Surplus-Value, Distribution and Exploitation

This paper introduces a notion of exploitation according to which participants in a cooperative production process are exploited to the extent that their earnings coincide with what they would earn from independent participation in the production process. This notion is then used to show that, in general, the institutional structure of production is not the solution to the problem of (opportunistic) exploitation, but may instead be the condition itself for its occurrence. Starting from the observation that surplus-value is almost always created by the collective undertaking of non additively separable investments, the key to the result is to take groups as units of analysis in a Marx-inspired framework driven by the evolutionary principle of differential, multilevel profit realization