical
Exploration

Authors:

- Simon Bittmann, Tenured Researcher and Assistant Professor of Sociology, CNRS -
University of Strasbourg.

- Ulysse Lojkine, Post-Doctoral Fellow, AxPo, Sciences Po Paris.

Corresponding author's address: simon.bittmann@gmail.com
Abstract

This paper sets a new empirical agenda for exploitation theory, through the notion of *chains*.

Exploitation generally offers three attractive properties compared to more commonly used concepts - inequality and domination - in that it is simultaneously distributive, relational and openly counterfactual - yet it remains an underexplored notion. While both marxist and neoclassical traditions focus on dyadic relations - either worker-employer or through market exchange - most exploitative situations bear several relational components, where agents can simultaneously stand as exploited and exploiters. Building on a sociological-relational tradition, we identify four chains - *I* (connected), *L* (hinged), *V* (dual) and *C* (complicit) - which we argue represent the elementary structures of exploitation. We then contend that this meso-level approach, complementary to individual-transactional and structural accounts, bears potential for sociological analysis, and then explore how these chains materialize in various economic sites - within the production unit, on the market, in the domestic sphere, and by the state.

*Key words:* Exploitation, Class, Inequality, Social Structure, Normative Theory, Social Theory

*JEL classification:* B51, P16, Z13
# Introduction

Exploitation is a paradoxical notion, both widely used to describe imbalanced or extractive relations, yet much less consistently discussed than other critical concepts within social sciences; namely, inequality and domination. This has, of course, much to do with Marx’s own historical emphasis on the worker-employer dyad, which he argued was the primary form of exploitation under modern capitalism, with rent, interest and other forms of appropriation interpreted as redistribution from this original surplus extraction. Yet, this paper argues that the notion can be expanded while still retaining its attractive features. Many contemporary phenomena intuitively seem to beg for such a broader approach; from housing or credit inequalities to hiked prices, from globalized finance to various forms of subcontracting – through franchises or “gig” jobs – from “pocketbook” policing of disadvantaged neighborhoods to post-colonial legacies driving unequal exchanges between Global Norths and Souths. Does it make sense and to what degree can one say, for instance, that landlords exploit their tenants, energy suppliers their consumers, creditor their debtors, husbands their spouse providing free domestic work, or states segments of their citizens? How does exploitation operate when multiple relational patterns are involved, or when actors can simultaneously stand as exploited and exploiters?

In this paper, we suggest a new approach through the notion of *chains of exploitation*, arguing that exploitative configurations can be represented through a combination of four elementary patterns - *I* (connected), *L* (hinged), *V* (dual) and *C* (complicit). In doing so, we rely on an expanding literature on power relationships within global capitalism, occasionally articulated through the notion of “chains of power” (Reed 2017; Dallas *et al.* 2019; Grabs and Ponte 2019); yet with those rarely questioning “manifold exploitation” (Folbre 2020). The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, rather than hierarchizing exploitative forms, and hence distinguishing exploitation from other forms of
oppression, domination, predation etc., we offer to bring a wide set of economic relationships under
the scope of exploitation analysis. Second, we argue that the meso-level analysis of chains, between
individual-transactional and broader structural levels (Wollner 2019) is often fit for sociological
analysis, and illustrate this through a wide array of examples. The paper is organized as follows: in
section 1, we emphasize that exploitation as simultaneously a *relational, distributive* and explicitly
*counterfactual* notion, through a review of the two main - marxist and neoclassical - traditions, and turn
to a presentation of *chains*. In section 2, we expand an analysis of each elementary pattern, surveying
various sites - within the production unit, on the market, within the domestic sphere, and by the state -
through empirical examples.

# 1. Theories of Exploitation: An Appraisal

When contemporary social sciences apprehend asymmetrical social structures or relations,
they tend to rely on two main concepts: inequality and domination. The former is a distributional,
quantitative notion: individuals or groups are compared, side-by-side, to measure who has more and
who has less (income, wealth, opportunities, life expectancy, etc.), with exemplary studies focusing
either on the top, such as the now famous 1% (Alvaredo et al. 2013) or on poverty, i.e. the bottom of
the distribution (Banerjee and Duflo 2007; Ravallion 2015). But in itself, the concept of inequality is
essentially descriptive: it doesn't specify the relationship between these two extremes, or who takes
from whom, directly or indirectly. Domination has quite opposite properties, in that it is purely
qualitative and relational (Bourdieu 1976): an agent or a group is not dominant in absolute terms, but
always in relation to a dominated agent or group, and domination analysis uncovers the mechanisms of
that power relation — in general, it thus resists quantification. This conceptual gap is somewhat
frustrating since many socio-economic phenomena exhibit both distributional and relational
components; imbalances to be measured and economic relations which are reproduced, or sometimes contested.

The notion of exploitation seems well equipped to bridge such a gap in that, as according to most acceptations, it involves both domination and appropriation; or rather it designates a form of domination that enables appropriation (and henceforth impacts inequalities). It is hence both qualitative (or relational) and quantitative (or distributional). The scientific use of the concept has surely suffered from the distrust of marxist traditions gaining ground since the 1980s, coinciding with mounting technical difficulties, within marxist economics, to precisely define what it was. Yet conceptual elaborations persevered not only within marxist sociology (Burawoy 1982; Wright 2000; Sakamoto and Liu 2006; Avent-Holt 2015), but among scholars of power, inequality, or poverty, adopting a relational perspective (Tilly 1998; Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019; Folbre 2020, Desmond 2023). More generally, exploitation remains widely used by social scientists, within a variety of contexts, to characterize imbalanced or extractive economic relations, yet it remains little discussed as such.

This is in sharp contrast to moral philosophy, where a rich body of conceptual work has expanded during the last decades (Wertheimer 1999; Sample 2003; Deveaux and Panitch 2017; Ferguson and Zwolinski 2024). However, the rift between those and social sciences remains hard to mend: the questions asked are often of an individual, moral character, and the reasonings tend to rely on thought experiments rather than empirical data. Some contributions do open possible discussions, especially when they strive to articulate social structures with interpersonal exploitative relations: Wollner (2019) thus insists for instance on “anonymous” exploitation, which can be simultaneously “non-individual, non-agential, and structural” - meaning that exploitation can happen between groups, be devoid of clear intentions, and benefit both exploiters and exploited - or Vrousalis (2023) who connects a theory of domination with the unequal distribution of property.
# 1.1. The Marxist Tradition: Surplus Labor and the Sphere of Production

In the traditional marxist conception, exploitation is tied to surplus labor, i.e. the fraction of a worker's labor time appropriated by someone else — typically a non-working member of the ruling class. For Marx, the paradigmatic illustration of this was feudal serfdom: the serf toils for his master, on the master's land, for a fraction of the year, but also for himself, on his own land, the rest of the time (Marx 1992[1867], 344-353). Marx then generalizes this concept to other modes of production, and especially capitalism, where the separation between “necessary” (for oneself) and “surplus” labor is not directly measurable. However, as Marx famously argued, the ratio between the two can still be computed by comparing profits and wages; thus defining the “degree of exploitation” (ibid., 320-329). Yet in doing so he relies on the strong assumption that the quantity of labor an agent can acquire through the market is proportional to her monetary income, which is true if and only if the price of all products is proportional to the labor time embodied in them. This much disputed labor theory of value thus defines a simple, proportional conversion of labor times into money which, though appealing, has been challenged on various theoretical grounds.

This has sparked a long, technical, and sometimes polemical debate (Desai 1988) among both marxist and neoclassical economists: on the one hand, the claim that equilibrium prices (“production prices”) are proportional to embodied labor time does not hold, as was already mentioned by Ricardo (Stigler 1958), and more generally, any causal labor theory of value, i.e. the idea that prices derive from a “transformation” of embodied labor time is either false or tautological (Samuelson 1971; Steedman 1977). Yet on the other hand, as Sen (1978) and Cohen (1988, 214) have argued, one can reject the causal labor theory of value and still adopt a descriptive approach to surplus labor, i.e. measure the flows of labor in the economy; from its origin in the labor process to the appropriation, through
consumption or investment, of the labor embodied in commodities<fnref n="1" />. Indeed, marxist economists have long shown that in a Leontief model where the production technology can be described by an input-output matrix with fixed coefficients, it is possible to compute the labor embodied in any product (Okishio 1963; Morishima 1973). Here, if an agent provides more labor time than she can appropriate through her purchasing power, then she is exploited, otherwise she is an exploiter. For sociological analysis, the main point here is that independently from any causal theory of value, the appropriation of commodities is always, simultaneously, the appropriation of the labor embodied in them, so that monetary purchasing power is also the power to claim a portion of social labor<fnref n="2" />.

Within classical marxism, these quantitative debates are generally subsumed to a qualitative claim that capitalist exploitation happens primarily in the sphere of production rather than circulation, i.e. through wage labor rather than commercial relations (see esp. Marx 1992[1867],279-80). While this assumption serves to highlight the core question of labor time, working conditions and discipline at work, it struggles to identify surplus value extracted by commercial, financial, or rentier (from land, real estate or patent property) capital. In the third volume of *Capital*, Marx (Marx 1981[1895]) suggested that these forms all derived from a redistribution of surplus value between capital owners after the “the original exploitation that takes place directly within the production process itself” (ibid, 745). Yet, this fell short of properly theorizing such redistribution, with internal contradictions (see e.g. Harvey 2013, 189), and a restricted focus on situations where financial or commercial actors are involved in the funding of industrial capital, not when they directly deal with households.

Finally, this primacy of production thesis found traction in a broad range of marxian scholarship, including for authors not strictly adhering to a labor theory of value. The most prominent

<footnote n="1">1 According to Sen (1978, 177), it is a “description of the process of exchange (...) in terms of relations between persons through personal participation in the production of commodities that are being exchanged”.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 To develop that insight into a quantitative measure of exploitation, accounting assumptions are needed, especially on the critical question of how to treat labor hours of different skill or intensity (see e.g. Lojkine, 2025, 40-51).</footnote>
proposal in this regard was that of E.O. Wright (1997), who introduced notions of “authority” and
“qualification” (as additional criteria to the property of the private means of production) to map the
heterogeneity of statuses within capitalist exploitation; famously pointing to the “contradictory class
locations” of certain categories of high-paid workers. Yet this framework still exclusively ties
exploitation to production and the “rights and powers over productive resources” (Wright 1997, 31-
33; 2000), dismissing for instance market relations (with issues such as housing or credit) as outside the
scope of exploitation analysis. Because of these limitations, classical marxism offers little flexibility to
analyze the plurality of the institutional vectors within capitalist exploitation, and their possible
imbrication.

## 1.2. The Neoclassical Approach: Exploitation as Rent

A competing approach has had a long standing within neoclassical economics (Pigou 1932),
measuring exploitation as the gap between wages and marginal productivity. Here, the degree of
exploitation is not captured by the profit share, but the distance to a perfectly competitive benchmark:
exploitation is measured as rent, and exploiters are conceived as rentiers. Robinson first (1933)
developed the corresponding theoretical framework for the labor market, through monopsony theory,
with exploitation strictly arising when obstacles to workers' mobility limit the competition between
employers. This meaning is now standard within neoclassical studies of labor exploitation (Ashenfelter
et al. 2010), and to some extent within quantitative sociology (Sakamoto and Kim 2010).

Similar views have been strongly revived in philosophy and sociological theory, from the 1990s
onward, when traditional marxist takes had started sliding in the background. Here, a core argument is
that “the competitive market price is a price at which neither party takes *special* unfair advantage of
particular defects in the other party’s decision-making capacity” (Wertheimer 1999, 232). The intuition
at work is the neoclassical idea of competitive discipline: under perfect competition, a given agent has
no arbitrary power, and hence could not be an exploiter, while frictions to competition confer to some
agents the power to unilaterally and arbitrarily impose their will on others. In sociological theory, a
similar view of exploitation as rent has been put forward by Sørensen (2000)<fnref n="3" />, who suggested holding
on to the Marxian view of exploitation as economic antagonism, but to decouple it from any labor
theory of value by restricting it to “rent-producing assets”, such as land or intellectual property.

While we do not deny that rentier relations can be exploitative because of the power relation
involved, this imposes a strong restriction for exploitation theory, in a unique non-exploitative
counterfactual defined as an unequal (although rent-less) market society where profits derive from the
distribution of the means of production. This is often limitative: Wertheimer's assertion that there is
no room for domination within competitive markets has been disputed (Vrousalis 2023; Lojkine
2025,106-114), whereas Sørensen's claim that this is the only framework consistent with “modern
economic theory” (Sørensen 2000, 1532) simply seems unwarranted<fnref n="4" />. More applied approaches to
economic rent tend to reject the normative counterfactual of a rentless society: for instance, while
Mazzucato *et al.* (2023) endorse the possibility of rentier exploitation (with reference to the work of
Christophers, 2020), they also emphasize the stark contrast between different types of rent, especially
Schumpeterian short-term innovation rents, which they associate to a more productive function within
market societies<fnref n="5" />.

<footnote n="3">³ For a critique, see Wright (2000).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ A similar argument applies to the difference between exploitation and discrimination. Those might appear
very close, since they would designate a relation where, for instance, an employer does not pay a worker the full
value of her labor. Yet a major difference lies in the implicit counterfactual: a worker is discriminated against if
she gets less than a 'typical', average or median worker, as measured empirically (Lang and Spitzer 2020).
Discrimination thus vanishes if all the workers are treated equally, under existing institutions, whereas
exploitation points to structural alternatives which would benefit most or all workers equally.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ A germane critique of the normative character of the neoclassical concept of rent is provided by Stratford
(2022).</footnote>
1.3. Exploitation = Appropriation + Power

We define exploitation as a social relation between two agents or groups A and B where: i) A appropriates the product of B's labor; ii) A dominates B; iii) one can conceive an alternative institutional setting for the interaction of A and B without this appropriation and domination. As stated by both marxist and neoclassical approaches<fnref n="6" />, although through different interpretation, both appropriation and domination are thus necessary conditions of exploitation. This definition excludes, for instance, various forms of exclusion and expropriation such as land or resource grabbing, at the condition that the victims of such are not compelled to work for the new owners (Wright 1997,11). Conversely, appropriation without domination is not here characterized as exploitation - think of sickness benefits or old-age pensions (despite some forms of libertarianism stating otherwise).

Regarding criteria *i*, marxists and neoclassical theorists offer different views on appropriation, with the former insisting on the circulation of embodied labor within commodities, and the latter relying on measures of marginal productivities (i.e. a monopsonist appropriates part of the worker's product when the wage is less than the marginal value of the product). But debates on appropriation go beyond this canonical opposition regarding the measurement of productive contributions: since any unidimensional index of value or labor content has inherent limits, one needs to factor the heterogeneity of these costs – encompassing degrees of both physical and emotional labor (Hochschild 2012[1983]) – and benefits – from monetary purchasing power, which is an abstract claim on social labor, to specific concrete efforts in the case of household labor. Hence, the criterion of an

<footnote n="6">6 An apparent exception to this consensus is present in one of Wright (1997,10)'s writings, where domination is not explicitly invoked. Yet even in this text, Wright posits that the exploited has to be “excluded from access to certain productive resources”, which can be interpreted as a form of domination. Additionally, domination is not necessarily exerted through exclusion from “productive” resources: think of domestic chores performed by a spouse for a husband because she is compelled to do so by patriarchal norms.</footnote>
appropriation of labor is open and flexible - it imposes adherence neither to a causal theory of labor value nor to a restrictive conception of what activity counts as such.

As per criterion *ii*, this has featured as a key element in recent theoretical developments, with an emphasis on the *relational* nature of exploitation (Desmond and Wilmers 2019; Desmond 2023), either under the explicit name of domination (Vrousalis 2013; 2023; Renault 2023), power (Tilly 1998,128; Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019, 108-109), or forced appropriation (Holmstrom 1977; McKeown 2016). Regardless of the way relational power is characterized<sup>7</sup>, any claim about exploitation should clarify the ways in which constraints on the life and labor of the exploited are tied to the interests and the decisions of the exploiters.

Finally, criterion *iii* accounts for the politics of exploitation: intuitively, if a social relation entailed appropriation and domination, yet without any workable alternative, this could be characterized as something of a necessary evil, and the notion of exploitation would seem out of touch. While these non-exploitative counterfactuals are often not explicitly emphasized, they can be reconstructed from most common definitions. Hence, while the marxist approach famously begs for the abolition of the private property of the means of production, neoclassical takes consider a fully commodified, perfectly competitive market society with no restriction on wealth inequality as its normative horizon<sup>8</sup>. Similarly, while relational sociology does occasionally acknowledge that exploitation “implies comparison with a counterfactual analysis” (Tilly 1999,131), this is not always done or not through a clear normative elucidation. To be clear, our definition does not commit to one specific normative horizon, rather inviting analysts of exploitation to explicit the multiple alternative

<footnote n="7"><sup>7</sup> Marxist and neoclassical takes offer, yet again, competing interpretations (Chirat and Lojkine 2024): for the former, power is essentially the impersonal constraint on propertyless agents to sell their labor power, coupled with the capitalist hierarchy in the workplace; while for the latter, it is exclusively monopoly power. Some feminist philosophers yet add another layer of meaning to the concept, emphasizing norms of gender difference as a distinct and singular form of power (MacKinnon 1987, Allen 2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="8"><sup>8</sup> Somewhere in between the marxist and the neoclassical approaches, Roemer (1982:194-237) discusses various counterfactuals at the level of the distribution of private property that are implicit to various notions of exploitation.</footnote>
baselines operating at different scales – which, in certain settings, can be mutually exclusive or conflicting. In this regard, Avent-Holt (2015) has formulated two possible approaches to this problem, either “positive” (grounded in the “normative worldviews” of actors) or “normative” (based on the “normative commitments of the analyst”).

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: The chains of exploitation</figcaption></figure>

1.4. From Dyads to Chains
The definition and guidelines provided above can be applied to various dyadic segments, whether it is the classic worker-employer, a one-to-one market transition, a spouse performing free domestic work, etc. Yet most socio-economic configurations bear several relational components, pointing to connected or nested forms of exploitation, and to distinct, potentially conflicting counterfactuals. The notion of chains helps untangle these by mapping the segments considered, from basic links to more complex structures, into a two-dimensional plane. Crucially, although not purely individual-transactional, these chains bear only a weak structural component (McKeown 2016; Wollner 2019), in the sense that they map networks of power-infused relationships: they derive from larger structures in a more traditional sense - capitalism, patriarchy, racial formations - yet always materialize through identifiable relations between individuals or groups<fnref n="9" />.

This framework bears common intuitions with Reed's (2017, 93) “chains of power”, especially regarding the capacity of actors to stand at the connecting end of multiple dyadic segments, as it suggests that “rector-actor dyads can expand, accordion-like, into chains, creating situations in which almost everyone in the chain is both a giver and a taker of orders”. Although Reed is primarily concerned by the broader “struggle for recognition and redistribution” involved in social ties, his proposal hints at the connection with the “morphology” of global capitalism, central to our analysis<fnref n="10" />. In this sense, while the inputs of the global value chains (GVC) and global production networks (GPN) scholarship (see for instance Dallas *et al.* 2019) have helped move beyond dyadic frameworks, the exclusive emphasis on the geography of commodity chains has largely left the exploitative nature of these productive ties out of the picture.

<footnote n="9">⁹ See also McKeown (2017) and Müller (2024a,b) on the articulation between the individual-transactional and structural dimensions.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Reed (2017, 108-109) writes: “the new political economy has replaced the older notion of the extraction of surplus value with an understanding of value as produced in far-flung commodity chains variously governed and ungoverned. Here, nothing is more important than the morphology of the chain of rectors and actors who must confront various others”.</footnote>
Starting from a basic vertical link between exploiter (or rector) A and exploited (or actor) B, four types of segments can be added. First, vertically if exploiter B is him or herself exploited by A - pointing to a *connected* exploitation of C by A. We designate this by an *I-chain* (Figure 1), to which multiple links can be further positioned above added. One can think of a subcontractor B exploiting workers C, her or himself being exploited by a parent company or franchisor A. Another close example is that of a majority shareholder A appointing and removing at will a company's top managers B, who in turn increase extraction from production workers C, with no direct relation between A and C. These cascading links do not have to be tied to the direct control over productive assets, although they require a form of nested appropriation. While globalized production and distribution offers a high potential from complex I-chains, through the fractal nature of GVC and GPN, this type of interconnection occurs in other economic sites as well.

Second, a link can be added obliquely if C is simultaneously exploited by A and B - in cases of a *dual* exploitation, what we refer to as a *V-chain*. This is quite straightforward in the case of several employers, creditors, or any combination of labor and market exploitation - such a worker-tenant or worker-debtor being in exploitative relations simultaneously with an employer and a landlord or a creditor. *V-Chains* thus correspond to two direct exploitative relations bearing on the same individual (contrary to *I* and *L-chains*, no individual is simultaneously exploiter and exploited). And while these can operate on different planes, the outcome of one relation affects the other: one can think of a worker struggling to pay her of his rent and hence standing at a higher risk of losing her or his job (Desmond and Gershenson 2016) - or the other way around, as is exemplified in section 2.3.

Third, a horizontal link can be added if exploited B is her or himself exploiting C while C remains an “other” to A (contrary to an *I-chain*, where A exploits C through B). We refer to these cases as *L-chains*, suggesting a form of *hinged* exploitation, where two distinct forms of exploitation, operating on different planes, are connected through an exploiter/exploited B. The ideal-typical case is
that of a spouse C performing free domestic work for her or his breadwinner-worker B spouse, her or
himself being exploited on the labor market (by employer A). This situation does not involve direct
cascading links - through a chain of command, nested contracts, or integrated financial circuit - but one
form of exploitation still rests on the other to remain functional. The singularity of the *L-chain* lies in its
articulation between formal paid and unpaid, or unpriced labor (Seccombe 1974; Folbre 2020), making
it specific to domestic exploitation, or in short to the articulation of production and reproduction.

Fourth, a last elementary pattern corresponds to a *complicit* exploitation of C by A, mediated
by a distinct productive or financial circuit, or distributive institution B; what we refer to as a *C-chain*. In
this configuration, while an economic agent, A is neither actor nor rector but rather an “other” with
respect to C. Though not involved in direct exploitation (as an employer, seller, etc.) A still contributes
to it. One can typically think of a consumer purchasing a product manufactured using exploited labor
(Ferguson and Ostmann 2018), but as we will see in section 2, this can also apply to a group of
taxpayers being advantaged at the expense of the other through the state fiscal system. Put differently,
*C-chains*, involve a strong decoupling between appropriation and power: A appropriates without
exercising a direct, visible, or consolidated power over C. Rather, power is disseminated across a
multitude of As, through the coordinative capacity of B (the market, the state) (Nefsky 2015; Wieland
and van Oeveren 2019).

## 2. Mapping the Chains of Exploitation

In the following, we illustrate the chains identified in section 1, starting from a typology of
the main dyads (direct exploitation), and then moving to more complex ties, across a multitude of
economic arenas, involving not only production, but also market exchange, consumption, domestic labor, and the state.

## 2.1. Dyads, or Direct Exploitation

To properly understand chains, we start from its basic component – direct, dyadic exploitation – which can manifest across a wide array of economic relations, without the need to hierarchize, as Marx famously did, between “primary” and “secondary” forms.

In the productive sphere, Marx's famous approach to direct, wage exploitation contains two dimensions: a quantitative one, through the appropriated surplus product; and a qualitative one, in the subordination of workers to capital in the labor process. The first aspect points to the capital share of value added as a measure of exploitation (Foley 1982); with a wide body of evidence showing that the labor share of value added has declined over recent decades among rich countries (Karabarbounis and Neiman 2014). As per the second dimension, this has long been a subject of inquiry for the sociology of labor, from the pioneer work of Friedmann (1961) and Braverman (1974) showing how profit-driven domination tends to intensify physical labor, to more recent research showing how technologies of control have been complemented, since the 1980s, by other forms of pressure relying on an ideology of consent, freedom, and corporate culture in the secondary sector (Burawoy 1982; Kunda 1992; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). Yet, the use of modern technology to control and intensify work has by no means ceased to exist in tertiary industries, be it call centers where workers have to follow pre-established scripts (Buscatto 2002; Woodcock 2016), in the fast-growing logistics sector where they operate under voice command (Gaborieau 2017), or through digital surveillance devices (Aloisi and Gramano 2019; Levy 2023). Simultaneously, workplace expectations evolve
beyond physical effort, with “emotional work” (Hochschild 2012[1983]) increasingly required in
service occupations bearing disproportionately on women.

Within market exchange, exploitation can occur through direct face-to-face interactions, or
indirectly through “price gouging”, high mark-ups or unfair extortion (Deveaux and Panitch 2017)<fnref n="11" />.
In his pioneer work *The Poor Pay More* (1963), sociologist David Caplovitz referred to the “poor” as
“exploited consumers”, and recent studies, primarily in the U.S., have built on similar intuitions,
congregating around the notions of “predatory lending” and “predatory inclusion” to characterize
exploitative markets<fnref n="12" />. Though the vocabulary of “predation” introduces relational and extractive
components, it tends to draw a moral, and often artificial line, between mainstream and “fringe”
market sellers; or simply put between good and bad capitalists. Hence, this consequentialist view
obscures the fact that exploitation, when contrasted to a hypothetical pattern of non-interaction, can
often benefit both parties involved, especially when low-class consumers have no other options
(Deveaux and Panitch 2017). By contrast, the concept of exploitation doesn’t anchor the divide
between exploited and non-exploited to the presumed morality of actors. For a clear example,
Desmond and Wilmers (2019) recently put to the test the notion of “renter exploitation” on the U.S.
housing market, defined as the “ratio of annual rents from all rental units” collected by landlords “over
property value”, adjusted for several “maintenance costs”. The authors then show this ratio to be
steeper in areas with higher poverty rates and a larger share of Black residents. Crucially, here

<footnote n="11">11 Since the beginning of a global inflationary episode in 2021, the issue of “seller’s inflation” (Weber and Wasner 2023) has been increasingly raised, with firms hiking prices beyond supply-side constraints (Glover et al. 2023). This has remained a major blank spot within economic sociology, despite price levels raising complex distributional conflicts, not only between workers and employers, or between countries, but with respect to the extractive power of price-setting firms, especially in the food or energy sectors (Serafin 2022).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 The latter describes a staggered process of financialization - especially on housing and credit markets -, with a first step leading to exclusion of many lower-class and non-white constituencies, only to be included during a second phase, yet “on different and more expensive terms” (Taylor 2019). Originally coined to explain why residential segregation outlived the end of redlining, the expression is now used in a wide variety of socially or racially segmented markets such as credit cards, mortgages, student debt, or rental housing (Seamster and Charron-Chénier 2017; Faber 2020; Besbris et al. 2022).</footnote>
“overpayment is not defined in terms of economic rent, and does not presuppose barriers to entry that limit competition among landlords (e.g. collusion, monopoly)”. Rather, the authors define on a “counterfactual of property ownership”, that is the “costs of purchasing a housing unit” for renters; a majority of which are credit constrained on the mortgage market. In turn, this pushes the authors to support programs targeted at expanding homeownership, mitigating risk for low-income and racialized households, as well as bringing down housing costs. Here, specifying a tractable index along with a clear counterfactual allows for a grounded discussion of “housing exploitation”, which goes beyond “interindividual distributions” of prices in a purely neoclassical view.

For the domestic sphere, feminist scholars have long pushed against Marx's own underestimation of women's exploitation, often treated as secondary to that of the “proletariat” (Federici 2012; Vogel 2014). In their landmark book, Delphy and Leonard (1992, 42) strived to restore this balance, placing capitalism and patriarchy on equal footing, with domestic exploitation being defined as a relation where “things produced by the labor of one person are consumed by another in an unbalanced exchange”. In short, women, spouses, or children, are exploited inasmuch as their work time is “appropriated” by men without pay, thus echoing and amplifying what is happening within commodified production<fnref n="13" />. Studies relying on time-use surveys thus show that the distribution of domestic work in bi-active heterosexual couples remains overwhelmingly unequal in Western countries, with a limited decrease linked to higher market productivity for women (through longer studies) and a broader access to outsourced services (Chiappori et al. 2022). Despite these studies not relying on the concept of exploitation, this suggests that heterosexual women are, as a group, exploited by their partners at the family level. Nevertheless, the marxist notion of surplus labor still uneasily fits the specificities of domestic labor, especially at its boundaries. As an example, to the extent that

<footnote n="13">13 Some authors like Guillaumin (2016) went one step further, pointing to the “appropriation” of women’s physical bodies through the notion of “sex classes”, thus abstracting exploitation from the strict realm of production.</footnote>
“mental load” - which includes planning, scheduling and caring for others (Dean et al. 2022) - is often an effort performed by women to the benefit of household’s members, it should qualify as exploited labor, despite it escaping any simple quantitative index. A distinct but related difficulty arises regarding sexual activity within the couple: while it is most often not counted as unpaid female work, feminist scholarship has long emphasized the various coercive processes by which it is often obtained (Finkelhor and Yllo 1985; Basile 1999), yielding a striking instance where the degree of exploitation appears to be related to a power imbalance rather than to strict labor hours.

Finally, whereas classical marxist accounts often present the state as a mere conduit for exploitation - “a coercive institution which maintains the rule of the game” (Roemer 1982: 42) -, contributing indirectly to the extraction of surplus value (Poulantzas 2020), the state can more directly participate in the exploitation of its citizens, through both labor and monetary punishments. Labor historians’ insistence on “penal work” as a “historically ubiquitous institution” (de Vito and Lichtenstein 2016,49) emphasizes that the state penal power was persistently used to corral and utilize underpaid labor, specifically for racialized or low-status segments of the workforce (see also van Rossum 2018). Similarly, in the post-Civil War U.S. South, Muller (2018) showed that the “leasing” of convicts to private companies developed more “in cities and in counties where African Americans had achieved a degree of economic independence”, and where “white civilians, sheriffs, and police had little to lose in [...] punish[ing] property crimes”. Convict leasing thus underlines the deep connection between “exclusion and exploitation” (Muller 2021): because the end of slavery “consigned [Black Americans] to the bottom of the labor market”, the “relations of exploitations” signified “dependence” of employers on this form of labor. Beyond the carceral state, the question of court-ordered monetary sanctions has recently attracted a lot of scholarly attention, with the drastic rise of legal financial obligations (LFOS) leading to increased legal debt, with major long-term effects on poverty and inequalities (Harris et al. 2010; Kohler-Hausmann 2018; Kohler-Hausmann 2022). This is
specifically true for subfelonies, many of which having been partly decriminalized into civil offenses,
starting from the period known as the Broken Windows Era in the late 1980s. In Ferguson, Missouri, a
study thus found that $2.2 million had been collected in municipal fines in 2012, through 24,500
warrants, amounting to $272 per household (Harris 2016). This form of “pocketbook policing” is now
commonly used in municipalities where fiscal revenues (mostly through sales taxes paid by non-
residents), prove more difficult to collect, pushing officials to turn to ““bad” revenues like legal fines to
manage fiscal crises” (Pacewicz and Robinson III 2021).

**2.2. I-Chains, or Connected Exploitation**

The notion of connected exploitation finds its primary expression in the myriads of actors
involved within global commodity chains (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986; Dallas et al. 2019), largely
studied by the literature on global value chains and production networks, whose results have
challenged Marx's own overemphasis on the worker-employer dyad (Bair 2009). Indeed, the history of
commercial capitalism provides a plethora of examples where “in-between exploitation” can occur,
from putting-out factories to sweat-shops, or through recruiting subcontractors (Didry 2016; Banaji
2020; Bittmann 2024). This is no historical feat, as these hierarchical value chains are proving an
enduring feature of contemporary capitalism, both within and across borders. Internationally, while
the traditional “producer-driven” value chains persist in some industries such as car manufacturing,
these have been increasingly superseded by “buyer-driven” value chains (Gereffi 1999; Gereffi and
Fernandez-Stark 2016; Kumar 2020) where multinational corporations often from the Global Norths
concentrate research and design, while leveraging the resulting intellectual property to exert control
down the line (Rikap 2021). In this regard, prominent examples include the textile, electronics or food
industries (Davis 2016; Boudreau et al. 2023). These configurations can also materialize at the local
level: in the case of sex work in Andra Pradesh, studied by Brady *et al.* (2015), female workers are “exploited” by brokers, who levy “disproportionate” fees with respect to the services provided, yet they also frequently invoke local textile factories, whose poor working conditions often force them to sell their bodies on the illegal sexual labor market<fnref n="14" />.

Even within the strict confines of Western national countries, relations of commercial exploitation have gained weight through the “fissured workplace” (Weil 2014). This is observable both for workers - such as in the construction or high-tech sectors (Kunda 1992; Jounin 2009), through the externalization of low-skilled tasks such as cleaning or security (Dube and Kaplan 2010; Perraudin *et al.* 2014) - and in business relations, through specific juridical forms such as franchising, gaining ground in the hospitality, retail or fast-food industries (Callaci 2021). This trend also corroborates the fall in the labor share of value added within Western economies, in large part explained by a reallocation of value-added from low to high-profit share firms (Autor *et al.* 2020; Kehrig and Vincent 2021; Bauer *et al.* 2024). Part of this shift is tied to productivity increases in high-profit sectors, yet this is also a direct consequence of the externalization of some activities, increasing the market power exerted over suppliers, and thus enabling the indirect exploitation of workers from other firms (Lojkine 2025,135-137).

This is also true within firms, with the productive and financial structure of large corporations revealing more complicated exploitation patterns than direct face-offs between employers and employees. Both value extraction and power are distributed in more complex chains, with shareholders situated upstream (and hierarchies between majority and minority owners) and the power exerted over production workers critically resting on the mediation of managers, from CEOs down to overseers. As shown by Amable *et al.* (2005) or van der Zwan (2014), the financialization of firms

<footnote n="14">14 As long argued by the theory of unequal exchange, even competitive relations between firms from the global Norths and Souths can generate equilibrium prices which lead to inter-firm exploitation at the macro-level (Emmanuel 1972; Köhler and Tausch 2002).</footnote>
impacts industrial relations, so that financial actors are indeed rectors/exploiters connected to downstream actors/workers, yet it would nonetheless be incorrect to view those in positions of authority within the firm as mere conduits, channeling shareholder power down to the workers, and value upward in return. The position of managers is actually “contradictory” as argued by Wright (1997): their work generates value for the shareholders, remaining submitted to financial decision-making; but they also retain discretionary power as well as capture high incomes from the appropriation of some form of others’ labor. Paradoxically, as shown by Goldstein (2012), the earnings of managers have grown precisely at the era of shareholder capitalism, leading some like Levy and Duménil (2018) to speak of a “managerial capitalism” for the recent decades.

Finally, while globalized production offers a high potential for connected exploitation, through the fractal nature of industrial and distribution networks, *I-chains* are not analytically restricted to commodity production. In the realm of market exchange, one can easily think of a tenant subletting her apartment through a formal or informal contract; or the rise of asset managers and their effect, mediated by the companies they acquire, on consumer exploitation, through housing rent or infrastructure prices (Christophers 2024). Similarly, an *I-chain* would describe a situation where a grocer imposes high selling prices to its retailers, with costs then being then passed on to consumers; or conversely if a retailer is forced to collect unpaid debt from its clients to repay its own account. Finally, connected exploitation by the state can also occur if, for instance, the government of a (developing) country faces pressures to repay its sovereign debt, exerted by (Western) creditors: in this case, local taxpayers may either face a higher fiscal pressure on their income, or be forced to increasingly purchase social services on the private market, following austerity plans. In all these configurations, a similar chain of actor – rector/actor – rector thus emerges, with both an intermediary acting both as exploiter and exploited, and power being distributed downstream to the final link.
## 2.3. *V-chains*, or dual exploitation

Dual chains of exploitation can occur within a multitude of settings where an exploited faces more than one exploiter, with similar forms of appropriation. Typically, this can involve cumulative patterns, where exploiters are of the same type of rectors - such as for a worker with more than one occupation, or a debtor facing multiple claims to her resources - yet this can also involve exploitative relationships of different economic nature, with perhaps the most explicit expression standing in the long historical articulation of debt and labor (Muldrew 2016).

Consumer credit represents a standout case since it embodied what Marx referred to as a “secondary exploitation, which proceeds alongside the original exploitation that takes place directly within the production process itself” (Marx (1981[1894]), 745). Yet as various historical research has shown, the connection between the two is often more direct: to take the example of the industrial transition, Albert (2021) and Bittmann (2024) have shown that in the early twentieth century France and U.S., credit contracts were increasingly tied either to a fixed or secure pay, or the possession of small collateral in connection to one's job; all of which could be garnished in cases of default. The stratification of credit and labor markets thus became increasingly intertwined: in early twentieth century Georgia, Black working women were thus overrepresented among clients of second-tier lenders, especially for certain occupational segments, such as washerwomen. As these faced little competition from white women, they were perceived as relatively good risks in the eyes of creditors, especially compared to male Black workers, who often had to move around to secure precarious contracts, as in the railroad industry (Bittmann 2024, 50). Whether and to what degree should wage garnishments be allowed raised, however, heated political debates, both in France and the U.S., regarding what balance to strike between workers' contractual freedom and the risk of “financial slavery”.
Resorting to credit indeed produced strong disciplining effects, with workers-consumers having to adapt their behavior and budgets to convince lenders or brokers of their good standing. In Birmingham (Alabama) during the 1910s and 1920s, dozens of collection agents thus sat outside steel factories every week on payday, to collect interest from Black workers, reminding them of their contractual duty: as one loan employee phrased it, “so long as he [*the steel worker*] pays the interest on this money”, the worker knows that the pledge made on his wages “will never be turned over to his employer for payment”. Since it was common for indebted workers to face a threat of dismissal, keeping with payments was also a way to protect one’s occupation and livelihood, an attitude lenders typically interpreted as a form of blind submission (Bittmann 2024, 63). In a more contemporary context, Desmond and Gershenson (2016) have similarly shown that evictions increase the risk of job loss in Milwaukee, with, conversely, the place of residence being often used as a basis for discrimination in hiring (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Bunel et al. 2016). Desmond and Gershenson (2016) thus argue that “involuntary displacements” function as an “overlooked mechanism of social stratification” similar to that emphasized here through consumer credit. In this type of configuration, neither the notion of “predation” (from “loan sharks”) neither the simple juxtaposition of two dyadic exploitative relationships (credit/debtor and employer/worker) can fully account for the *dual* ties involved. Indeed, on top of a direct subordination to employers, managers or foremen, debtors face the hovering threat of physical or institutional violence, from financial agents or judicial intermediaries, which reverberates through debt obligations; and complex manifestations in terms of race and gender. Labor and market exploitation therefore intersect according to distinct local arrangements and phases, yet without one ever subordinating completely to the other.

Finally, this duality is not a pure analytical construction, as it can inform actors’ political claims against these chains. As a rare example, in Macon (Georgia), a trade union of local washerwomen wrote in 1916 a petition to the city mayor, asking for protection against “loan sharks”. Yet in their
statements they equally blamed the “collectors”, and “white people” who did “not pay them enough”;
that is white families exploiting their labor in exchange for insufficient wages. Here, the wage relation
was foregrounded by workers as a cause for their indebtedness, as debt further increased the plight of
low wages. Put differently, voicing their claims to better life conditions involved a *dual* criticism of debt
and labor exploitation. Whereas Krippner (2017) has shown that debtors often connect their assertion
of financial rights not to labor claims, but asset ownership (either individual or collective), this example
shows that apprehending debt and labor exploitation as a dual chain can help understand how “debt
resistance” connects to more traditional labor-based forms of claims making (Mader and Ravelli 2024).

**2.4. *L-chain*, or hinged exploitation**

In *L-chains*, as in *I-chains*, an actor/rector B simultaneously acts as exploited and exploiter. Yet in this configuration, exploited C remains an “other” to B’s exploiter A, suggesting two forms of exploitation operating on different planes. In its typical determination, where a worker-breadwinner, exploited on the labor market, is exploiting his spouse outside the formal economy<fnref n="15" />, (male) labor thus plays a “mediating role [...] between the housewife and capital” (Seccombe 1974). Put differently “in its relative form [*labor power*] it is linked back to domestic labour and in its equivalent form [*the wage*] it is linked forward to capital”; yet in a way that distinguishes this hinged exploitation from a direct interconnection. The representation of such a relational structure remains, however, a contested issue: according to the “social reproduction theory” (Bhattacharya 2017), the family remains a distinct unit to which reproductive labor is outsourced, by the capitalist class, pointing either to an *I-chain* or even two

<footnote n="15">15 In the case of bi-active spouses, this obviates the frequent, simultaneous exploitation of women on the labor market, which would add further links. This issue led Wright (1997, 257-259) to introduce the distinction between “direct” and “mediated class locations” of spouses, in his criticism of John Goldthorpe’s approach to the issue of class and gender.</footnote>
distinct economic sites<fnref n="16" />. Here we adopt the *L* representation, in line with recent criticisms of SRT, and
calls for a more “unitary” approach to production and reproduction (Vogel 2014; Quick 2023): among
others, Munro (2019) argues that this decoupling “deemphasizes a central insight of Marxist feminism
— the necessary role that household production plays in the reproduction of capitalist society as a
whole” — arguing that “social reproduction” should be integrated within a broader analysis of “societal
reproduction”, that is including the “productive economy”.

Despite some early empirical studies (Meillassoux 1981; Barthez 1984; Delphy and Leonard
1992), empirical approaches to the articulation of labor and domestic work have been long
overshadowed by “household microeconomics” (Becker 1981); a literature offering a purely
individual-transactional take on exploitation, treating the spousal unit as a productive dyad maximizing
a utility function under time, budget, and technological constraints - with outputs including food,
children-rearing, leisure or housing. Women’s domestic work is thus interpreted as a part of an optimal
division of labor, with gendered differences in both productivity and preference treated as given. The
literature has progressively moved beyond Becker’s “unitary” framework to introduce intra-couple
bargaining, with more or less complex rules (Chiappori et al. 2022), and relied extensively on time-use
data to explain several stylized facts regarding time-allocation patterns. Typically, marriage is associated
to a “premium” for men and a “penalty” for women, and hence unequal benefits both in term of labor
supply and income (Petersen et al. 2014), with specialization choices being better explained by relative
rather than absolute wages, and men’s inelastic labor supply being consistently observed across a range
of measures and countries.

Yet this literature bears major, and well-known shortcomings: they account poorly for
intertemporal dynamics, that is how behaviors are affected through marriage or divorce, and cannot
convincingly explain the sexual division of labor between spouses, at the heart of domestic exploitation

<footnote n="16">16 For a recent review of these debates, and arguments in favor of decoupling “social reproduction” from “household production”, see Munro (2019).</footnote>
(Chiappori et al. 2022). The main economic narrative has consistently relied on comparative advantages to explain specialization choices, yet as Siminski and Yetsenga (2022) have shown through Australian data, according to this model women should be 109 times more productive in paid labor in order to achieve equality in domestic chores - which is highly unlikely. Rather, economists now routinely rely on notions of “norms” and “identity” to fill in the empirical gaps, mostly through a psychological understanding of utility penalties in case of deviance (Bertrand et al. 2015). Yet this still fails to move beyond the individual-transactional level, on top of major methodological limits: since “intrahousehold allocation” is never directly observable, these approaches build conditions and testable restrictions derived either from labor market choices or naturalized psychological attributes, making it “unclear whether or not the final conclusions obtained by household collective models of labor supply are accurate” (Chiappori et al. 2022).

In its current state, microeconomics is thus poorly armed to study exploitation in or linked to
the domestic sphere; and yet reversely the “political economy of patriarchy” has also been largely
neglected within sociology since a few foundational studies (Meillassoux 1981; Barthez 1984) carried in
the 1970s (Bessière and Gollac 2023, 215¹⁷). First of all, while time-use surveys document the
increasing externalization of domestic tasks, the consequences of these evolutions for women as a
social group are less frequently looked into. As such, through outsourcing, within-couple exploitation
is often displaced unto lower, racialized segments of the female working class, many of whom are
excluded from minimal wages, collective agreements, or remunerated through non-monetary transfers
of gifts and favors. Alleviating one site of exploitation (the horizontal link of the *L-chain*) here increases
other exploitative segments, less tractable through quantitative household studies. In rich households,
this “golden exploitation” serves to mask actual work conditions, with long-time workers frequently

<footnote n="17">17 This has in part to do, according to Bessière and Gollac (2023, 214-216), with a divergence between labor sociology and gender studies, with the former largely dismissing the family as an economic unit worthy of exploration.</footnote>
presented as “family members” (yet consistently excluded from money transfers or patrimonial arrangements) precisely to frame work exploitation as willful devotion (Jansen 2015; Delpierre 2022).

This further outsourcing thus requires adding a vertical link to the *L-chain*, from the household (as an exploiter/rector unit) down to account for the exploitation of paid domestic workers.

Second, the broader, life-cycle effects of domestic exploitation (that is appropriated time, or informal labor) on wealth accumulation are much less consistently explored (Schneebaum *et al.* 2018). Gaps in assets, tied to aforementioned specializations between partners, trickle into further life stages, through “divorce penalties”, access to lower retirement pensions and long-term wealth accumulation (Bó 2022). This is true both in contexts where formal equality is not achieved, such as many former colonial societies (N’Diaye 2014), and countries where it is. And even in the latter, wealth gaps are amplified by legal intermediaries, such as notaries and judges, whenever divorce or heritage settlements are negotiated (Bessière and Gollac 2023). The same goes for relational accounting between spouses: how is money pooled, allocated across expenses and bills depending on each partner’s contribution? How is capital accumulation, such as real estate, negotiated through gendered norms and interactions and further excluding women? Data on both capital assets and spending is often pooled at the household level in national surveys, except in rare cases such as France and Germany; thus stalling our understanding of individualized wealth accumulation (Grabka *et al.* 2015; Frémeaux and Leturcq 2020).

Further research on family exploitation would thus be needed to better apprehend the complex set of imbalanced monetary transfers between couples or kins, as compared to respective income, time and capital contributions, all the way from marriages through break-ups and deaths.

## 2.5. *C-chain*, or complicit exploitation
In this configuration, we consider the exploitation of actor C by an “other” A, through the intermediation of rector B. In the typical case studied in the literature, that is purchasing products from sweatshop labor: while A retains the full control of her or his spending decision, she or he exerts very little control on the downstream appropriation - at least without some form of collective organizing such as in the case of boycotts or white-labelling campaigns -, making A ‘complicit’ but not participant in C’s exploitation (Ferguson and Ostmann 2018; Wieland and van Oeveren 2019, Ferguson 2021)<fnref n="18" />. The question of labor exploitation has, historically, been at the heart of consumer activism, at least in the U.S. since the early stages of mass consumption in the early twentieth century (Sklar 1998; Glickman 2009). Florence Kelley’s National Consumer League famously campaigned against child labor, but also for shorter hours, better wages, directly appealing to (women) shoppers and targeting department stores who distributed mass produced garments. Rather than by-standers of labor exploitation, this form of activism is meant to turn consumers into direct rectors of manufacturers’ decision-making, the latter in turn becoming actors submitted to demand pressures; and even if these actions can often feel superfluous (Wieland and van Oeveren 2019). While the case of sweatshop labor has attracted the most attention from philosophers, one can think of similar examples, such as that of a retired worker earning his monthly pension through a pension fund, exerting no influence - especially in cases of employer-imposed schemes - over the financial decisions to invest in potentially exploitative circuits downstream.

Finally, one understudied arena where complicit exploitation can occur is through the fiscal
system, as tax systems define a social contract where “relations of extraction” and “relations of
redistribution” need to be equated (Daunton 1996). Though not direct exploitation by the state, such
as in the case of penal labor or LFOs, fiscal exploitation can arise whenever those are perceived as
imbalanced. Indeed, through the fiscal system, consisting of both direct taxes (on revenues or wealth)

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ This “superfluity problem” has been first laid out by Nefsky (2015).</footnote>
and indirect tariffs (on consumption), the state plays a major distributive role, socializing expenses through collective levies; thus raising issues of allocative fairness. Since taxation does not involve direct relations between exploiters and exploited, formulating an explicit counterfactual can help shed light on what some social groups might consider an unjustified burden on their revenues. In this regard, the history of tax resistance proves insightful to understand how constituents claimed that their communities were exploited through fiscal policymaking. Time and again, these have been at the root of major revolutions and political upheavals, either to oppose costly conflicts waged abroad by feudal, “domain states”, demand more retribution through welfare from later “tax states”, or simply lower the levies captured by the Leviathan (Schumpeter 1918).

Adepts of liberal or libertarian creeds have actively voiced such rejections: as early as the eighteenth century, Say (1971[1821], 130) referred to taxes as “mere spoliation”: even if “levied by national content”, taxes remained in his eyes an extractive device used by the “unproductive classes” to prey upon the “industry of individuals”. Closer to the present day, partisans of a “nightwatchman” state have repeatedly endorsed tax resistance on behalf of similar precepts (Martin 2008). Among the California tax revolts during the 1970s, public choice theorist James Buchanan (1976) thus explicitly spoke of “fiscal exploitation” to support property tax reductions (through Proposition 13), levies he believed were detrimental to consumers and economic efficiency. However, fiscal sociology has also strived to emphasize the complex roots of tax resistance, often resting in the defense of a specific segment or territory. The California tax revolts were no exception, with for instance many African American taxpayers arguing that “their [our] tax money” was being used to finance industrial and urban projects in suburban white areas, thus diverting capital away from local investments (Self 2005, 131, 195). As Martin (2008) has argued on a broader scale, despite these movements being later recuperated by right-wing conservatives, many constituents originally mobilized to defend an
"invisible welfare state", in the form of local and "informal fiscal privileges" which the federal administration was precisely trying to curb.

Fiscal reforms can thus directly affect distributive politics at the local or national levels, with specific groups being fiscally exploited at the expense of others: as an example, with major tax cuts implemented since the 1980s in the U.S., municipal and state fiscal capacities have been drastically undercut, evolutions which proved advantageous to many white homeowners through hidden "privileges" (Martin and Beck 2017, Henricks and Cheyenne-Harvey 2017). Manduca et al. (2025) have thus recently shown that the "tax base fragmentation" – defined as the "unequal allocation of taxable property wealth across jurisdictional boundaries" – affects both the amount and type of fiscal revenue raised by local governments, forcing local jurisdictions under fiscal stress to turn to fees or non-revenue taxes. This directly connects to racial "macro-segregation", between metropolitan areas, with Black residents paying property tax rates close to double those of Whites (Manduca 2025), through what is described as the "Black tax" (Kahrl 2024). While local polities might argue that they represent independent economic bodies, thus refusing to pay for poorer, neighboring municipalities, the imbricated scales of U.S. fiscal federalism raises issues of distributive justice at the national level.

The case of imperial and colonial taxation provides an even more striking case of decoupling between “extraction” and “redistribution” (Daunton 1996); that is taxation and welfare. Historians of fiscal systems have just started to understand how displacing the “tax burden from metropole to the periphery” contributed to the univocal extraction of resources from distant subjects, thus shaping enduring inequalities at the global level (Bhambra and McClure 2022, 1). These imbalanced arrangements were commonplace throughout empires, often leading to a “racialized [...] fiscal hierarchy” (Woker 2022, 47). Furthermore, fiscal and wage exploitation were closely tied in this context: in the French Empire, the poll tax (capitation) was primarily made to “force colonial subjects into wage labor” with, conversely, fiscal seizure being facilitated by formalized labor, especially on
public works. In these contexts, colonial subjects were thus submitted to a dual exploitation (*V-chain*) by the state and colonial firms, yet exploiter status also extends to metropolitan taxpayers through a *C-chain*, since those benefited from the extraction of cheaper colonial products, often through forced labor, as well as geopolitical influence, despite a low fiscal burden. Symmetrically, for (exploited) imperial taxpayers, formulating a political alternative often combined demands for distributive equality, with more radical claims at political autonomy.

Conclusion

This paper seeks to renew exploitation theory by elaborating the notion of *chains*. Adopting a meso-level perspective, in between individual-transaction and structural accounts of exploitation, we move beyond dyadic frameworks to identify four basic chains (Figure 1), which as we argue constitute the elementary structures of exploitation - and study how they materialize in various economic arenas. Expanding on marxian approaches, we enlarge the scope of exploitation analysis beyond the strict realm of production, using insights from neoclassical approaches to open to other counterfactuals - not limited to the abolition of the private means of production. The quest for alternatives to both purely distributive-quantitative (inequality) and qualitative-relational accounts (domination) is visible through the recent proliferation of concepts, such as “oppression”, “subordination”, “appropriation”, “predation”, “marginalization”, etc. (Taylor 2019; Folbre 2020; Alami et al. 2023). Yet these explorations rarely question exploitation as such, almost sanctuarizing the classical marxist approach despite its long-known shortcomings. Through the combination of appropriation and power, we argue that exploitation offers a more solid bedrock to apprehend and compare a large range of economic imbalances: between individuals, households, firms or states; based either on class, gender, and race. While specific chains have received some attention - crucially *I-chains* in international political
economy, or *C-chains* in social philosophy - analytical and empirical accounts of the economic relations involved remain relatively disconnected (for an exception see Reed 2017), and other patterns are still critically underexplored. Among more emerging research, dual exploitation in production and the marketplace has thus proved a fertile ground for empirical work on consumer debt (Desmond and Wilmers 2019; Desmond 2023; Bittmann 2024), and fiscal exploitation has come under recent scrutiny (Woker 2022; Kahrl 2024; Manduca 2025).

More broadly, calls for expanding our conceptual understanding of capitalist relations beyond the worker-employer dyad (and wage-based production) have been formulated from a wide-range of loci in social theory. To cite but three contemporary articulation of these debates, one may think of social reproduction theory (SRT), intersectionality, or racial capitalism. All of these argue against, respectively, a production-centric, class-centric, and Western-centric vision of capitalism's advent or contemporary structure, narratives that have pushed outside the realm of exploitation theory unpaid or unpriced labor (Munro 2019), race and gender segmentations (Davis 2015), and historical hierarchies inherent to the global working class (de Vito et al. 2020; Bhambra 2021). Yet all of these somehow fragmented discussions have come short of precisely outlining what these (other) geometries meant for exploitation analysis, once the standard marxian framework and chronology are abandoned. While SRT scholars do theorize exploitation, they maintain a strict focus on the articulation between production and reproduction (that, the *L-chain*, cf. supra 2.4). As for theorists of intersectionality, they have pointed out the fuzziness with which the “vectors of power” (Nash 2008) materialize into local stratification situations and inequalities based on race, gender, and class (Davis 2015). Similarly, critiques of the “racial capitalism” framework have pointed out Cedric Robinson’s “strong attachment to Marx’s core idea of capitalism as formed around the capital-labour relation” (Bhambra and Holmwood 2023), and the “implicit teleology attributed to ‘labour’” (Bhambra 2021); thus folding racial inequalities back into strict dyadic relations. Rather than characterizing specific groups as
inherently exploited or exploiters, or hierarchizing between exploitative forms, chains help to map
relational segments between rectors, actors, and others, as they compound into elementary patterns,
thus providing a more flexible framework.

While the identification of chains sets the basic analytical groundwork, this paper has left a
range of issues open for inquiry: at an analytical level, a first set of interrogations pertains to the
combination of chains, beyond the elementary structures isolated, to fully describe the exploitative
configuration at various scales. A second, more empirical direction consists in studying the effects of
specific chains on local and global inequalities, especially when segments of actors can both benefit and
suffer from a position involving multiple links, leading to complex monetary flows (think of *I* and *L-*
*chains* involving, for instance, the subcontractor of a multinational or a worker-breadwinner). A last,
essential aspect concerns the ways in which the different chains can be contested, and the specific
obstacles faced by social movements. It is known that throughout the global North at least, traditional
labor unions are in crisis (Batut *et al.* 2024) and strike activity has generally collapsed (Massenkoff and
Wilmers, 2024). How much did the fragmentation of exploitation contribute to this weakening, and to
what degree does the diversification of anti-exploitation claims, transversally and beyond production,
represent solid ground for contestation remains to be studied. Indeed, beyond traditional issues raised
by materialist feminists regarding the articulation of production and reproduction, typical battles
against exploitative chains now include debt-based resistance (Krippner 2017; Mader and Ravelli
2025), the rise of tenant unions in the face of financialization (Crosby 2023), the endorsement of fiscal
or fees-related inequalities by traditional social movement organizations, or the disruption of value-
chains by local labor battles (Kumar 2020).

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