The concept of exploitation is a central one in Marxism. A key claim of Marxism is that capitalism, like previous class-divided societies, rests on the exploitation of the class of direct producers. Just like the slave system was built on the exploitation of the slaves, the direct producers in a slave system, and the feudal system rested on the exploitation of the serfs, who were the direct producers in feudalism, the capitalist system rests on the exploitation of the working class, the direct producers in capitalism. In Chapter 3, we had encountered the concept of exploitation when we were discussing Marx's argument about the origins of surplus value. In this chapter, we revisit the issue and discuss it in greater detail. We will also discuss two important issues related to the question of exploitation. First, we will study the Analytical Marxist (AM) critique of the labour theory of value (and exploitation of labour) that can be called a commodity theory of value (and exploitation of commodities). Second, we will study the relationship between exploitation and oppression, and the related question of the relationship between exploitation and distributive injustice.

Recall that Marx's labour theory of value rests on the argument that labour is the substance of value (Marx, 1992, Chapter 1). In the first volume of Capital, Marx refined and extended the classical labour theory of value (LTV) and used it to demonstrate that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class. An influential strand of AM thinking has challenged this basic argument with what I would like to call a commodity theory of value (CTV). There are two key claims of the CTV: first, that any basic commodity can be used to construct a consistent value theory, where a basic commodity is one which is used directly or indirectly to produce all other commodities; and second, that the rate of profit is positive if and only if the basic commodity is exploited. This means that there is nothing special in labour so far as it can be considered the substance of value. Basic commodities can as well function as a substance of value. Moreover, just like labour is exploited if we choose to use Marx's LTV, it can also be demonstrated that when a basic commodity is chosen as the candidate substance of value, it is also necessarily exploited in a capitalist economy.