The concept of exploitation is central in social and political theory, but there is no precise, widely accepted definition. This paper analyses John Roemer’s seminal theory, which construes exploitation as a distributive injustice arising from asset inequalities, with no reference to notions...

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...

This paper provides an innovative axiomatic analysis of the notion of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour. General convex economies with heterogeneous agents endowed with unequal amounts of physical and human capital are considered. An axiomatic characterisation of the class of...

Andrew Levine analyses the theoretical legacy of recent Marxist schools, focusing in particular on analytical Marxism (AM). He argues that AM is uniquely suited to provide the foundations for a revival of Marxist theory. In this paper, Levine’s reconstruction of the core of Marxism and his...

This paper is built around a theorem proved analytically and exemplified empirically in Flaschel, Franke and Veneziani (2010) which states that profitable capital-using labor-saving technical change is under mild conditions always reducing the labor content of commodities. This type of technical...

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 an innovative axiomatic analysis of the notion of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour. General convex economies with heterogeneous agents endowed with unequal amounts of physical and human capital are considered. An axiomatic characterisation of the class of...

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 examines the interaction between education, growth and distribution from a classical-Marxian perspective. It first briefly examines classical-Marxian ideas on the relation between education and growth and income distribution. Drawing on these ideas to the extent that they are relevant...

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...