Conclusions: Rethinking Exploitation

The explanation of exploitation constitutes the core of Marx’s economic theory. It is his most innovative contribution to the science of capitalism. Better than any other socialist thinker, Marx helps us understand the institutions and social relations that form the mechanisms through which capitalism extracts surplus value from the labour activity of wageworkers. However, the edifice of his theory is not devoid of some clumsiness, for example, in his account of the employment contract, as we...