Self-Ownership

Abstract

One topic more than any other has dominated recent discussion among Analytic Marxists: exploitation. That exploitation should have such at tention lavished upon it seems appropriate enough: it is at the heart of the Marxian claim that capitalism is unjust. The other ills of capitalism may be differentially distributed, but only exploitation is essentially a relation between two classes—exploited and exploiting—and therefore, by defi nition, a kind of unfairness. Unfortunately, the classical analyses of exploitation have proved dif ficult to defend. The economic theory upon which they rely—the labor theory of value—is now all but entirely discredited, and the best defini tions of capitalistic exploitation have proved vulnerable to counter example. Under the weight of these repeated assaults, the theory of ex ploitation is tottering; indeed, it seems to some already to have given way. The concept is so compromised that one well-known Marxist, John Roemer, has asked himself the question Should Marxists Be Interested in Exploitation? and answered in the negative.1 And as if the objections and counter-examples upon which Roemer relied were not sufficient finally to kill off exploitation, since Roemer's article G.A. Cohen has formulated a new set of problems. Cohen's strat egy is to lay bare the presuppositions of the charge of exploitation. Once this is achieved, he is able to show that these presuppositions are irre deemably bourgeois, and entail consequences that are unacceptable to Marxists—indeed, to anyone who values equality. Moreover, Cohen ar gues, whatever value the charge of exploitation had in Marx's day, al terations in the class structure of Western societies have since rendered it