2 Domination at Work

Theories of exploitation face three urgent questions. First, what makes exploitation unjust? Second, what is the metric of exploitation complaints, the yardstick for their individuation and measurement? Third, what is the modality of these features under different social formations, that is, what gives exploitation its historical specificity under slavery, serfdom, patriarchy, and capitalism? Liberal political philosophy, in its canonical statements in Rawls and Dworkin, couches its answer to the injustice question in terms of coercion, rights, or fairness; to the metric question in terms of (access to) welfare, goods, capabilities, or a combination thereof; and to the modality question by appeal to the mutually consensual nature of transactions which, in the case of capitalism, reflects the positions of reciprocally situated commodity owners.

This book offers better answers to these questions. In this chapter, I argue that what makes exploitation unjust is that it constitutes domination-induced unilateral service to others. In Chapter 3, I show that this form of servitude is necessarily cashed out in terms of labour time or effort and that competing accounts of exploitation fail to do justice to the servitude dimension. It follows that the concept of surplus labour is central to charges of exploitation, a centrality that does not presuppose any controversial claims about the determination of prices or a labour theory of value. And in Chapter 4, I will show that what distinguishes capitalism historically is the way it reproduces a structural dilemma between no work and dominated work.

I now summarize the argument of this chapter. According to the domination account of exploitation, the theoretical starting point is how power converts others into servitude and how that servitude, in turn, redounds as benefit. As a matter of logic, servitude presupposes dominion. So what is dominion? This chapter argues that it is subjection of purposiveness to the choices of others. Applied to work, such subjection means unilateral control over productive purposiveness: human labour capacity. I then argue that capital is a historically specific form of that subjection, namely monetary control over the labour capacity of others.

This chapter has eight sections. Section 2.1 introduces the Non-Servitude Proviso, an account of domination at work. Section 2.2 broaches three justifications for the Proviso: Kantian, republican, and recognitional. Section 2.3 illustrates the Proviso with the help of a simple economic model. Section 2.4 discusses the implications of the Proviso for capitalism and capitalist accumulation. Section 2.5 discusses the role of money, the crucial distinction between money as a means of exchange and money as capital, and their relationship to unilateral control over labour capacity. Section 2.6 distinguishes between different forms of domination and explores the distinction between domination at work and domination in the workplace. Section 2.7 discusses exemptions to the Proviso and contrasts it with different specifications of what makes exploitation unjust. And section 2.8 explains why exploitation is inherent to capitalism.

The French Revolution taught us to think about equality, liberty, and solidarity as three faces of the same value: the equal independence of the individual in community with others. This book uses that general idea to develop an account of exploitation as domination. According to this account, exploitation is what happens when alien wills exercise unilateral control over your purposiveness, thereby converting you into their servant. How do you serve others without being their servant? Rousseau and Kant offer a promising answer: by serving institutions that support the conditions of the freedom of all, and therefore the conditions of your own freedom, you serve others without being implicated in their ends.¹ The Rousseau/Kant idea applies quite generally, but this book undertakes to apply it to social relations between human producers.

To take a concrete example, suppose that omelettes are the only means of consumption and that, if I am to nourish myself, I must produce an omelette. As an omelette consumer I have set myself an end; as an omelette producer I must use means to pursue and fulfill that end. Now, as long as you and others own the eggs, I can produce the omelette only by your permission. This makes my ability to set and pursue the end of omelette production—my productive purposiveness—subordinate to your unilateral will. When that subordination is expressed in extraction of unilateral labour flow from me, you exploit me. Omelette redistribution will not solve this problem, insofar as it leaves the mode of omelette production untouched, no matter how much it ameliorates the mode of omelette distribution in my favour. Egalitarian egg predistribution does better, but still subordinates my omelette production to your will, insofar as it does not preclude your ownership or control of the omelette-producing cookshop. And again, when that control eventuates in unilateral labour flow, you exploit me. The rest of this chapter refines and elaborates these simple ideas.

To focus intuitions, consider:

Pit—A and B are alone in the desert. A finds B lying at the bottom of a pit. A offers B costless rescue, on condition that B works for A for $1/day for the rest of her life, or pays A $1 million.

A’s offer is exploitative, such that, if B accepts it, she will be exploited. The purpose of this book is to explain why A treats B unjustly in this and similar cases, despite the fact that their agreement is uncoerced, voluntary, and mutually beneficial.² I will first offer an explanation for why a Pit-like contract exploits B. The idea is that the contract ropes B’s purposiveness into unilaterally serving A’s, something to which A is not, by right, entitled. I will then explain why asking for $1/day or for $1 million are, in principle, equivalent, as both cases entitle A to a share of the exercise of B’s productive purposiveness to which she is not, by right, entitled. Chapter 3 will extend these ideas to the sale of sexual services, gestational labour, and body parts.

A central concern of the domination account of exploitation is the form of social control over the net product and, by implication, over the surplus product.³ ‘Forms’ of control range from slavery, feudalism, and the patriarchy—where control over the net product is established through coercion in the labour process—to capitalism—where control over the net product is market mediated, value constituted, and noncoercive. Capitalism is unlike all pre-capitalist economic formations, in that control over labour capacity appears like action at a distance: it never involves direct control over alien agency. I elaborate the possibility of domination without direct control in section 2.3. The rest of this section introduces and defends my account of servitude and domination.

A generic concern with agency is normally justified by a fundamental commitment to freedom: the independence of the individual. Individual independence, in general, consists in nonsubjection to the choices of others. Consider the Pit case. A’s behaviour is unjust because she controls not just any contingent end that B might set and pursue, but rather B’s wholesale ability to set and pursue choiceworthy ends, quite independently of her ability to work for $1 or pay $1 million. What matters here is that B gets roped into unilaterally serving A, thereby sacrificing something of agential significance. A, in other words, comes to unilaterally control B’s purposiveness and not just her contingent purposes, including the end of costless pit exit.

Applied to work, individual independence is violated when alien wills⁴ possess unilateral control over the exercise of your labour capacity in a way that subjects the conditions of your agential purposiveness to theirs. This includes Pit-like relations, of the form: ‘My rope for your productive powers!’ Unsubjected purposiveness, by contrast, is described by the:

Non-Servitude Proviso—For any agents or groups engaged in mandatory mutually affecting cooperation under a division of labour, and barring any special justification that exempts them, none should possess unilateral control over the labour capacity of any other.⁵

The Non-Servitude Proviso is a transhistorical normative criterion of freedom at work. It concerns mandatory cooperation in the sense of cooperation institutionally necessary for unsubjected mutual purposiveness. The idea behind the Proviso is that, as long as production goods are scarce, mutual independence will require social labour.⁶ Note that this says very little about control over the product of labour itself. Saying more requires a theory of justice in the transfer of goods and services, once a set of prior property rights in useful things has been established. Rather, any such set must incorporate the Proviso’s concerns by ensuring that unilateral control over things does not confer unilateral control over persons. I now explain what this means and what it enables us to explain.

In the context of mandatory social cooperation, the Proviso establishes a presumption against unilateral control over the social labour of others, the exercise of their productive purposiveness. You possess unilateral control over my labour capacity if, in the description of our respective roles in the division of labour,⁷ you possess control over the content, intensity, or duration of my labour process which I do not possess over yours. This means that there are things you can order or get me—‘bind’ me—to do over which I have no say, and over which you are not (legally or conventionally) obligated to consider my judgements, interests, or goals. According to the Proviso, such control over the labour capacity of others is presumptively unjust. What does ‘presumptively’ mean?

Consider an analogy with polygamy. One good argument against institutionalized polygamy is that it involves unilateral control of one married partner over another.⁸ Polygamy is presumptively unjust in the sense that, whatever reasons might count in its favour—for example, that it is mutually consensual or beneficial—there is always a presumption against unilateral residual control over purposiveness and its conditions. Capitalist relations between consenting adults are presumptively unjust in a similar sense: they are the civil society equivalent of polygamy.

The Proviso censures this unilateralism. It establishes a prima facie case against unilateral control over the labour performance of others. It implies that, if A and B perform independently required cooperative work—social labour—then they may work (un)equal amounts of time, as long as that (in)equality does not only reflect unequal power. If the Proviso is violated, such that A unjustly possesses unilateral control over B’s purposiveness, then A dominates B. Exploitation is what happens when the dominator benefits through such domination. So, on this view, exploitation is the activation of the extractive dispositions of the powerful: it is a dividend of servitude.⁹

These definitions imply a general taxonomy of different forms of unilateral control over the labour capacity of others across different modes of production of the net product. Slavery and feudalism, for example, involve unilateral control over labour capacity through direct coercion. The Non-Servitude Proviso is clearly violated in these cases. Patriarchy is similar, in that it involves coercive control, by men, over the (sexual) labour of women. But, unlike traditional slavery and serfdom, the patriarchy seems compatible with meaningful exit options for women. For it is conceptually possible, under the patriarchy, that individual women can exit their individual marital relationships, or even retain the socioeconomic wherewithal never to marry.¹⁰ Yet, for as long as the role of women within the (legal) description of the family remains subordinate to the role of men, women as a whole remain subjected to the choices of men. In other words, the patriarchy violates the Non-Servitude Proviso, not because the labour of any individual woman is dominated, but rather because the labour of women is dominated. Similar things can be said about polygamy and prostitution.

Capitalism is akin to the patriarchy, in the sense that it is compatible with meaningful exit options for individual workers.¹¹ But the availability of such options—through labour rights, the welfare state, or an unconditional basic income—does not suffice to emancipate the workers from the domination of capitalists, any more than the availability of divorce suffices to emancipate women from the domination of men. The slavery and patriarchy examples show that a free, voluntary, uncoerced contract does not, in general, suffice to waive the requirements of the Proviso: one might freely contract into slavery or into an abusive marital relationship. This does not make such relationships just. By the same token, a dictatorship may offer good, even lucrative, exit options to its subjects. This makes it no less dictatorial for those who stay. So it is the Proviso, or something like it, that establishes the conditions for a just contractual relationship and not the other way around.¹² I now offer three provisional justifications for the Proviso.

The Non-Servitude Proviso can be elaborated as follows:

I will discuss three widely discussed philosophical accounts of (1): Kantian, broadly based on the idea of a moral right to independence; republican, broadly based on a conception of arbitrary power; and recognitional, broadly based on a conception of interpersonal recognition. My purpose here is not to provide a complete justification for the Proviso, but rather to steer the conversation about the injustice of exploitation in the direction of the domination theory.

The Kantian argument for the Proviso goes roughly as follows: all humans have an innate moral right to external freedom, ‘independence from being constrained by another’s choice … insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law.’ (Kant 1996, p. 393). Independence, on this view, is about being able to set and pursue ends with means that are rightfully yours. Domination, by contrast, consists in my thwarting your agential purposiveness, subjecting your ability to set and pursue ends to mine. This establishes (1), excluding the bracketed term. A Kantian may now construe (2) as follows: cooperation at work involves constraint by another’s choice, insofar as one agent (or group of agents), A, unilaterally controls the labour process of another, B, including the labour/nonlabour input mix, and has possession of B’s final product.¹³ Kantian independence therefore countenances the Proviso.

The republican argument has a similar structure: unfreedom consists in subjection to arbitrary power. All power over others that is not compelled to track their judgements, interests, or goals is arbitrary.¹⁴ This establishes (1), including the bracketed term. A republican may now argue for (2), as follows: work relations involving A’s unilateral control over B’s labour process, including the labour/nonlabour input mix, and legal possession of B’s final product, are instances of arbitrary power. Republican independence therefore countenances the Proviso.¹⁵

Finally, the recognition argument for the Proviso goes as follows: free recognitive agency consists in the ability to act by having your rational intentions—intentions whose contents are independently justified—taken by others as reasons. For example, B’s rational intention to eat gives A a reason not to obstruct B’s eating, by taking B’s rational intention to eat as a reason not to obstruct that eating. When the realization of B’s rational intention is at A’s discretion, B is subjected to A’s choices. This establishes (1), excluding the bracketed term. The recognitionist may now argue for (2), as follows: work relations involving A’s control over B’s labour process, including the labour/nonlabour input mix, and legal possession of B’s final product, give A discretion over the realization of B’s rational intentions about production—what gets produced when and how. Free recognitive agency therefore countenances the Proviso.¹⁶

This concludes my sketch of three separate justifications for the Non-Servitude Proviso. In practice, all three theories allow that the Proviso is satisfied if B had an equal say on all matters that subject her labour capacity to A’s decisions, and vice versa.¹⁷ The result generalizes to any sufficiently developed economy with a complex division of labour and concomitant labour flows.¹⁸ I now put the Proviso to work, with the help of a simple economic model.

To motivate the domination account of exploitation further, and to demostrate its general applicability, I will use a simple model of economic reproduction due to Roemer (2017). My intention is to provide an account of the central injustice of capitalism that works as an alternative to Roemer’s, without disputing widely shared assumptions about the constitution of prices, markets, and rational agency.¹⁹ A convincing ecumenical critique of capitalism cannot be based on idiosyncratic methodological or behavioural assumptions its defenders do not share.

The model I will consider involves a single consumption and production good, produced through a rudimentary division of labour across two sectors with different technologies, under the assumption of optimizing economic agents and instantaneous market clearing.

There are 1000 peasants who own the means of production collectively. These means amount to 500 units of seed corn. Each peasant wants to enjoy subsistence forever and, subject to that constraint, maximize her weekly leisure. Subsistence requires consumption of one unit of corn per week. There are two technologies, the Factory Farm and the Forest. The input–output relations are as follows:

In the Factory Farm, each peasant produces two units of corn, by using up one unit of seed corn and one unit of labour—say, one day a week.²⁰ In the Forest, each peasant produces one unit of corn by increasing her labour input to three days a week.

In this economy, there is a Pareto efficient and egalitarian equilibrium in which each peasant spends 1/2 a day working in the Farm, using up 1/2 a unit of seed corn, producing a total of 1000 units of corn and netting 1/2 corn each (for a total of 500 units of corn). Then each works 3/2 days in the Forest, receiving 1/2 unit of corn (for a total of 500 units). In equilibrium, each peasant works for two days. Total labour time in this economy is 2000 days and there is no exploitation.

Now contrast economy (I) with a capitalist economy, in which all of the seed corn is owned by ten capitalists. The remaining 99 percent own nothing but their capacity to work. Roemer argues that this economy will have a labour market, in which the only market-clearing real wage (in terms of units of corn) is 1/3. Intuitively, this is entailed by the nature of the outside option: since the Forest allows the worker to subsist outside the Farm by earning 1/3 corn per day, the demand for labour in corn would be too high above 1/3 and too low below it.²¹ Note that corn is here both a measure of value and a means of exchange (of labour power). The rest of this section elaborates on the exploitation properties of economy (II).

In equilibrium the capitalists will hire 500/3 (≈ 167) peasants, each working for three days per week, and netting one unit of corn each. The remaining 2470/3 (≈ 823) peasants will work in the Forest for three days each, earning one unit of corn. Finally, the capitalists will appropriate 1000 units of corn. They will spend 500 to replace their capital stock and 500/3 as wages. The remaining 1000/3 (≈ 333) is their total profit.²²

In this economy, total labour time is 2970 days per week (990 peasants times three days each). According to the domination account of exploitation, these extra 970 days of labour expended, compared to economy (I), comprise exploitation. More precisely, each of 167 factory workers must work an extra day, for a total of three days. Since the daily wage is 1/3 corn, the worker attains subsistence only by working two out of three days gratis for the factory owner. Moreover, by dint of the ownership-induced scarcity of factory work compared to economy (I), each of the remaining 823 peasants must spend an extra day working in the forest.²³

Generalizing from capitalist economy (II), Roemer argues that:

Three conditions are necessary for exploitation to emerge in this model: (1) unequal ownership of the capital stock, (2) a labour market, and (3) scarcity of capital relative to the labour available for employment. All three conditions must hold for exploitation to occur. (Roemer 2017, p. 268)

Roemer shows that the existence of a labour market, condition (2), will not, of itself, generate exploitation when either (1) or (3) fail to hold. Consider, for example, a situation without collective ownership, in which every peasant owns an equal share of 1/2 corn, such that (1) does not hold. The division of labour reflects economy (I): each peasant works for 1/2 at the Farm, netting 1/2 corn. She then works in the Forest for one and a half days, producing another 1/2 corn. She therefore nets a total of one unit of corn. In this private ownership economy each attains subsistence, the capital stock is reproduced, and there is no exploitation.

A more interesting case involves some peasants hiring others, such that only (2) and (3) hold.²⁴ Here, both ‘capitalists’ and ‘workers’ work for a total of two days each. There is a ‘profit’ but no surplus labour, over and above the 2000 total days necessary for reproduction. There is therefore no exploitation.²⁵ In a sense, there is also no capital in this economy, as no peasant has corn-conferred title to unilateral control over the labour performance of any other.

I now use Roemer’s model to elaborate on a general corollary of the Non-Servitude Proviso, namely that any economy that violates conditions (1)–(3) is exploitative, regardless of its origins. In other words, there is such a thing as ‘clean’ capitalist accumulation and even that form of accumulation gives rise to injustice.

This section studies the purest form of capitalist accumulation imaginable: ‘clean’ capitalist accumulation through capitalist ‘ingenuity and hard work’. I show why, by the Proviso, even this form of capitalism is unjust. The result is significant because it shows capitalist accumulation to be unjust in its purest and most idealized form. It is, moreover, relevant that critics of capitalism sometimes assume that what makes it unjust are violent enclosures, colonialism, or plunder. These are not, I will argue, necessary features of capitalist accumulation. To think otherwise is to suggest that clean capitalist accumulation—accumulation without these features—is not, as such, unjust. And it then follows that capitalism is not, as such, unjust. I proceed by considering a simple case of cleanly-generated capitalist accumulation, that is, of a clean—nonviolent, noncoercive—transition from an economy like (I) to an economy like (II).

This is the same setup as in collective-ownership economy (I), the only difference being that some peasants no longer want to consume one unit of corn in perpetuity. About a sixth of the total population are beginning to want more, which boosts corn demand. Ten enterpreneurial peasants conceive of a plan.

The ten begin working in the Forest for six-and-a-half days a week. Each spends half a day in the Farm, netting half a unit of corn. She then works in the forest for six days. Of this, she spends one and a half days working for subsistence, which produces half a unit of corn, and another four and a half days, which produces another 11/2 units of corn. This surplus she saves, week in, week out. In thirty-three weeks, the ten will together own 500 corn. This will allow them to start their own private Factory Farm. Reproduction in this economy will work as in capitalist economy (II): assuming the wage is 1/3, the ten will hire the 167 non-ascetic peasants to work for three days each. Of the resulting net product, they will earn a profit of 333 units of corn (33.3 each), paying the non-ascetic peasants 167 corn as wages. Surplus labour is equal to 333 days and amounts to exploitation.²⁶

What we have here is an invisible-hand process which, starting from a condition of rightful collective ownership and absolute equality (economy (I)), turns into something resembling an infinitely reproducible capitalist economy (economy (II)). No force, no violence, no colonies, no robbery.²⁷ What could possibly be wrong with this situation? More precisely, how could this transition from a just initial situation, through just steps, produce an exploitative, and therefore unjust, outcome?²⁸

Consider, again, the Pit case. The Non-Servitude Proviso censures A’s behaviour in that example, regardless of (the justice of) distributive background or the presence of reasonable alternatives for B. It does not matter, for example, whether B ended up at the bottom of the pit by failing to save resources, by eating the soil, or by failing to buy cheap insurance against soil erosion. By the Proviso, A cannot permissibly offer costless rescue in return for thousands of hours of labour—at least, barring some independent justification for doing so.²⁹ The same is true of capitalist economy (III): it does not matter if it is arrived at from a just original situation (such as economy (I)) through just steps (clean capitalist accumulation). The end result, capitalist economy (III), violates the Proviso. The argument for this conclusion is as follows.

Capitalism solves the problem of labour ‘difficulty’—the allocation of labour inputs across economic units with different capital intensities—by expressing the value of the exercise of labour capacity in terms of the value of its product.³⁰ Because the seed corn is concentrated in a few hands, so is the value of the net product. And since unilateral control over the net product confers unilateral control over labour capacity (in this case, through the labour market), the seed corn becomes something it was not in economy (I), namely unilateral control over persons in the form of control over things. The seed corn, in other words, becomes capital.

More concretely, in economy (III) ten capitalists come to control 500 units of seed corn. The non-ascetic peasants have an interest in this product and can access it by renting out their several labour powers—their ability to work—to the capitalists. So control over the value of the final product entitles the capitalists to control over the productive purposiveness of those peasants, indeed more control than any of the peasants enjoy over any of the capitalists.³¹ Now each capitalist can produce her own subsistence individually and still have corn left over, corn which begets her unilateral control over the labour performance of sixteen others. This is how economy (III) violates the Proviso. Note, moreover, that this conclusion is independent of how economy (III) is arrived at.³² And since the violation of the Proviso is expressed in the form of extraction of surplus labour, economy (III) is exploitative. I now explain the significance of the distinction between exploitation and domination in the context of these stylized examples.

I begin with a clarification. The Proviso does not say that A dominates B only if A extracts unreciprocated labour flow from B. That is, the Proviso is compatible with A and B working an equal amount of time, or no time at all. Rather, the Proviso emphasizes power over labour, regardless of actual labour contribution or the distribution of its fruits. This has important implications for the dispositional nature of the freedom critique of capitalism. The following example elaborates:

This is the same setup as in capitalist economy (II)—the 1 percent owns all the seed corn—with two amendments. First, the ten capitalists work in the Farm for three days each, that is, as much as the other peasants. Second, the capitalists institute a system of profit-sharing, such that each peasant, including the capitalists, consumes an equal amount of corn.³³ In equilibrium, the capitalists earn a profit of 343 corn. This profit is then equally distributed to all, giving each peasant a final consumption of 1.3 corn. I now explain why even this economy, which features a perfectly egalitarian final distribution, runs afoul of the Non-Servitude Proviso.

In economy (IV), the total amount of labour performed is 3000 days (500 in the Farm; 2500 in the Forest). If necessary labour amounts to 2000 days, surplus labour is equal to 1000 days. But no surplus is consumed by the capitalists, so there is no exploitation. Roemer infers from this that labour extraction is irrelevant to complaints of economic injustice. But this inference is unacceptable.³⁴ For the ten capitalists directly control the working lives of 157 peasants (and indirectly of 833). Contrast a case where the capital stock is jointly owned, as in economy (I). Here the peasants could collectively decide to work an extra day each, for 3000 days in total. Such a collective decision would not violate the Proviso, insofar as it did not reflect unilateral control, by ten capitalists, over the working lives of any other.

So what matters, according to the Proviso, is who controls the net product and, by implication, the labour capacities of others. Once again, capital is monetized control over alien labour capacity. Whether that control translates into exploitation—actual unilateral labour flow—is secondary. So economy (IV) and its philanthrocapitalists violate the Proviso, but without exploiting.³⁵

To make this argument more vivid, consider Pettit’s (1999, pp. 50–55) well-known example:

Kindly Master—A owns a slave, B, but never actually interferes with her. Moreover, A never extracts a surplus from B’s labour.

In this case, A does not exploit B. But that hardly matters. What matters is that B is enslaved, such that A can readily exploit B. Such exploitability is censured by the Non-Servitude Proviso, on the grounds of unilateral or arbitrary or misrecognitive control over B’s purposiveness. In other words, A dominates B, and that suffices to dub their relationship unjust, regardless of the (justice of the) distributive background that gave rise to it or the availability of alternatives. As I explained in Chapter 1, this theory dubs as exploitative a wider class of transactions than just the monopolist, the rentier, or the patrimonial capitalist (who benefits against the background of unjust distribution).

Summing up, the Proviso implies that, morally speaking, distribution is subordinate to production. That is, the Nozickian-transition economy (III) is unjust not because it is distributively unjust—it may not be, if it issues from clean capitalist accumulation. Rather, it is unjust because it gives a small minority of ten capitalists unilateral control over the working lives of hundreds of others. Exploitation is what happens when that control is activated in order to squeeze unilateral labour flow out of the labour capacity of those others. I now extend these ideas to garden-variety monetary transactions, by elaborating the distinction between money and capital.

Having explained how capitalist exploitation might work in a simple reproducible economy, I now explain how the Non-Servitude Proviso deals with cases that do not involve vertical authoritative control over the labour capacity of others. Consider the variant of the Pit case in which A offers B costless rescue, on condition that B pays A $1 million. How does that offer violate the Proviso?

The answer trades on the already-established contrast between economies (I) and (II). In collective ownership economy (I), corn is both a means of consumption and a means of exchange, but the 500 units of seed corn is not capital, in the sense of monetized unilateral control over alien purposiveness. In capitalist economy (II), by contrast, the seed corn entitles ten capitalists to 500 days of labour, which includes 333 days of surplus labour, all performed by 167 peasants. This contrast between money as a means of exchange—in this case, corn—and money as capital characterizes any capitalist economy in which the means of production (the seed corn) are scarce and privately owned, that is, where Roemer’s conditions (1) and (3) are met. I now explain the import of this distinction between money and capital.

Back to the Pit case. Suppose that, by working for $1/day for A the rest of her life, B will produce her basic necessities and create a surplus of $1 million (in net present value) for A. Suppose, further, that this is equivalent to borrowing $1 million when she finds herself in the pit and paying it to A up front. Insofar as rope-ownership constitutes capital in the Pit case, so does ownership of its money-equivalent of $1 million. In other words, ownership of ropes (or millions) gives those who own them title to the unilateral labour performance of others. It scarcely matters that B now owes the same labour performance to the money lender; all that matters is that her structural resourcelessness comes to entitle owners (of ropes or money) to such performance. And since, barring an independent justification, that title violates the Proviso, it is unjust.

This explains my original distinction between money as a means of exchange and money as capital. The owner of money as a means of exchange is like the owner of a theatre ticket: her ownership only entitles her to consumption of the product of the exercise of alien labour capacity—the play. The owner of money as capital—for example, the theatre owner—is a capitalist, in the sense that her ownership entitles her not only to the product of the exercise of alien labour capacity, but also to unilateral control over that capacity (e.g. of the actors) itself. This, I have argued, violates the Proviso and therefore constitutes domination. One might object that B paying A $1 million does not imply control over B’s purposiveness, especially if B inherited or found that money. The objection fails, insofar as $1 million unjustly entitles A to control over the net product, and therefore to the exercise of alien labour capacity. In other words, the purchase of the Pit case on our intuitions consists precisely in the amount of positional purposiveness $1 million can muster: the value of money just is the amount of reified purposiveness it can muster.

These conclusions can be systematically connected to the critique of capitalist economies like (II) and (III). They are, in the sense I have just explained, self-reproducing pit-like structures whose reproductive basis is value-constituted control over human productive power. To see this, suppose that productive assets are scarce and privately owned. If such control over the means of production reproducibly confers unilateral control over the production and distribution of the net product,³⁶ then control over the means of production confers unilateral control over the labour capacity of others. So economies (II) and (III) are unjust precisely because they give a small minority of ten capitalists unilateral control over the working lives of hundreds of others. Pace Roemer, the distributive upshot in the means of production or consumption is secondary to this central unilateralist feature of the capitalist mode of production.

I have, so far, argued that monetary transactions under capitalism are mere appearances of the substance of capitalist production, namely unilateral control over the labour capacity of others. Capital is not mere monetary title to alien labour capacity, for it involves control one might choose not to exercise. This is the moral of the Kindly Master story. Unilateral control, moreover, is not tantamount to what Roemer calls domination ‘at the point of production’. That is, the Proviso’s normative emphasis is on work capacity, as such, and not on the workplace itself. Section 2.6 elaborates on this further implication of the Proviso: the distinction between domination at work and domination in the workplace.

This section discusses three different accounts of domination at work. Two of them have been criticized by Roemer. I will argue that, for all that Roemer’s criticisms show, they do not exhaust the relevant set of possibilities.

Roemer (1982, p. 195) argues that the set of sufficient conditions for exploitation is completed by ‘A being in a relation of dominance to B’. Roemer’s dominance condition makes the exploiter’s livelihood dependent on the nature of the interaction with the exploitee. In later work, Roemer explains why he came to reject his earlier emphasis on domination:

It is necessary to distinguish two types of domination by capitalists over workers, domination in the maintenance and enforcement of private property in the means of production, and domination at the point of production (the hierarchical and autocratic structure of work). The line between the two cannot be sharply drawn, but let us superscript the two types domination₁ and domination₂, respectively … each of domination₁ and domination₂ implies exploitation, but not conversely. Hence if our interest is in domination, there is no reason to invoke exploitation theory, for the direction of entailment runs the wrong way … In certain situations, exploitation requires domination₁, but since we cannot know these cases by analyzing the exploitation accounts alone, there is no reason to invoke exploitation if, indeed, our interest in exploitation is only as a barometer of domination₁. Furthermore, our interest in domination₁ is essentially an interest in the inequality of ownership of the means of production, for the purpose of domination₁ is to enforce that ownership pattern. I maintain if it is domination₁ one claims an interest in, it is really inequality … in the ownership of the means of production which is the issue.

(Roemer 1996, p. 73)

Given the significance of this objection to the overall integrity of the thesis defended in this book, I will study it at some length. I proceed as follows: first, I reconstruct Roemer’s account of domination₁ and domination₂. I then rebut his anti-domination conclusion on the grounds that the forms of domination he discusses do not exhaust the sphere of domination tout court. Exploitation is simply a ‘third form’ of domination, equivalent to neither domination₁, nor domination₂. In the course of this rebuttal, several points of disagreement with Roemer will surface.

Here’s a reconstruction of Roemer’s argument against the view that exploitation implies domination₂, which I will call point-of-production domination:

Roemer defines domination₂ in terms of the ‘hierarchical and autocratic structure of work’: (3) follows from this definition. (4) is trickier to defend. Unlike most Marxists before him, Roemer claims that A can exploit B even in the absence of labour or credit markets. Here’s an illustration of that claim:

Friday and Robinson—There are two producers, Friday and Robinson. Friday is poor in capital, and Robinson is rich. If they do not trade, Robinson will work eight hours and Friday will work sixteen so that each can satisfy his or her needs (assuming they’re both rational, the fact that they decide to trade shows that they bothbenefit from trading). They only trade in final goods, and there are no labour or credit markets. In equilibrium under free trade, Friday works twelve hours, Robinson works four, and both attain subsistence.

Roemer claims there is exploitation here. Having worked for four hours, Robinson can relax for the rest of the day, while Friday toils to produce what Robinson would otherwise have produced only with an extra four hours of work:

Robinson benefits from Friday’s presence, and is able to use his wealth as leverage, through the market, to get Friday to work for him, which Friday would not have to do if he had access to his per capita share of the produced capital. (Roemer 1996 [1985], p. 52)

I agree with Roemer’s conclusion, and I also agree that it vindicates (4). It follows that exploitation does not presuppose domination₂ and an interest in domination₂ cannot justify an interest in exploitation. Note, further, that the capitalist workplace is not always oppressive in the sense of domination₂. The well-paid workers of high-technology firms, for example, often attest to the quality of their workplace and the meaningfulness and creativity of their work. These judgements are sometimes true; they are not censured by the Non-Servitude Proviso as blighted or ideological.³⁷ So, if not domination₂, then why not domination₁?

Is the interest in exploitation justified by appeal to domination₁, what I will call property-relations domination? No, says Roemer. His argument goes as follows:

(7) is true by definition. (8) says that exploitation provides an indication or prediction of domination₁, just as barometers indicate or predict the weather (Roemer 1996, p. 73). And since we are only interested in weather predictions because we are interested in the weather, it follows that exploitation is of no intrinsic interest, which is what (9) says. Adding the premiss:

It follows that:

Whatever one thinks about the inference to (10), the inference to (11) seals off any appeal to domination as explanans of our interest in exploitation and concludes Roemer’s attack on that front. I now show why Roemer’s arguments do no exhaust the conceptual field.

My response to Roemer consists in showing that his account of domination is too narrow—that is, I refute (10). It is plausible, I think, that there are instances of domination, such that (i) they do not arise from asset injustice (i.e. are not instances of domination₁), and (ii) they do not take place at the point of production (i.e. are not instances of domination₂). Garden-variety examples of sexual domination are compelling illustrations of that possibility.³⁸ I now generalize the force of these examples, beginning with claim (ii).

Roemer’s own Friday and Robinson example is purported to show that exploitation can take place in the market but outside the workplace. Why is the same not true of domination? Roemer says that Robinson ‘is able to use his wealth as leverage to get Friday to work for him’, adding that this is something ‘Friday would not have to do if he had access to his per capita share of the produced capital’ (emphases mine). It follows that Robinson unilaterally leverages Friday’s vulnerability to get him to benefit Robinson (which might, as a mere upshot, also benefit Friday). According to the Non-Servitude Proviso, such treatment amounts to domination and is therefore unjust.

One reason why Roemer wants to resist this description seems to be that he takes domination to be coextensive with the absence of perfect competition:

… where markets for particular assets or commodities are thin … one agent has power overanother which he would not have in a fully developed, perfectly competitive market economy

(Roemer 1996, p. 74)

So, given that domination implies power over, it follows by modus tollens from the passage just quoted that ‘fully developed’ perfect competition excludes the possibility of domination.

Yet Roemer (and indeed Marx) thinks that exploitation obtains even in a perfectly competitive capitalist economy.³⁹ So even under ‘fully developed’ perfect competition, a class of people (owners of the means of production) can unilaterally set others (nonowners) to work. These are exercises of power over and, indeed, instances of domination (as betrayed by Roemer’s own language). Therefore the first premiss of Roemer’s argument, that domination is coextensive only with the absence of perfect competition, is false.⁴⁰ Capitalist exploitation, in other words, is compatible with all producers being price takers and all inputs receiving their marginal products.

I now turn to (i), the view that domination always arises from asset injustice. Consider:

Slavery contract—A and B are identical twins starting from exactly equal and fair bargaining positions. Each freely agrees to the following contract: on a 50/50 coin toss, the one who gets heads enslaves herself for life to the one who gets tails. B gets heads.

(see Cohen 1995, p. 47)

In this example, domination arises from conditions of full distributive justice through the voluntary, unmanipulated choices of free agents. The example shows why complaints of (Roemerian) distributive injustice are unnecessary for charges of domination.

I conclude that there are forms of domination that correspond neither to domination₁ (asset injustice) nor to domination₂ (point-of-production autocracy). If such a ‘third form’ of domination exists, then (10) is false and (11) fails to follow. And this is exactly the judgement sponsored by the Proviso. Its focus is not on ‘the extraction of labour from the worker on the assembly line, and … the oppressive practices that bosses use to discipline workers, to keep them working at a fast pace’ (Roemer 2017, p. 274; Roemer 1996, pp. 72–9). Rather, the Proviso’s focus is on the residual control over alien productive purposiveness conferred on capitalists by their control over productive assets.

I have, so far in this chapter, explained how the domination account deals with generic forms of capitalist accumulation. I now explain how the theory appropriates traditional criticisms of the capitalist mode of production. I then contrast the domination theory with other related ideas in the history of social philosophy.

As I have elaborated it, the domination theory normativizes a sentiment expressed in Brecht’s Song of the United Front:

[she doesn’t need a boot to the face!] And because a human is human,

she doesn’t need a boot to the face!

She wants no slaves below her,

and no masters above!

This stanza brilliantly expresses the Enlightenment idea that, just by dint of being human, you are entitled to having neither masters nor slaves. The Non-Servitude Proviso applies this idea to work, tying it explicitly with a theory of domination at work. The theory also provides a new glossary for old socialist concepts, such as alienation and reification. Take alienation first. On the domination theory, alienation just is the subsumption of alien purposiveness.⁴¹ Exploitation is related to alienation in the way a disposition is related to its realization: unilateral control over labour capacity, realized as unilateral labour flow. The concept of reification, on the other hand, refers to the form alienation assumes under the capitalist mode of production: it is a de facto claim to alien purposiveness in the form of a relation between things—commodities and money. As I explained in section 2.4, this is the macroeconomic consequence of an asset inequality that confers control over alien labour capacity on those who control the net product.

In the interest of further elaboration of the Proviso, I now discuss some exemptions from its requirements as well as contrasts with other familiar normative theories. What counts as a ‘special justification’ that would exempt someone from the requirements of the Proviso? Consider a workers’ cooperative (a factory, post-office, bank, hospital, school, or university), all of whose members possess roughly equal voice and exit options.⁴² These workers elect managers without any reciprocal prospect that each of them would, eventually, themselves be elected manager. By this democratic decision, the democratically elected manager comes to be exempt from the requirements of the Proviso for the duration of her appointment.⁴³ So the prospective managers’ obligation not to manage the labour of others is waived in virtue of the background and procedural virtues of their appointment.

If certain presumptive obligations under the Proviso are waivable, then others can be forfeited. Consider, for example, free riding on the effortful contribution of others. Under the Proviso, the industrious, non-ascetic peasants of capitalist economy (III) must retain the same degree of control over their conditions of production as their ascetic or non-industrious counterparts, such that nobody subjugates the labour capacity of others as part of a scheme of mandatory social cooperation. If the latter group is culpably lazy, or culpably free rides on the labour of the former, then they may forfeit a right to enjoying the benefits of such cooperation. To free ride in a system of mandatory cooperation is to be disposed to exploit the industrious, that is, to take advantage of their good faith and the good faith of background institutions in order to benefit at their expense. That disposition contradicts any plausible justification of the Proviso, especially if it impinges upon the structural conditions of reproduction of mutual independence. So my free riding may entitle others, at least temporarily, to sanction or exclude me from their cooperative endeavours.⁴⁴

I now explain what the Proviso is not. First, it is not a perfectionist ideal or an account of political morality based on a certain conception of the good life.⁴⁵ One can be neutral about the nature and content of the good life and still affirm the Proviso. Indeed, this is why the Proviso entails a logically weak conception of alienation. Moreover, the Proviso does not provide a complete theory of the state or of political morality, but only a necessary part of it. The idea is that, for any system of mandatory mutually affecting cooperation between agents who must produce in order to establish their mutual independence, their system of government must include something like the Proviso. A political morality without it will be incomplete, as it will provide an inadequate justification for private property. As I argued in section 2.1, any such justification must incorporate the Proviso’s concerns by ensuring that unilateral control over things does not confer unilateral control over persons. The Communist Manifesto provides one of the clearest statements of this idea:

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

(MECW 6, p. 500)⁴⁶

As I will show in Chapter 5, Marx envisages the rightful liberation of the labour of the majority from the unjust control of a small minority, albeit at a high level of productive interdependence: independence and the division of labour go hand in hand.⁴⁷ Marx’s view, I will argue, is an extension of the Rousseau/Kant distinction between service and servitude mooted in section 2.1.

A final contrast is worth mentioning. Any complete political morality has to reckon with work and de facto unilateral control over the productive purposiveness of others. But the converse does not hold: the Proviso does not exhaust political morality. That is, any given transaction that violates the Proviso is presumptively unjust. But this pro tanto reason may be defeated or overriden by other reasons that form part of justice.⁴⁸ I now conclude this chapter by considering why capital—monetized unilateral control over alien labour capacity—is intrinsically exploitative.

The Non-Servitude Proviso evinces a distinction between the justification of a mode of production and the justification of the (historically specific) institutions that comprise it. The slaveholding mode of production, for instance, is unjust everywhere and everywhen. Indeed, the Proviso implies a stronger claim: if humans are enslaved, then they are unjustly treated. The italicized claim is true, even if there are no humans—even if humanity never exists, such that the antecedent of the conditional is false, the conditional itself remains true. This evaluation, moreover, is independent of the evaluation of any given institutional arrangement realizing the slaveholding mode of production, which may depend on the presence of feasible and comparable alternatives to slavery.

Some social scientists conflate these two evaluative exercises. They claim that social criticism is a necessarily comparative exercise. That is, in order to understand what is intrinsically unjust about capitalist economic structure, we must ask not only whether a putatively unjust feature is necessarily present in it; we must also show that this feature is not necessarily present in other (feasible) social systems, such as socialism. Failure in the comparative exercise is tantamount to failure in critique itself. The mooted claim is demonstrably false: critique is not necessarily comparative. Being locked in a cage for no good reason is unjust, even if there exists no (feasible) state involving cagelessness. And some injustices may be irremediable, inevitable, or even necessary. But there is a more sophisticated version of this comparativist belief. The rest of this section considers and rebuts that version, with a view to explaining why capitalism is intrinsically exploitative.

Van Parijs (1983) argues that, the more we insist on a conception of exploitation that is intrinsic to capitalism but not to socialism, the less ethically relevant that conception is. And conversely, the more ethically relevant the conception is, the less likely it is to be intrinsic to capitalism but not to socialism. So even if my account of exploitation is sound, it will not strongly juxtapose capitalism and socialism. I will illustrate this trade-off between presence (in capitalism but not socialism) and relevance with the help of two examples.

Consider, first, unequal flow of labour time (e.g. capitalist economies (II) and (III)). Van Parijs agrees with Roemer that unequal exchange of labour is necessarily present in capitalism but not in socialism (e.g. economy (I)). Under socialism, the means of production are administered by workers and, on a good day, are enlisted to reward work in proportion to, say, effortful contribution. More generally, they are never mobilized to reward mere ownership. So exploitation as title to (the fruits of) alien labour performance is necessarily present in capitalism and not socialism. But who cares? The young, old, sick, and disabled will not produce much. They will therefore tend to be net beneficiaries in terms of income, wealth, and labour time. But the sheer fact of unequal labour flow between them and the working majority, seems not to be unjust. ‘Exploitation’ seems to be present, but morally irrelevant.

Second illustration: take any conception of exploitation that seems morally relevant, for example, one defined in terms of an unjust distribution of resources (see Chapter 1, section 1.5.3). Van Parijs claims that there is nothing intrinsic to capitalism making it distributively unjust, and nothing intrinsic to socialism making it distributively just. The cleanly generated capitalism of economy (III), he argues, vindicates this suspicion. So exploitation as distributive injustice is morally relevant, but not necessarily present under capitalism or absent under socialism. There is, once again, a presence-relevance trade-off.

I now show how the domination account of exploitation establishes both presence and relevance. Throughout this chapter, I have argued that exploitation involves title to unilateral labour flow. And since that unilateralism follows from the fundamental institution of capitalism—unequal control over scarce productive assets—this establishes presence under capitalism. What about relevance? This book defends the view that exploitation is unjust because it involves domination. Exploitation is a dividend of servitude, cashed out in surplus labour. Under capitalism, such service literally assumes the form of currency—labour has a monetary expression, which is what enables money to convert humans into its servants or, better, into the servants of those who are sufficiently moneyed. So capital just is pecuniary title to unilateral control over alien labour capacity.

So, if it is admitted that domination and servitude are a legitimate dimension of moral concern and that capitalism builds that relation into the conditions of market exchange, then both of Van Parijs’ conditions (relevance, presence under capitalism but not under socialism) are satisfied. Hence exploitation as subsumed labour performance constitutes a counterexample to the presence–relevance trade-off and capitalism is a form of servitude—it is a cage; one from which we can and should escape.

Chapters 3 and 4 further examine the nature and core injustice of our imprisonment in that cage.

This chapter explained how power converts others into servitude and how that servitude, in turn, redounds as benefit. I began by arguing that domination is subjection to the choices of others. Applied to work, subjection to the choices of others is unilateral control over their labour capacity. So exploitation consists in extraction of unilateral labour flow on the basis of subsumed purposiveness. It is therefore a violation of the requirements of rightful individual freedom. This account of freedom is based on the Non-Servitude Proviso, which received three justifications: Kantian, republican, and recognitional. I then explained implications of the Proviso for capitalism and capitalist accumulation with the help of a simple economic model. In Chapter 3 I will further refine the Proviso and discuss its implications for generic human vulnerability, needs, rights to the body, and gestational labour.

What would happen in the transition from joint-ownership economy (I) to capitalist economy (II) if productivity were to increase by 50 percent? Consider economy (I). Suppose the invention of a new technology increases the material productivity of the factory by half (⁠$1c+1l→3c$⁠). Then the peasants would achieve reproduction by working there exclusively, for half a day each. They work for a total of 500 days, enough to produce 1500 units of corn, of which 500 replaces the original seed corn. The higher productivity allows them to expend only a fourth of total labour compared to Roemer’s original economy.

Now consider economy (II). With constant wages, the peasants will perform as much labour as in (II): 167 will work at the Farm for three days, receiving one unit of corn as wages, while 823 will work in the Forest for another three days, receiving one unit of corn each. The main difference is that the capitalists will now appropriate a total of 1500 corn. Of this, they will spend 500 to replace the existing seed corn, 167 as wages, and keep the remaining 833 (≈2500/3) as profit. So when productivity increases by a half, surplus labour almost triples. The total labour performed in this economy is 2970 days (as in (II)). But the labour necessary for the workers’ subsistence is only 500 days. So total surplus labour here is 2470 days. Each peasant must work six times longer (three days/week, as opposed to 1/2 days), for the same consumption, in order to feed ten capitalists.⁴⁹