Unequal Exchange, Assets, and Power: Recent Developments in Exploitation Theory

This paper surveys and extends some recent contributions on the theory of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour. A model of dynamic economies with heterogeneous optimising agents is presented which encompasses the models used in the literature as special cases. It is shown that the notion of exploitation is logically coherent and can be meaningfully analysed in such a general framework. It is then shown that the axiomatic approach of social choice theory can be adopted to explore the normative foundations of the notion of exploitation. Finally, it is argued that purely distributive approaches to exploitation are not entirely compelling and a notion of dominance, or unequal power is necessary.