Exploitation via labour power in Marx

Abstract

Marx's account of capitalist exploitation is undermined by inter-related confusions surrounding the notion of “labour power.” These confusions relate to [i] what labour power is, [ii] what happens to labour power in the labour market, and [iii] what the epistemic status of labour power is (the issue of “appearance and reality”). The central theses of the paper are [a] that property ownership is the wrong model for understanding the exploitation of labour, and [b] that the concept of exploitation is linked more fruitfully to a conception of distributive injustice than to Marx's theory of surplus value.