askchapo

Also, some further thoughts. Read with caution.

I'm not certain how easy or straightforward it is to talk about exploitation of a single person. My understanding of Marx's categories in Capital is that they are social relations, not so much people. Capital, not the capitalist, is the object of study. Labor, not the individual worker, is the protagonist. Marx himself notes in his Preface to the First Edition of Capital that

individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests.

When you hire workers to make commodities for profit you are acting as a bearer of capital. Capital, the larger social process, is "carried" through you or personified in you. When you go to work for your boss in modern capitalism you are an instance of the larger collective worker. These larger social relations are the fundamental starting point for Marx, as I understand it. An individual plays the "role" of these categories.

A single person may also "bear" multiple economic roles. They may be a landlord, and hence be a bearer of the interests of the landlord class. That same person may also be a wage worker too and hence a bearer of the class interests of the proletariat. This can make discussion of the exploitation of a single person somewhat tricky. I'm not saying it isn't possible and I may just be ignorant of the best way to do so. I am saying that my own reading and understanding of Marx causes me to view things structurally and socially and things can get fuzzy when we reduce it down to what about this specific person.

Marx does make mention of the surplus value produced by a single worker, for example - so maybe there is no reason to suspect there is difficulty with discussing these categories for an individual - but again I always read that as personifications of these collective categories. But this may be my own bias here.

One index we could try to use to talk about the exploitation of an individual comes form an academic article from J. Cogliano (Computational Methods and Classical-Marxian Economics) in which he uses agent based simulations to try to simulate an economy as Marx describes. This is an approach that explicitly starts with the individual and isn't an orthodox Marxist approach. The index is similar, but not identical, to ratios that Marx himself would use in Capital.

To calculate what Cogliano called the exploitation intensity index of an economic agent, you just compare a.) the total labor they provide to the economy over a certain time period with b.) the value of products they consume in the economy. If a person works many hours, but they afford very little or only afford low value goods then this ratio is very high. They have a high intensity of exploitation. On the opposite end, if someone works very little or not at all and they can still somehow afford high value goods then they have a low intensity of exploitation - and someone somewhere else is likely being exploited to support them.

This may be hard to calculate in practice. Especially if the person works multiple jobs or, like I said before, inhabits multiple "economic roles" (like somehow being both landlord and worker and part-time small business owner, etc.). Also, that measurement depends on us being able to measure the value of goods. Depending on who you ask, this either is the same thing as the price or isn't the same thing but is close to it. Things get bloody real fast.

Also, this index obviously isn't the end-all be-all of figuring out if someone was exploited. If someone is young, or disabled, or elderly such they can't provide labor then I would not say they exploit others even if the above index suggests. Likewise when you do someone a favor and paint their house for free you (likely) aren't getting exploited.

But using the above ratio can help to think about exploitation in some ways.

How much of my labor do I give to others? How much of others' labor am I taking? In terms of hours of human labor: do I give back more than I use up, or do take more than I give?