Exploitation

By virtue of their monopoly on the means of production, some people or a group of people appropriates, without compensation, the surplus-labor, surplus-produce, or surplus-value of those who do not have or lack the means of production.

Exploitation arose as a product of the development of human society to a certain historical stage. In primitive society, productive forces were extremely low, and all human labor was used to produce the products necessary for their own existence, and there was no surplus-labor. With the development of the first great division of labor, cattle-raising was gradually separated from agriculture, and there was a surplus-labor and surplus-produce at the disposal of individuals, which made exploitation possible. With the gradual formation of private property in the means of production, society also increasingly split into two opposing classes, i.e., the class of slaves and the class of slave-owners, and mankind entered the slave society, which was the first society in human history in which man exploited man. Three basic systems of exploitation have existed in history, i.e., slave, feudal and capitalist system. In slave society, slave-owners directly owned the means of production and slaves, and all the products of slave labor belonged to the slave-owners. In feudal society, the landlord class, by virtue of relations of personal dependence, adopted the form of ground-rent to extract the surplus-labor or surplus-produce from the peasants. In capitalist society, labor-power is transformed into a commodity, and the capitalist exploits the surplus-value created by wage-labor. As the form of paying wages is adopted, the wage is expressed as the value or price of labor, concealing the relation of exploitation of the laborer by the capitalist. In real economic life, surplus-value is divided into many concrete forms such as industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, bank profit, and capitalist ground-rent, etc., all of which are surplus-value that jointly exploit the created by the joint exploitation of workers by virtue of the possession of capital or land.

The capitalist system of exploitation is the last system of exploitation in the history of human society. With the increasing intensification of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, the capitalist system will inevitably be replaced by the socialist system that abolishes exploitative private property and class antagonisms. Exploitation is an important category among the principles of Marxist political economy, as well as a theoretical and practical problem often faced in real economic life.