The Nature of Capitalist Exploitation
I’ve noticed how conservatives react to the conversation of class gap and poverty. Too often I hear from my peers, “well the American dream and wealth is attainable to anyone as long as you're willing to work hard enough to get to it.” The gap between the top 1% and the rest of us isn’t even a matter of privilege and resource distribution (even though that in itself is a problem). Activists are not mad that they are poor, they are mad because the class gap is built off of an exploitive community, and although we recognize that wealth comes with sacrifice, most of us are not willing to sacrifice our morals for an exploitative industry.
I won’t dwell too much into the nature of capitalist exploitation, because it was already clearly defined by Marx and also I think the point is plainly simple. But for my peers and teachers who continue to praise the idea that even Google was built in a garage, here is a little bit of an in depth analysis.
It is already well known that companies such as Nike, Forever 21, Ralph Lauren and other high end fashion companies use child labor and sweatshops for profit. Even Amazon, a company that has debunked the use of child labor and overseas sweatshops is oppressive in nature by monopolizing the consumer and production economy. Already, Amazon was exempt from taxes for two years straight. In 2019 Amazon’s tax bill accounted for 162 million dollars, a number a lot of us cannot even fathom, and still 162 million dollars is only 1.2% of a tax rate for the multi-million dollar industry.
However, Jeff Bezos isn’t even the face of what exploitation looks like in a capitalist society. Worker exploitation is a component of all class systems. It can be broken down into two main schools of capitalism, an exploited class that produces wealth and an exploiter class that expropriates it. Marx had argued that exploitation ultimately forms the groundwork for capitalism. The source of profit, driving production by means of underpaid labor workers and children. Under feudalism in classical Europe, serfs worked on land that belonged to the lord, producing what they were allowed for themselves while the majority product was kept to the lord. In European and World History class, exploitation is clearly defined by serfdom and feudalism, and we can understand poverty and poor working class men to be a consequence of an overworked and underpaid society, but in the modern developed world we reject this idea even when it is clearly laid in front of us. Why?
Marx answered this question by arguing that the exploitative nature of labor is hidden by the wage system. On the surface it appears that workers are paid a wage in exchange for service. The other piece of Marx’s examination on the nature of capitalism, is that of labor-power. Under capitalism, while we exchange our service for wage, we also sell our labor-power - our ability to work. Marx examines that "the value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently the reproduction, of this special article" (171). But, unlike other commodities, labor is a commodity whose "use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value" (167).
“All the billions in bonuses for the Wall Street bankers, every dividend paid to the shareholders of industrial corporations, every dollar collected by capitalist landlords--all of this is the result of the uncompensated labor of working-class people”.
- Gary Lapon 2011
Capitalism is inherently oppressive in nature, and this idea of our free market and American dream society is surely attainable to everyone - after all, Google was built in a garage. However, it is not the matter of opportunity distribution that makes it a corruptive system, but that wall street entrepreneurs and big companies are exacerbated by slavery, underpaid, and overworked labor and it is very difficult to accept this as a brink of society. “Eating the rich” is not a phrase rolled out of jealousy or envious poor people. The problem isn’t that wealth is unattainable, but that the system is exploitative.