Note: This essay was co-written with my friend and frequent collaborator Michael Sechman.Economic inequality has several sources. One businessman might flourish while another barely keeps his head above water because the first has better connections or better ideas or simply hustles harder. One worker might have a stable and well-paying unionized job while another cobbles together an income from fleeting part-time positions. Some people might be wealthier than others because they stumble on valuable artifacts buried in their backyards.

But a key claim that socialists have always made about the societies in which we live is that the most important source of really existing capitalist inequality is exploitation. Intuitively, the idea is that an economy is premised on exploitation when one class has to labor on behalf of another. Socialist agitation has long compared exploitation to robbery, slavery, or extortion.

But what exactly is exploitation? It’s a narrower concept than economic oppression. The jobless and homeless population of major cities is economically oppressed by the owners of the means of production (who exclude them from the system entirely and thus immiserate them), but it isn’t exploited. In fact, that’s the problem. As the left-wing economist Joan Robinson memorably put it, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited all.” Relationships of exploitation involve a very specific kind of antagonistic pairing of the interests of the exploiting group and the exploited one, and not all inequalities (and not even all outrageously unjust inequalities) fit the bill.

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Conversely, though, “exploitation” is a broader concept than “exploitation of workers by capitalists through employment relations.” Feudal lords exploited serfs, for example. When Marx is arguing that the working class is systematically exploited in Capital, he leans hard on this analogy.

Relationships of exploitation in particular are going to be important for social theorizing in part because they can be important for understanding and predicting the dynamics of class societies. Exploited and exploiting groups are locked into relationships of conflict, defined by asymmetrical dependence (the exploiters need the people they’re exploiting, but not vice versa). The hope, at least, would be that theorists will learn something important about both what a group’s interests are, and which strategies will be available to it as it pursues those interests, when we understand whether they’re exploiters, exploited, or oppressed in ways that don’t involve exploitation.

So, what mechanisms can help us differentiate inequalities arising from exploitation (or any kind) from other sources of inequality (or even other kinds of economic oppression)? The economist and analytical Marxist thinker John Roemer proposes a three-part test in his 1996 book Egalitarian Perspectives. According to Roemer, group A exploits group B if and only if:

(i) were B to withdraw from the society, endowed with its per capita share of

society’s alienable property (that is, produced and nonproduced goods), and

with its own labour and skills, then B would be better off (in terms of income and leisure) than it is at the present allocation;

(ii) were A to withdraw under the same conditions, then A would be worse off (in terms of income and leisure) than it is at present;(iii) were B to withdraw from society with its own endowments (not its per capita share), then A would be worse off than at present

Later, in response to an objection made by Erik Olin Wright, Roemer tightened condition (iii). The revised version is that:(iii) [A’s comparative advantage revealed in (i) and (ii) comes] “by virtue of the labor” [of B]

All of this might be initially confusing in a few ways, especially to readers unacquainted with Roemer’s way of expressing himself (which often combines elements of his academic training as an economist with the jargon of analytic philosophy).

First, Roemer obviously knows that exploited classes typically can’t withdraw from society. They wouldn’t submit to exploitation if they could!

Second, be careful to note the “together with its per capita share” part. If serfs made up, say, 90% of feudal society, then we’re imagining them somehow “withdrawing” together with 90% of arable land, 90% of ploughs, 90% of the food that’s already been grown so they could continue to support themselves while they waited for the next crops to come in, and so on.

Perhaps a clearer way of getting across his point would be to rephrase his conditions like this:

(i) If A were to disappear tomorrow, together with its per capita share of

society’s alienable property (that is, produced and nonproduced goods), and

with its own labour and skills, then B would be better off (in terms of income and leisure) than it is at the present allocation;

(ii) were B to disappear tomorrow under the same conditions, then A would be worse off (in terms of income and leisure) than it is at present;

(iii) A’s better off position as a result of the labor of B

Is this a fully adequate definition of exploitation? We take no position on that issue here. At the very least, though, (i)-(iii) are plausibly necessary conditions for exploitation. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine a clear example of exploitation that didn’t check these boxes. And we also think that Roemer’s analysis helps reveal something important about the dynamics of economic oppression in the world around us.

So, for example, if the capitalist class were to disappear tomorrow (together with a share of society’s resources corresponding, not to their current holdings, but to their share of the population), thus allowing a painless transition to collective ownership of the great majority of the means of production, the working class would be better off. If the working class were to disappear tomorrow together with their per capita share, that would be a cataclysm for the capitalist class. But the same isn’t true for all economically oppressed populations. If that “jobless and homeless” urban population we mentioned before magically disappeared tomorrow, even together with the 0.2% of the means of production corresponding to their share of the population, the reaction of our capitalist overlords would be relief that a social problem had been painlessly solved. Similar points apply to populations that might not be living in the street but require state support because severe cognitive or physical disabilities stop them from being reliably employed by capitalists.

And even grimmer examples arise when we move from the domestic American situation to thinking about the political economies of other nations.

At this point, it’s helpful to supplement Roemer’s point with a distinction gestured at by Karl Marx at the end of Capital Vol. 1 and expanded by Karl Kautsky. Marx ends the volume with a chapter on colonies, where he specifies that he’s talking only about “true” colonies. He doesn’t expand on the distinction, but Karl Kautsy takes it up in various places, including in his 1907 book*Socialism and Colonial Policy*.There, he writes:

If we wish to investigate the significance of colonial policy for the development of the productive powers of mankind, there is one sharp distinction that we must make. There are two kinds of colonies which are as different as fire and water. Anyone who confuses them instead of clearly distinguishing between them will never attain a clear understanding of the colonial question.

The first, which corresponds to Marx’s talk of “true” colonies, is the “work colony.” The second is the “exploitation colony.”

The work colony is settled by members of the working classes of the motherland, craftsmen, wage workers, and particularly, peasants. They forsake their native country to escape economic or political pressure, and to found a new home for themselves free from such pressure. Such a colony rests upon their own labour, and not on the labour of subdued natives.

On the other hand, an exploitation colony is settled by members of the exploiting classes of the motherland, where the booty did not suffice them, who therefore aspire to extend the field of their exploitation. They go to the colonies, not in order to find a new home, but in order to forsake the colony when they have squeezed enough out of it; not to escape pressure at home, but in order to become capable of exerting even greater pressure in the motherland. The economic utility of such a colony does not rest on the labour of the colonists, but on the plundering or forced labour of the natives.

This is roughly the distinction gestured at by left-wing academics who talk about a particular subset of colonialisms as “settler-colonialism.” That corresponds to Kautsky’s subset of “work colonies.” While this form of colonialism is an important part of the backstory of many societies in the world today (such as the United States), the only ongoing settler-colonial project in the contemporary world is Israel.

We don’t necessarily agree with the normative conclusions of either Kautsky, who wrote of work colonies that, while “one must very often condemn the way the natives are treated,” the initial construction of such colonies need not necessary be condemned “in principle,” nor of the parts of the activist Left who have latched the hardest onto talk of “settler-colonialism” (and often seem to suggest that every single Israeli Jew is a “settler” with less innate connection to the land than Palestinians, and even in the worst cases rhetorically flirt with the insinuation that it might be just if the direction of ethnic cleansing was somehow reversed so we could “make Israel Palestine again”). We’d plant our flag on basic democratic-egalitarian principles. The reason Zionism is grotesque is precisely that no one’s rights should depend on where their ancestors lived, and we’d apply that principle in a sweepingly universalist way. There’s no such thing as a person without a right to live in the country in which they were born, full stop, and the most just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be a single secular democratic state with a right of return for Palestinian refugees and completely equal rights for Jews, Palestinians, Thai guest workers, and everyone else. But these normative questions are simply a separate matter from the descriptive question of whether Kautsky’s distinction can illuminate something important about the political economy of the situation, upstream of the horrifying reality of the world’s first livestreamed genocide.

Israel is often compared to apartheid South Africa by left-wing anti-Zionists. One of us has written many articles that have employed precisely this analogy, and we continue to think that in many ways it’s an apt one. But there’s a crucial disanalogy between the two cases.Neither the late 20th century Republic of South Africa nor the 21st century State of Israel are colonies in the literal sense. Both had gained independence from Britain by the mid-20th century. But in both cases the economic elite within the dominant ethnic group then pursued a policy of control over a subjugated ethnicity closely corresponding to one or the other of Kautsky’s two options. South Africa worked like an exploitation colony, with white elites relying on the exploited labor of the black working class. Israel has always worked like a work colony, pushing out the Palestinian labor force and trying to rely as much as possible on the Israeli Jewish working class.

Even in Israel/Palestine, where there are roughly similar numbers of Jews and Palestinians (never mind apartheid South Africa, where the black population made up a large majority), Roemer’s first two boxes are checked when we consider the relationship between the white/Jewish ruling class and the bulk of the black/Palestinian population. If the subjugated group disappeared tomorrow, together with their per capita share of society’s resources, it would be a disaster for the rulers, while vice versa would greatly improve that population’s prospects. All of that is just a way of saying that the means of production are unevenly distributed between these two populations, and the excluded group is a large one. (Similarly, in a dystopian scenario whereby automation got to the point where, say, 50% of the American population was unemployed and living on the streets, (i) and (ii) would apply to the relationship between these surplus ex-workers and the capitalist class.) But the crucial disanalogy is that (iii) held in the South African case but it doesn’t hold for Israel/Palestine. The source of the inequality is, for the most part, not the enrichment of wealthy Israelis by the labor of Palestinians.

That’s why, for all the brutalities of South African apartheid, the South African state never escalated its oppression of the black population to the level of genocidal frenzy we’re seeing every day in reports from Gaza. They never went through the Bantustans bombing every church, every school, every apartment building, and every hospital, so that aerial shots of the devastation, as one of us wrote elsewhere this weekend about Gaza, “increasingly look like the surface of the moon.” There were never polls where a majority of white South Africans supported the forcible removal of every single black person from the country. South African President P.W. Botha never engineered a famine that produced images reminiscent of Auschwitz in a bid to pressure the black population to simply abandon the country in their millions and leave it to the whites.

Roemer’s co-thinker Erik Olin Wright put the point starkly in his book Class Counts. “It’s no accident,” he wrote, that American culture historically included “the abhorrent saying, ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian’ but not ‘the only good worker is a dead worker’ or ‘the only good slave is a dead slave.’”

This is a particularly striking instance of the explanatory and predictive importance of understanding which social relations do (or don’t) rest on exploitation. And the normative upshot is jarring.

Economic exploitation is deeply objectionable in and of itself, and depending on the local particulars, it can lead to results like sweatshops or violent strikebreaking or even horrors like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire or the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. As socialists, bringing about a world free from exploitation is the defining telos of our politics. But, as long as we live in a class society, it’s far from the worst fate that can befall economically oppressed populations.Transforming Israel from an exclusionary ethnostate into a normal liberal democracy (i.e. implementing a “one-state solution”) would, until such time capitalism itself is overcome, mean integrating Palestinians into normal structures of capitalist exploitation. And as bad as that can be, the grim irony of the situation is that, in this case, upgrading their form of oppression to exploitation would not only be an improvement but an urgent moral imperative.

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