Exploitation, according to the advocates of exploitation theory, is the failure to pay a person what he deserves. The idea central to this theory is that deserts are objectively truths.
According to the labor theory of value, the value of a product is determined by the socially average amounts of human labor-time currently required to produce different goods and services. If it takes the average craftsman one hour to make a pair of shoes, then it is worth one hour of labor. If a doctor trades 15 minutes of his labor for two hours of a farmer’s labor, the doctor is exploiting the farmer.
There are two ways of reading the labor theory of value. One way of reading it is as a descriptive theory which purports to explain how market’s settle upon a certain price for any given product or service. Marx and others believed that the market would reach an equilibrium wherein no man would trade his labor for less labor than he had invested in his own product or service; such an equilibrium would be historically inevitable.
“What?” you say, “That’s insane! No doctor would trade an hour of his labor for an hour of a farmer’s labor!”
Marx would answer you, “Yes, they will, when the equilibrium has been reached.”
After all, if a doctor can trade 15 minutes of his labor for 2 hours of the farmer’s labor, then wouldn’t it make sense for the farmer to give up farming and become a doctor? And after so many people have given up farming and become doctors, the supply of farmers will dwindle, and supply of doctors will increase, and an equilibrium will be achieved whereby one hour’s labor by the doctor is of equal value to one hour’s labor by the farmer.
Of course, we know now the labor theory of value to be unadulterated hogwash. Farmers do not give up farming to become doctors. People do not choose their occupations solely or even largely on the basis of income potential. They choose occupations they believe to be a good fit to their skills or personality.
Another way to read the labor theory of value is as a moral imperative; that is, normatively instead of descriptively. Under this reading, Marx is saying it is morally wrong to trade one hour’s labor for less than or more than one hour’s labor.
The labor theory of value, read as moral proposition, is neither true nor false. It simply isn’t truth-apt, same as all moral propositions. Moral propositions are nothing more than an individual’s statement of his own subjective valuation of behavior. To say something is morally wrong is to say that you negatively value the occurence of that behavior.
As such, when an individual argues that one person or group is exploiting another, he is simply saying that he doesn’t value the behavior, in the same way he may not value cotton T-shirts. The statement does not have the possibility of possessing the authority of objective truth.
