Exploitation, alternatives and socialism

Abstract

How can one understand the formation of inequality, strata and classes, and perhaps exploitation, in socialist society? Among Marxists there is no widely accepted materialist theory of the development of classes and inequality under socialism. Perhaps more noticeably, there is no widely accepted theory of the political behaviour of socialist states. Indeed, the response of many or most Marxists to wars between socialist states, for example, is that at least one of the countries involved is not socialist. This argument is tautological and not scientific: since two socialist countries could never fight each other, therefore the major premise (that they are both socialist) must be false. The example of wars between socialist countries is given to point out the nature of a crisis in Marxian theory: that theory, formulated in the late nineteenth century to explain the development of nineteenth century capitalism, does not seem useful when applied to late twentieth century socialism (and capitalism, perhaps). Marxists cannot, for instance, agree on the nature of Soviet society. Is it socialist, capitalist, state capitalist, or transitional? What definitions might one give to decide? Taking a cue from the Marxian approach to capitalism, one might seek to define a notion of exploitation relevant to socialist society. From such a beginning could follow a theory of class, and finally a political theory of socialist society as corollary to the theory of class. This paper is an attempt to approach this set of problems in the way indicated, by proposing a general theory of exploitation, of which socialist exploitation will be a special case. The task of providing a tlheory of exploitation relevant to socialist economies has much in common with the problem Marx faced in providing a theory of exploitation for capitalist economies. The economic problem for Marx was to explain how the gross inequities of capitalism could be reproduced in an economy characterised by voluntary exchange. In feudal and slave economies, there was no mystery to the locus of surplus appropriation, since the institution of labour exchange was coercive: one could clearly speak of serf and slave labour as being forcibly expropriated due to those social relations. Under capitalism, where the institution for labour exchange is noncoercive, how could one speak of exploitation, or expropriation of any commodity, including labour power? Marx's effort was to re'solve this paradox by providing a theory of value which claimed that despite the non-coerciveness of the institution of labour exchange, that exchange was exploitative. Thus, he claimed that exploitation was a phenomenon which was robust when one