Abstract
The problem of how exploitation should be conceptualised in social theory is of equivalent importance to that of how we should seek to analyse domination and power. Easily the most influential theory of exploitation in sociology is that of Marx, and this has to form the initial point of reference for any appraisal of the notion. In Marx, the question of exploitation (exploitieren, ausbeuten) is inevitably bound up with his over-all characterisation of the nature and development of class systems. In tribal societies, according to Marx, production and distribution are communal. In such societies the productive forces are relatively undeveloped; there is little or no surplus production. Classes only come into being with the expansion of the productive forces, such that a surplus is generated, appropriated by an emergent dominant class of non-producers. Class relations are hence inherently exploitative, since the ruling class lives off the surplus production of the subordinate class or classes. There is a major difference, according to Marx, between the exploitative relation involved between the two main capitalist classes and the class relations found in the prior types of class society, the Ancient world and feudalism. In the latter two types of society exploitation takes the form of the appropriation of the surplus labour by the dominant class.
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Notes
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) p. 185.
T.B. Bottomore, Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGrawHill, 1964) pp.126–7).
Habermas has accentuated this very strongly in many of his publications. I have a strong sympathy with the over-all trend both of his critique of Marx and with some of his conceptions of what the ‘good society’ could and should look like. But I think he was led up a wrong alley in basing his criticism of Marx on the distinction between ‘labour’ and ‘interaction’, accusing Marx of reducing the latter to the former. I have argued the case for this in my ‘Labour’ and ‘interaction’ in John B. Thompson and David Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971), and other works.
Cf. Roberta Hamilton, The Liberation of Women (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975).
Cf. Jean Baudrillard, Le miroir de la production (Tournai: Casterman, 1973).
On Habermas, see especially John Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and various of the contributions in Thompson and Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates.
For an analysis of the problem of German ‘backwardness’ as related to the intellectual relationship between Marx and Weber, see Anthony Giddens, ‘Marx, Weber, and the Development of Capitalism’, Sociology, vol.iv, 1970.
A Marxist treatment of the development of German philosophy and sociology in this context is given in Georg Lukács. Die Zerstörung der Vernuft (Berlin; Aufbau-Verlag, 1955).
See H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Galaxy, 1958) pp.382, 384. I have slightly amended the translation.
Max Weber, Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland (Leipzig; Dunover V. Humblot, 1982) p.798.
It is quite misleading to say as Eugene Fleischmann does, ‘De Weber à Nietzsche’, Archives européennes de sociologie, vol.v, 1964, p.194, that ‘Weber conceived most of his major works with the aim of “verifying” the correctness of the Marxian theory of the relations between infrastructure and superstructure’.
Quoted in Eduard Baumgarten (ed.), Max Weber, Werk und Person (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1964) p.607.
Max Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften (Tübingen: Mohrsiebeck, 1958) pp.543–4. My translation [of the standard collected edition of Weber’s political writings — Ed.]. A different version appears in Gerth and Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber, p.124.
Max Weber, Economy and Society, 3 vols (New York Bedminster Press, 1968) vo1.I pp.55–6.
Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1924) p.508.
Melvin Richter, ‘Durkheim’s politics and political theory’, in Kurt H. Wolff, Emile Durkheim et al., Essays on Sociology and Philosophy (New York: Harper’s Row, 1964).
See Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, Chapter 14. Cobban remarks: ‘A revolution had laid the foundations of an intensely conservative society, nor is this difficult to understand. The classes which consolidated their victory in the Revolution were the peasant proprietors in the country and the men of property in the towns, neither with any vision beyond the preservation of their own economic interest, conceived in the narrowest and most restrictive sense’. Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France (Harmondsworth: Penguin [New York: Braziller], 1968) vol.2, p.219.
Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 2nd edn (New York: Free Press, 1949) p.307 and passim.
E. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (Glencoe: Free Press, 1964) p.228. (I have modified the translation in this and certain other quotations.)
E. Durkheim, L’individualisme et les intellectuels’, Revue bleue, vol.10, 1898, pp.7–13.
A translation appears in Steven Lukes, ‘Durkheim’s “Individualism and the Intellectuals”’, Political Studies, vol.17, 1969, pp.14–30.
Cf. Alvin W. Gouldner: ‘Introduction’ to Durkheim’s Socialism and Saint-Simon (London: Routledge & Negan Paul, 1952 [Kent, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1958]) pp.13–18.
Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society ([Glencoe: Free Press, 1947] London: Macmillan, 1964) p.377.
E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method ([Glencoe: Free Press, 1950] London: Macmillan, 1964) pp.lvi.
E. Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau (Ann Arbor: University of, 1960) p.59.
Durkheim’s review of Simon Deploige, Le Conflit de la morale et de la sociologie (Paris: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1911)
E. Durkheim, Année sociologique, vol.12, 1909–12, p.327.
See particularly the brief but deservedly famous ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1967) pp.400–402.
Cf. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought (London: Penguin [New York: Basic Books], 1968) p.82ff.
E. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957) pp.50–1.
See Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision ([Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960] London: Allen & Unwin, 1961).
Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914–1924 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966) p.9.
This phrase was, of course, originally used by Engels to refer to Marx’s relation to Hegel. Cf. Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy’, K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1950) vol.2, p.350.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publish, 1968) pp.38–9.
Marx, Grundrisse, pp.375–413; the relevant sections are mostly included in an English translation of a small section from the work, E.J. Hobsbawm, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964); Weber’s discussion of Rome is to be found in ‘Die sozialen Gründe des Untergangs der antiken Kultur’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1924) pp.289–311. In the subsequent part of this paper I do not deal with the discrepancies between Marx’s discussion of ‘the Asiatic mode of production’, and Weber’s analysis of China and India. It has often been stated that Weber’s views upon the emergence of rational capitalism in the West can only be fully understood in the light of his writings on the various ‘world religions’. This is undeniably true. It is, however, quite misleading to regard these writings, as many have, as a form of ex post facto experiment which ‘tests’ the ‘independent’ influence of ideology upon social development. What Weber shows is that both the content of the religious ethics he discusses and the specific combination of ‘material’ circumstances found in Europe, China and India differ. (Thus, for example, Weber laid stress upon the ease of communications in Europe, the peculiar economic and political independence of the European city, plus various other ‘material’ conditions in terms of which Europe differed from China and India.) These material and ideological factors form a definite, interrelated ‘cluster’ in each case: the material conditions cannot therefore simply be treated as a ‘constant’ against which the ‘inhibiting’ or ‘facilitating’ influence of religious ideology as a ‘variable’ can be determined.
Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in On Religion (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1957), p.50. Marx only briefly alluded to the significance of the ideological content of Calvinism. (See, for example, Capital, vol.1, p.79.) Engels, on various occasions. discussed Calvinism at greater length.
Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in T.B. Bottomore, Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) pp.168 ff;
see also Karl Löwith, ‘Max Weber und Karl Marx’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialnnlirik vol.67, 1932, part 1, pp. 77ff
Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, p.171; cf. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp.110–11.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956).
Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962); Dialectics of Nature (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954).
It would perhaps be nearest to the truth to say, in Laski’s words, ‘That the two men had, as it were, evolved in common a joint stock of ideas which they regarded as a kind of intellectual bank account upon which either could draw freely’. Harold J. Laski. ‘Introduction to The Communist Manifesto’ (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967) p.20.
The phrase is Lukács’: Georg Lukács, Histoire et conscience de classe (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1960) p.20.
Cf. Maclntyre’s remarks on Kautsky, Bernstein and Lukács, in Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (London: Penguin, 1969) pp.95 ff.
Herbert Marcuse, ‘Industrialization and capitalism in the work of Max Weber’, in Herbert Marcuse, Negations, Essays in Critical Theory (London: Allen Lane, 1968 [Boston: Beacon Press, 1969]) p.223.
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Cassell, P. (1993). Encounters with the Classical Traditions. In: Cassell, P. (eds) The Giddens Reader. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22890-4_2
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