The purpose of this paper is to examine the critical arguments made by Burmeister, Samuelson, and others, with respect to Sraffa (1960). Sraffa did not address these arguments, but they are relevant from the viewpoint of modern economic theories. In his arguments about the standard commodity,...

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In the standard Okishio-Morishima approach, the existence of profits is proved to be equivalent to the exploitation of labour. Yet, it can also be proved that the existence of profits is equivalent to the ‘exploitation’ of any good. Labour and commodity exploitation are just different...

This paper analyses two central issues in exploitation theory. First, the appropriate definition of individual and aggregate measures of exploitation is discussed. Second, the relation between profits and exploitation (the so-called Fundamental Marxian Theorem) is analysed. A general framework...

This paper critically analyses the strongly subjectivist approach to exploitation theory recently proposed by Matsuo ([7]), in the context of general convex economies with heterogeneous agents. It is proved that the Fundamental Marxian Theorem is not preserved in his subjectivist approach,...

In subsistence economies with general convex technology and rational optimising agents, a new, axiomatic approach is developed, which allows an explicit analysis of the core positive and normative intuitions behind the concept of exploitation. Three main new axioms, called Labour Exploitation in...

This paper critically analyses the approach to the determination of values, or commodity contents, developed by Fujimoto and Opocher (2009). Even setting aside various problematic definitional issues, the broader implications of the approach for classical theory are unclear. First, the...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the critical arguments made by Burmeister, Samuelson, and others with respect to Sraffa (1960). In his arguments about the standard commodity, Sraffa assumed that a change in income distribution has no effect on the output level and choice of techniques....

In a recent contribution on this journal, Matsuo (2009) has provided an interesting argument to refute the Generalised Commodity Exploitation Theorem (GCET), by highlighting a potential asymmetry between labour and other commodities. In this paper, a novel characterisation of the relation...

This paper provides a mathematical analysis of the Marxian theory of the exploitation of labour in general equilibrium models. The two main definitions of Marxian exploitation in the literature, proposed by Morishima (1974) and Roemer (1982), respectively, are analysed in the context of general...