Exploitation

in socioeconomic formations characterized by class antagonisms, the appropriation of another’s labor by the owners of the means of production.
As a social phenomenon, exploitation presupposes a system of measures for coercing people to work. The dominant classes use such a system to appropriate, without offer of compensation, the products of surplus labor of the actual producers; on occasion, part of the necessary labor is appropriated as well. The material prerequisites for exploitation appear when the development of productive forces reaches a level that permits the creation of both the necessary product and the surplus product. The socioeconomic conditions in which one person can exploit another originated in the period of the disintegration of the primitive communal system, when the institution of private ownership emerged and society became divided into antagonistic classes.
The modes of exploitation vary according to the particular antagonistic socioeconomic formation and are determined by the way in which labor power is coupled with the means of production. Extraeconomic constraint typified the slaveholding and feudal socioeconomic formations, whereas capitalism developed a system that relied on the economic compulsion to work (seeEXTRAECONOMIC CONSTRAINT and ECONOMIC COMPULSION TO WORK). The degree of exploitation is measured by the ratio of the surplus product to the necessary product; stated another way, it is the ratio of surplus labor to necessary labor.
Historically, the first and crudest form of exploitation was slavery. In slaveholding society, the slaveholder owned both the means of production and labor power. The entire product was appropriated without remuneration by the slaveholding class, which supplied the slaves with means of subsistance scarcely sufficient for them to exist in a state of semistarvation.
Under feudalism, exploitation was based on the feudal lords’ ownership of the land and partial ownership of labor power. The surplus product created by the labor of peasant serfs was appropriated without remuneration by the feudal lords and assumed the form of feudal land rent. Feudal exploitation passed through two main stages: the corvée economy and the quitrent economy (seeCORVÉE and QUITRENT). In the corvée economy, the peasant worked part of the time on the feudal lord’s land and part on the parcel of land allotted to him. Necessary and surplus labor were separate from one another in time and in space. Under the quitrent system, all labor was expended on the peasant’s farm. In the corvee economy, surplus labor assumed the form of labor rent; in the quitrent economy, rent was paid in produce or in cash.
Under capitalism, the means of production, which are owned by the capitalist class, are coupled to labor power by means of the purchase and sale of the latter. The worker is legally free, but he lacks the means of production. Under such a system, labor power becomes a commodity that is remunerated by the capitalist on the basis of value. The mechanism of capitalist exploitation is based on the difference in magnitude between the value of the labor power commodity and the value created by labor power. The exploitation of hired workers by capital is expressed in the appropriation of the surplus product, which assumes the form of surplus value. The degree of exploitation is measured by the ratio of surplus value to variable capital spent on the remuneration of the labor power commodity. Exploitative relations in capitalist society are masked by the concept of wages, which serve as the transformed value (price) of the labor power commodity.
Production goals and the laws of competition promote the systematic growth of capitalist exploitation. Today, the capitalist monopolies, by concentrating vast material and labor resources in their hands, are able to extract monopoly profit. The joining of the economic power of the monopolies with the power of the bourgeois state into a single mechanism, as well as the formation and development of finance capital, make the working people of capitalist countries an object of exploitation at all stages of the reproduction of social capital. Under contemporary capitalism, exploitation is accompanied by a continual rise in prices and the cost of living, increased unemployment, and a heightening of social inequality. Workers engaged in physical labor and workers engaged in intellectual labor, both in the sphere of material production and in the nonproduction sphere, are drawn into the orbit of capitalist exploitation.
The history of all exploitative societies has been marked by the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters—that is, by class struggle.
The establishment of social ownership of the means of production eliminates the exploiting classes and the exploitation of man by his fellow man (seeSOCIALISM).
===REFERENCES===
Marx, K. Kapital, vol. 1, chs. 4, 5, 17, 23, and 24. In K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 23.Marx, K. Kapital, vol. 3, chs. 20,36, and 47. Ibid., vol. 25.Engels, F. Anti-Dühring, secs. 2–3. Ibid.,vo\. 20.Engels, F. Proiskhozhdenie sem’i, chastnoi sobstvennosli i gosudarstva. Ibid., vol. 21.Lenin, V. I. Razvitie kapitalizma v. Rossii. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol.3.Lenin, V. I. Imperializm, kak vysshaia stadiia kapitalizma. Ibid., vol. 27.Lenin, V. I. “Ekonomika i politika v epokhu diktatury proletariata.” Ibid., vol. 39.A. A. KHANDRUEV