Exploitation of Labor and Exploitation of Commodities

Naoki Yoshihara () and Roberto Veneziani

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2013, vol. 45, issue 4, 517-524

Abstract: In the standard Okishio-Morishima approach, the existence of profits is proved to be equivalent to the exploitation of labor. Yet, it can also be proved that the existence of profits is equivalent to the “exploitation†of any good. Labor and commodity exploitation are just different numerical representations of the productiveness of the economy. This paper presents an alternative approach to exploitation theory which is related to the “New Interpretation†(Duménil 1980; Foley 1982). In this approach, labor exploitation captures unequal social relations among producers. The equivalence between the existence of profits and labor exploitation holds, whereas it is proved that there is no relation between profits and commodity “exploitation.â€

Keywords: exploitation; profits; generalized commodity exploitation theorem; “New Interpretation†(search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B51 D46 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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