“Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent.” This is how Karl Marx, writing in his magnum opus Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, described the various exchanges that drive capitalist accumulation. He was referring to how capitalists pay the full value of all the things that are needed in order to produce a commodity – such as raw materials, technology, and, very importantly, labour power.
That might seem like an odd thing for someone like Marx to say. After all, he understood capitalism to be a fundamentally antagonistic economic system, where politics is defined by interests of an exploiting class of capitalists clashing with those of an exploited working class. How can exploitation be taking place if workers are being paid the full value of their labour power? Surely exploitation is all about paying workers less than what their labour power is actually worth?
It is useful to reflect on this question. It not only helps us to understand what was specific about Karl Marx’s theory of exploitation under capitalism, but also supplies some very important tools for better understanding our profoundly unequal world. The world’s 2,153 billionaires currently control more wealth than the bottom 4.6 billion people (60% of the planet’s population) precisely because the worldwide exploitation of working classes has thrown up perverse patterns of maldistribution.
