Exploitation as Domination
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Exploitation is a globally pervasive phenomenon. Slavery, serfdom, and the patriarchy are part of its lineage. Temporary and sex workers, commercial surrogacy, precarious labour contracts, sweatshops, and markets in blood, vaccines or human organs, are some contemporary manifestations of exploitation. What makes these exploitative transactions unjust? And is capitalism inherently exploitative? This book offers answers to these two questions. Nicholas Vrousalis argues that exploitation is a form of domination, self-enrichment through the domination of others. On the domination view, exploitation complaints are not, fundamentally, about harm, coercion or unfairness. Rather, they are about who serves whom and why. Exploitation, in a word, is a dividend of servitude: the dividend the powerful extract from the servitude of the vulnerable. Vrousalis claims that this servitude is inherent to capitalist relations between consenting adults whereby capital is monetary control over the labour capacity of others. It follows that capitalism, the mode of production where capital predominates, is an inherently unjust social structure.
Nicholas Vrousalis is an Associate Professor in Practical Philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He read economics and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and obtained his doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Oxford. In 2015 Vrousalis published his first book, The Political Philosophy of G. A. Cohen, with Bloomsbury. His research interests include distributive ethics, democratic theory, and the history of political thought, with an emphasis on Kant, Hegel, and Marx.