Exploitation Analysis in Socio-Economics. A State of the Art

Exploitation is a paradoxical notion: both widely used to characterize extractive relations, and little discussed within contemporary social sciences. It generally offers three attractive properties compared to more commonly used concepts - inequality, domination, and discrimination - in that it is simultaneously distributive, relational and openly counterfactual. In order to clarify debates on what makes a labor contract, market transaction or social relation exploitative, we suggest moving beyond strict Marxist and neo-classical baselines, making explicit the non-exploitative counterfactual on which claims of exploitation are predicated. To do so, exploitation analysis should answer four main questions: What is the non-exploitative counterfactual? What is appropriated? What allows the exploiter to exploit? At what scale does exploitation operate? Using those, we move away from the traditional focus either on the worker-employer dyad or rent capture, to offer a typology of four exploitative forms - within the production unit, on the market, in the domestic sphere, and by the State. Finally, we suggest the notion of chains of exploitation, since most socio-economic configurations involve layered relations, where agents can stand both as exploiters and exploited.