Exploiting Exploitation

As co-chairperson of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Megan Romer continuously reiterates in her many interviews that the raison d’etre of the DSA is to liberate the exploited blue collar workers from the hands of the greedy capitalists. However, it appears to me that the fate of those blue-collar workers is actually being exploited to a greater extent by the Democratic Socialists of America whose members are, by and large, highly educated graduates and post-graduates in unremunerative fields of scholarship (such as gender or ethnic studies) or suicidally empathetic soccer moms, none of whom have ever worked blue-collar jobs. Those blue-collar workers are actually Trump voters .

But socialism, and ultimately communism, is based on the belief that capitalism and thus Western civilization in general is built upon the supposed exploitation of those blue-collar workers. Without that exploitation, the rationale (the raison d’etre) for socialism does not exist. And this socialist rationale is based on Marx’s Labor Theory of Value. But to understand this theory and why exploitation is so important to socialism, we have to go back (way back) to what it means to exploit something. The word originates from the Latin word explicare, which means "to unfold, unroll, or disentangle". It later came to mean an achievement or result. My dictionary defines an exploit (the noun) as an act of remarkable brilliance or daring or a bold deed. As a verb it was defined as “to utilize productively.” In other words something you would be proud to have on your resume.

The word “exploit” only came to have a negative connotation in the 1800s when the early socialists got a hold of it. To them exploitation was the taking an unethical advantage of the labor of others, in other words profiting from the work of those poor blue-collar workers. To socialists and communists, profit, any profit, arises from the exploitation of others and therefore is evil and must be eliminated. But this is a perversion of the original meaning of the word. And this perverted understanding led to the creation of the Labor Theory of Value that has caused so much death and destruction. The real problem is not exploitation. The real problem for DSA (and other socialists) is inequality and inequality arises because some people are better at making a profit than others. But if profit is based on exploitation (rather than hard work, talent or some other factor) then inequality is also evil. Exploitation by itself is an insufficient reason to eliminate the capitalist system because under socialism the state will also exploit the labor of the workers (it’s just a change of bosses). But if inequality caused by exploitation is evil, that would be a sufficient justification for socialists to force the total realignment of the relationship between state and citizen. However, if exploitation is not the cause of inequality (as the socialists contend) then ending exploitation through socialism will not solve the problem of inequality thus negating the justification of socialism to cure a basic aspect of the human condition.

The first problem for the socialists is that not all labor is the same and therefore does not have the same value. A violin made by an apprentice does not have the same quality as a violin made by Antonio Stradavari, even though the apprentice worked just as hard and long as the master. And if it does not have the same quality it should not have the same value or price. The work done by an apprentice plumber, a journeyman plumber and a master plumber will all be different and the work done by the master plumber would be worth more. The labor theory of value is too restrictive a concept for the value of anything. It does not account for experience, care, dedication, thought or innovation.

There are other things that determine value. A glass of water may not have much value if you live on a lake but it might have great value if you are stranded in a desert. The Labor Theory of Value would say that the value of the water transported from the lake to the desert would be limited to the labor involved in transporting the water. But what would motivate someone to go to the effort to transport the water to the desert? Someone dying of thirst in a desert would gladly pay more to motivate someone to transport that water. That extra amount would be profit which our socialist friends have told us is evil. But without that profit you would have a dead person in the desert and a guy by a lake with more water than he knows what to do with.

Marx would say that “communist man” would transport the water because it is the right thing to do. But communist man does not exist yet and is unlikely to exist at any time in the near future so you would still have a problem transporting the water. But profit, the dreaded evil profit, is a great motivator. It gets things done. There may be more sophisticated arguments for and against Marx’s Labor Theory of Value. But those arguments are lost on most of us. But if you want to get things done, a little profit will get a lot more done than ideological purity. And it is the hope for a little profit that motivates people to hire workers in order to get things done.

Ignoring the negative connotation that socialism places on exploitation we need to focus on the productive use that comes from exploitation, whether from a tool, a natural resource or labor. If you travel at all in developing countries (and I have spent a lot of time in developing countries) you will see a lot of people on the streets trying to scratch a living out of odd jobs and reselling whatever they can find. Their labor provides little return. Poverty is the norm in many countries. Those people on the street would love to have their labor put to productive use (i.e., exploited) if it meant a steady pay check. Not everyone can be a businessman or entrepreneur. A lot of people (perhaps most people) need someone else to direct their labor to productive use. They don’t think that the exploitation of their labor is taking unfair advantage of them, they think that it is a lifeline for them and their family.

Our friends at DSA seem to believe that if they can get rid of the exploitation stolen from workers in the form of profits, the lives of workers will be better. But that can be easily disproven without having to roll out the myriad of examples where socialism has had the opposite effect. It is clear that without the “exploitation” of profits, there is little motivation to expand, grow, improve or innovate. And an economy that grows, expands, improves and innovates benefits everybody. It is true that in a capitalist society, some people will benefit more than others. People can complain about how miserable their lives are in modern America but they will have to complain on their smart phones about the bad news they watched on their flat panel TVs as they wait a few minutes for their dinner to be delivered by gig workers on e-bikes. Jeff Bezos may be richer than Croesus but your socialist government wouldn’t be able to deliver your precious item by tomorrow (and sometimes even sooner). The ubiquity of Amazon delivery trucks in your neighborhood is proof of the public good done by Jeff Bezos is the pursuit of profit.

Profit (or actually the search for profit) is the driving force behind our modern living standards, our better health and longer lives. Profit is what holds our modern civilization together as I noted in my Building Block Essays written back in 2019. Of course, our free-market economic system is not perfect. How could it be? It is made up of millions of imperfect human beings. Socialism believes in the perfectibility of human beings. The stated goal of DSA is to remake America, but their ultimate goal is to remake you. Make you into a human being that always places the public good (as determined by the central committee) ahead of self-interest, humans that  for some reason have lost the desire for self-preservation which is the basis of self-interest. And socialism has huge graveyards filled with the imperfect human beings that fell short of becoming “communist man.”