1.1. The Marxist Tradition: Surplus Labor and the Sphere of Production

In the traditional Marxist conception, exploitation is tied to surplus labor, i.e., the fraction of a worker’s labor time appropriated by someone else—typically a nonworking member of the ruling class. For Marx, the paradigmatic illustration of this was feudal serfdom: the serf toils for his master, on the master’s land, for a fraction of the year, but also for himself, on his own land, the rest of the time (Marx 1992, 344–53). Marx then generalizes this concept to other modes of production, and especially capitalism, where the separation between “necessary” (for oneself) and “surplus” labor is not directly measurable. However, as Marx famously argued, the ratio between the two can still be computed by comparing profits and wages; thus defining the “degree of exploitation” (ibid., 320–29). Yet in doing so he relies on the strong assumption that the quantity of labor an agent can acquire through the market is proportional to her monetary income, which is true if and only if the prices of all products are proportional to the labor time embodied in them. This much-disputed labor theory of value thus defines a simple, proportional conversion of labor time into money which, though appealing, has been challenged on various theoretical grounds.

This has sparked a long, technical, and sometimes polemical debate (Desai 1988) among both Marxist and neoclassical economists. On one hand, the claim that equilibrium prices (“production prices”) are proportional to embodied labor time does not hold, as was already mentioned by Ricardo (Stigler 1958), and more generally, any causal labor theory of value, i.e., the idea that prices derive from a “transformation” of embodied labor time is either false or tautological (Samuelson 1971; Steedman 1977). Yet on the other hand, as Sen (1978) and Cohen (1988, 214) have argued, one can reject the causal labor theory of value and still adopt a descriptive approach to surplus labor, i.e., measure the flows of labor in the economy; from its origin in the labor process to the appropriation, through consumption or investment, of the labor embodied in commodities.¹ Indeed, Marxist economists have long shown that in a Leontief model where the production technology can be described by an input-output matrix with fixed coefficients, it is possible to compute the labor embodied in any product (Okishio 1963; Morishima 1973). Here, if an agent provides more labor time than she can appropriate through her purchasing power, then she is exploited, otherwise she is an exploiter. For sociological analysis, the main point here is that independently from any causal theory of value, the appropriation of commodities is always, simultaneously, the appropriation of the labor embodied in them, so that monetary purchasing power is also the power to claim a portion of social labor.²

Within classical Marxism, these quantitative debates are generally subsumed to a qualitative claim that capitalist exploitation happens primarily in the sphere of production rather than circulation, i.e., through wage labor rather than commercial relations (see esp. Marx 1992, 279–80). While this assumption serves to highlight the core question of labor time, working conditions and discipline at work, it struggles to identify surplus value extracted by commercial, financial, or rentier (from land, real estate, or patent property) capital. In the third volume of Capital, Marx (1981) suggested that these forms all derived from a redistribution of surplus value between capital owners after the “the original exploitation that takes place directly within the production process itself” (ibid., 745). Yet, this fell short of properly theorizing such redistribution, with internal contradictions (see, e.g., Harvey 2013, 189) and a restricted focus on situations where financial or commercial actors are involved in the funding of industrial capital, not when they directly deal with households.

Finally, this primacy of production thesis found traction in a broad range of Marxian scholarship, including for authors not strictly adhering to a labor theory of value. The most prominent proposal in this regard was that of E. O. Wright (1997), who introduced notions of “authority” and “qualification” (as additional criteria to the property of the private means of production) to map the heterogeneity of statuses within capitalist exploitation, famously pointing to the “contradictory class locations” of certain categories of high-paid workers. Yet this framework still exclusively ties exploitation to production and the “rights and powers over productive resources” (Wright 1997, 31–33; 2000), dismissing, for instance, market relations (with issues such as housing or credit) as outside the scope of exploitation analysis. Because of these limitations, classical Marxism offers little flexibility to analyze the plurality of the institutional vectors within capitalist exploitation, and their possible imbrication.

1.2. The Neoclassical Approach: Exploitation as Rent

A competing approach has had a long standing within neoclassical economics (Pigou 1932), measuring exploitation as the gap between wages and marginal productivity. Here, the degree of exploitation is not captured by the profit share, but the distance to a perfectly competitive benchmark: exploitation is measured as rent, and exploiters are conceived as rentiers. Robinson (1933) first developed the corresponding theoretical framework for the labor market, through monopsony theory, with exploitation strictly arising when obstacles to workers’ mobility limit the competition between employers. This meaning is now standard within neoclassical studies of labor exploitation (Ashenfelter et al. 2010), and to some extent within quantitative sociology (Sakamoto and Kim 2010).

Similar views have been strongly revived in philosophy and sociological theory, from the 1990s onward, when traditional Marxist takes had started sliding in the background. Here, a core argument is that “the competitive market price is a price at which neither party takes special unfair advantage of particular defects in the other party’s decision-making capacity” (Wertheimer 1999, 232). The intuition at work is the neoclassical idea of competitive discipline: under perfect competition, a given agent has no arbitrary power, and hence could not be an exploiter, while frictions to competition confer to some agents the power to unilaterally and arbitrarily impose their will on others. In sociological theory, a similar view of exploitation as rent has been put forward by Sørensen (2000),³ who suggested holding on to the Marxian view of exploitation as economic antagonism, but to decouple it from any labor theory of value by restricting it to “rent-producing assets,” such as land or intellectual property.

While we do not deny that rentier relations can be exploitative because of the power relation involved, this imposes a strong restriction for exploitation theory in a unique non-exploitative counterfactual defined as an unequal (although rentless) market society where profits derive from the distribution of the means of production. This is often limitative: Wertheimer’s assertion that there is no room for domination within competitive markets has been disputed (Vrousalis 2023; Lojkine 2025, 106–14), whereas Sørensen’s claim that this is the only framework consistent with “modern economic theory” (Sørensen 2000, 1532) simply seems unwarranted.⁴ More applied approaches to economic rent tend to reject the normative counterfactual of a rentless society: for instance, while Mazzucato et al. (2023) endorse the possibility of rentier exploitation (with reference to the work of Christophers, 2020), they also emphasize the stark contrast between different types of rent, especially Schumpeterian short-term innovation rents, which they associate with a more productive function within market societies.⁵

1.3. Exploitation = Appropriation + Power

We define exploitation as a social relation between two agents or groups A and B where: (1) A appropriates the product of B’s labor; (2) A dominates B; and (3) one can conceive an alternative institutional setting for the interaction of A and B without this appropriation and domination. As stated by both Marxist and neoclassical approaches,⁶ although through different interpretation, both appropriation and domination are thus necessary conditions of exploitation. This definition does not include, for instance, various forms of exclusion and expropriation such as land or resource grabbing, at the condition that the victims of such are not compelled to work for the new owners (Wright 1997, 11). Conversely, appropriation without domination is not here characterized as exploitation—think of healthcare or retirement benefits (despite some forms of libertarianism stating otherwise).

Regarding criterion 1, Marxists and neoclassical theorists offer different views on appropriation, with the former insisting on the circulation of embodied labor within commodities, and the latter relying on measures of marginal productivities (i.e., a monopsonist appropriates part of the worker’s product when the wage is less than the marginal value of the product). But debates on appropriation go beyond this canonical opposition regarding the measurement of productive contributions: since any unidimensional index of value or labor content has inherent limits, one needs to factor the heterogeneity of these costs—encompassing degrees of both physical and emotional labor (Hochschild 2012)—and benefits—from monetary purchasing power, which is an abstract claim on social labor, to specific concrete efforts in the case of household labor. Hence, the criterion of an appropriation of labor is open and flexible—it imposes adherence neither to a causal theory of labor value nor to a restrictive conception of what activity counts as such.

As per criterion 2, this has featured as a key element in recent theoretical developments, with an emphasis on the relational nature of exploitation (Desmond and Wilmers 2019; Desmond 2023), either under the explicit name of domination (Vrousalis 2013, 2023; Renault 2023), power (Tilly 1998, 128; Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019, 108–9), or forced appropriation (Holmstrom 1977; McKeown 2016). Regardless of the way relational power is characterized,⁷ any claim about exploitation should clarify the ways in which constraints on the life and labor of the exploited are tied to the interests and the decisions of the exploiters.

Finally, criterion 3 accounts for the politics of exploitation: intuitively, if a social relation entailed appropriation and domination, yet without any workable alternative, this could be characterized as something of a necessary evil, and the notion of exploitation would seem out of touch. While these nonexploitative counterfactuals are often not explicitly emphasized, they can be reconstructed from most common definitions. Hence, while the Marxist approach famously begs for the abolition of the private property of the means of production, neoclassical takes consider a fully commodified, perfectly competitive market society with no restriction on wealth inequality as its normative horizon.⁸ Similarly, while relational sociology does occasionally acknowledge that exploitation “implies comparison with a counterfactual analysis” (Tilly 1999, 131), this is not always done, or is done without a clear normative elucidation. To be clear, our definition does not commit to one specific normative horizon, rather inviting analysts of exploitation to explicit the multiple alternative baselines operating at different scales—which, in certain settings, can be mutually exclusive or conflicting. In this regard, Avent-Holt (2015) has formulated two possible approaches to this problem, either “positive” (grounded in the “normative worldviews” of actors) or “normative” (based on the “normative commitments of the analyst”).

1.4. From Dyads to Chains

The definition and guidelines provided above can be applied to various dyadic segments, whether it is the classic worker-employer, a one-to-one market transaction, or a spouse performing free domestic work. Yet most socioeconomic configurations bear several relational components, pointing to connected or nested forms of exploitation, and to distinct, potentially conflicting counterfactuals. The notion of chains helps untangle these by mapping the segments considered, from basic links to more complex structures, into a two-dimensional plane. Crucially, although not purely individual-transactional, these chains bear only a weak structural component (McKeown 2016; Wollner 2019), in the sense that they map networks of power-infused relationships: they derive from larger structures in a more traditional sense—capitalism, patriarchy, racial formations—yet always materialize through identifiable relations between individuals or groups.⁹

This framework bears common intuitions with Reed’s (2017, 93) “chains of power,” especially regarding the capacity of actors to stand at the connecting end of multiple dyadic segments, as it suggests that “rector-actor dyads can expand, accordion-like, into chains, creating situations in which almost everyone in the chain is both a giver and a taker of orders.” Although Reed is primarily concerned by the broader “struggle for recognition and redistribution” involved in social ties, his proposal hints at the connection with the “morphology” of global capitalism, central to our analysis.¹⁰ In this sense, while the inputs of the global value chains (GVC) and global production networks (GPN) scholarship (see for instance Dallas et al. 2019) have helped move beyond dyadic frameworks, the exclusive emphasis on the geography of commodity chains has largely left the exploitative nature of these productive ties out of the picture.

Starting from a basic vertical link between exploiter (or rector) A and exploited (or actor) B, four types of segments can be added. First, vertically if exploiter B is him- or herself exploited by A—pointing to a connected exploitation of C by A. We designate this by an I chain (Figure 1), to which multiple links can be further positioned above. One can think of a subcontractor B exploiting workers C, her or himself being exploited by a parent company or franchisor A. Another close example is that of a majority shareholder A appointing and removing at will a company’s top managers B, who in turn increase extraction from production workers C, with no direct relation between A and C. These cascading links do not have to be tied to the direct control over productive assets, although they require a form of nested appropriation. While globalized production and distribution offer a high potential for complex I chains, through the fractal nature of GVC and GPN, this type of interconnection occurs in other economic sites as well.

Figure 1

The chains of exploitation.

Second, a link can be added obliquely if C is simultaneously exploited by A and B—in cases of a dual exploitation, what we refer to as a V chain. This is quite straightforward in the case of several employers, creditors, or any combination of labor and market exploitation—such a worker-tenant or worker-debtor being in exploitative relations simultaneously with an employer and a landlord or a creditor. V chains thus correspond to two direct exploitative relations bearing on the same individual (contrary to I and L chains, no individual is simultaneously exploiter and exploited). And while these can operate on different planes, the outcome of one relation affects the other: one can think of a worker struggling to pay her or his rent and hence standing at a higher risk of losing her or his job (Desmond and Gershenson 2016)—or the other way around, as is exemplified in section 2.3.

Third, a horizontal link can be added if exploited B is her or himself exploiting C while C remains an “other” to A (contrary to an I chain, where A exploits C through B). We refer to these cases as L chains, suggesting a form of hinged exploitation, where two distinct forms of exploitation, operating on different planes, are connected through an exploiter/exploited B. The ideal-typical case is that of a spouse C performing free domestic work for her or his breadwinner-worker B spouse, her or himself being exploited on the labor market (by employer A). This situation does not involve direct cascading links—through a chain of command, nested contracts, or integrated financial circuit—but one form of exploitation still rests on the other to remain functional. The singularity of the L chain lies in its articulation between formal paid and unpaid, or unpriced labor (Seccombe 1974; Folbre 2020), making it specific to domestic exploitation, or in short to the articulation of production and reproduction.

Fourth, a last elementary pattern corresponds to a complicit exploitation of C by A, mediated by a distinct productive or financial circuit, or distributive institution B; what we refer to as a C chain. In this configuration, while an economic agent, A is neither actor nor rector but rather an “other” with respect to C. Though not involved in direct exploitation (e.g., as an employer or seller), A still contributes to it. One can typically think of a consumer purchasing a product manufactured using exploited labor (Ferguson and Ostmann 2018), but as we will see in section 2, this can also apply to a group of taxpayers being advantaged at the expense of another through the state fiscal system. Put differently, C chains involve a strong decoupling between appropriation and power: A appropriates without exercising a direct, visible, or consolidated power over C. Rather, power is disseminated across a multitude of As, through the coordinative capacity of B (i.e., the market, the state; Nefsky 2015; Wieland and van Oeveren 2019).

2.1. Dyads, or Direct Exploitation

To properly understand chains, we start from its basic component—direct, dyadic exploitation—which can manifest across a wide array of economic relations, without the need to hierarchize, as Marx famously did, between “primary” and “secondary” forms.

In the productive sphere, Marx’s famous approach to direct wage exploitation contains two dimensions: a quantitative one, through the appropriated surplus product, and a qualitative one, in the subordination of workers to capital in the labor process. The first aspect points to the capital share of value added as a measure of exploitation (Foley 1982); with a wide body of evidence showing that the labor share of value added has declined over recent decades among rich countries (Karabarbounis and Neiman 2014). As per the second dimension, this has long been a subject of inquiry for the sociology of labor, from the pioneer work of Friedmann (1961) and Braverman (1974) showing how profit-driven domination tends to intensify physical labor, to more recent research showing how technologies of control have been complemented, since the 1980s, by other forms of pressure relying on an ideology of consent, freedom, and corporate culture in the secondary sector (Burawoy 1982; Kunda 1992; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). Yet, the use of modern technology to control and intensify work has by no means ceased to exist in tertiary industries, be it call centers where workers have to follow preestablished scripts (Buscatto 2002; Woodcock 2016), in the fast-growing logistics sector where they operate under voice command (Gaborieau 2017), or through digital surveillance devices (Aloisi and Gramano 2019; Levy 2023). Simultaneously, workplace expectations evolve beyond physical effort, with “emotional labor” (Hochschild 2012) increasingly required in service occupations bearing disproportionately on women.

Within market exchange, exploitation can occur through direct face-to-face interactions, or indirectly through “price gouging,” high markups or unfair extortion (Deveaux and Panitch 2017).¹¹ In his pioneer work, The Poor Pay More (1963), sociologist David Caplovitz referred to the “poor” as “exploited consumers,” and recent studies, primarily in the U.S., have built on similar intuitions, congregating around the notions of “predatory lending” and “predatory inclusion” to characterize exploitative markets.¹² Though the vocabulary of “predation” introduces relational and extractive components, it tends to draw a moral, and often artificial line, between mainstream and “fringe” market sellers; or simply put between good and bad capitalists. Hence, this consequentialist view obscures the fact that exploitation, when contrasted to a hypothetical pattern of non-interaction, can often benefit both parties involved, especially when low-class consumers have no other options (Deveaux and Panitch 2017). By contrast, the concept of exploitation doesn’t anchor the divide between exploited and non-exploited to the presumed morality of actors. For a clear example, Desmond and Wilmers (2019) recently put to the test the notion of “renter exploitation” on the U.S. housing market, defined as the “ratio of annual rents from all rental units” collected by landlords “over property value,” adjusted for several “maintenance costs.” The authors then show this ratio to be steeper in areas with higher poverty rates and a larger share of Black residents. Crucially, here “overpayment is not defined in terms of economic rent, and does not presuppose barriers to entry that limit competition among landlords (e.g., collusion, monopoly)”. Rather, the authors define on a “counterfactual of property ownership,” the “costs of purchasing a housing unit” for renters; a majority of which are credit constrained on the mortgage market. In turn, this pushes the authors to support programs targeted at expanding homeownership, mitigating risk for low-income and racialized households, as well as bringing down housing costs. Here, specifying a tractable index along with a clear counterfactual allows for a grounded discussion of “housing exploitation,” which goes beyond “interindividual distributions” of prices in a purely neoclassical view.

For the domestic sphere, feminist scholars have long pushed against Marx’s own underestimation of women’s exploitation, often treated as secondary to that of the “proletariat” (Federici 2012; Vogel 2014). In their landmark book, Delphy and Leonard (1992, 42) strived to restore this balance, placing capitalism and patriarchy on equal footing, with domestic exploitation being defined as a relation where “things produced by the labor of one person are consumed by another in an unbalanced exchange.” In short, women, spouses, or children are exploited inasmuch as their work time is “appropriated” by men without pay, thus echoing and amplifying what is happening within commodified production.¹³ Studies relying on time-use surveys thus show that the distribution of domestic work in bi-active heterosexual couples remains overwhelmingly unequal in Western countries, with a limited decrease linked to higher market productivity for women (through longer studies) and a broader access to outsourced services (Chiappori et al. 2022). Despite these studies not relying on the concept of exploitation, this suggests that heterosexual women are, as a group, exploited by their partners at the family level. Nevertheless, the Marxist notion of surplus labor still uneasily fits the specificities of domestic labor, especially at its boundaries. As an example, to the extent that “mental load”—which includes planning, scheduling, and caring for others (Dean et al. 2022)—is often an effort performed by women to the benefit of a household’s members, it should qualify as exploited labor, despite it escaping any simple quantitative index. A distinct but related difficulty arises regarding sexual activity within the couple: while it is most often not counted as unpaid female work, feminist scholarship has long emphasized the various coercive processes by which it is often obtained (Finkelhor and Yllo 1985; Basile 1999), yielding a striking instance where the degree of exploitation appears to be related to a power imbalance rather than to strict labor hours.

Finally, whereas classical Marxist accounts often present the state as a mere conduit for exploitation—“a coercive institution which maintains the rule of the game” (Roemer 1982, 42), contributing indirectly to the extraction of surplus value (Poulantzas 2020), the state can more directly participate in the exploitation of its citizens, through both labor and monetary punishments. Labor historians’ insistence on “penal work” as a “historically ubiquitous institution” (de Vito and Lichtenstein 2016, 49) emphasizes that the state penal power was persistently used to corral and utilize underpaid labor, specifically for racialized or low-status segments of the workforce (see also Van Rossum 2018). Similarly, in the post–Civil War U.S. South, Muller (2018) showed that the “leasing” of convicts to private companies developed more “in cities and in counties where African Americans had achieved a degree of economic independence,” and where “white civilians, sheriffs, and police had little to lose in . . . punishing property crimes.” Convict leasing thus underlines the deep connection between “exclusion and exploitation” (Muller 2021): because the end of slavery “consigned [Black Americans] to the bottom of the labor market,” the “relations of exploitations” signified “dependence” of employers on this form of labor. Beyond the carceral state, the question of court-ordered monetary sanctions has recently attracted a lot of scholarly attention, with the drastic rise of legal financial obligations (LFOS) leading to increased legal debt, with major long-term effects on poverty and inequalities (Harris et al. 2010; Kohler-Hausmann 2018; Kohler-Hausmann 2022). This is specifically true for subfelonies, many of which having been partly decriminalized into civil offenses, starting from the period known as the Broken Windows Era in the late 1980s. In Ferguson, Missouri, a study thus found that $2.2 million had been collected in municipal fines in 2012, through 24,500 warrants, amounting to $272 per household (Harris 2016). This form of “pocketbook policing” is now commonly used in municipalities where fiscal revenues (mostly through sales taxes paid by nonresidents), prove more difficult to collect, pushing officials to turn to “‘bad’ revenues like legal fines to manage fiscal crises” (Pacewicz and Robinson 2021).

2.2. I Chains, or Connected Exploitation

The notion of connected exploitation finds its primary expression in the myriads of actors involved in global commodity chains (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986; Dallas et al. 2019), largely studied by the literature on GVC and GPN, whose results have challenged Marx’s own overemphasis on the worker-employer dyad. Indeed, the history of commercial capitalism provides a plethora of examples where “in-between exploitation” can occur, from putting-out factories to sweatshops, or through recruiting subcontractors (Didry 2016; Banaji 2020; Bittmann 2024). This is no historical feat, as these hierarchical value chains are proving an enduring feature of contemporary capitalism, both within and across borders. Internationally, while the traditional “producer-driven” value chains persist in some industries such as car manufacturing, these have been increasingly superseded by “buyer-driven” value chains (Gereffi 1999; Gereffi and Fernandez-Stark 2016; Kumar 2020) where multinational corporations, often from global Norths, concentrate research and design while leveraging the resulting intellectual property to exert control down the line (Rikap 2021). In this regard, prominent examples include the textile, electronics, and food industries (Davis 2016; Boudreau et al. 2023). These configurations can also materialize at the local level: in the case of sex work in Andhra Pradesh, studied by Brady et al. (2015), female workers are “exploited” by brokers, who levy “disproportionate” fees with respect to the services provided, yet they also frequently invoke local textile factories, whose poor working conditions often force them to sell their bodies on the illegal sexual labor market.¹⁴

Even within the strict confines of Western national countries, relations of commercial exploitation have gained weight through the “fissured workplace” (Weil 2014). This is observable both for workers—such as in the construction and high-tech sectors (Kunda 1992; Jounin 2009), through the externalization of low-skilled tasks such as cleaning or security (Dube and Kaplan 2010; Perraudin et al. 2014)—and in business relations, through specific juridical forms such as franchising, gaining ground in the hospitality, retail or fast-food industries (Callaci 2021). This trend also corroborates the fall in the labor share of value added within Western economies, in large part explained by a reallocation of value added from low- to high-profit share firms (Autor et al. 2020; Kehrig and Vincent 2021; Bauer et al. 2024). Part of this shift is tied to productivity increases in high-profit sectors, yet this is also a direct consequence of the externalization of some activities, increasing the market power exerted over suppliers, and thus enabling the indirect exploitation of workers from other firms (Lojkine 2025, 135–37).

This is also true within firms, with the productive and financial structure of large corporations revealing more complicated exploitation patterns than direct face-offs between employers and employees. Both value extraction and power are distributed in more complex chains, with shareholders situated upstream (and hierarchies between majority and minority owners) and the power exerted over production workers critically resting on the mediation of managers, from CEOs down to overseers. As shown by Amable et al. (2005) or van der Zwan (2014), the financialization of firms affects industrial relations, so that financial actors are indeed rectors/exploiters connected to downstream actors/workers, yet it would nonetheless be incorrect to view those in positions of authority within the firm as mere conduits, channeling shareholder power down to the workers, and value upward in return. The position of managers is actually “contradictory” as argued by Wright (1997): their work generates value for the shareholders, remaining submitted to financial decision-making, but they also retain discretionary power and capture high incomes from the appropriation of some form of others’ labor. Paradoxically, as shown by Goldstein (2012), the earnings of managers have grown precisely at the era of shareholder capitalism, leading some like Duménil and Lévy (2018) to speak of a “managerial capitalism” for the recent decades.

Finally, while globalized production offers high potential for connected exploitation, through the fractal nature of industrial and distribution networks, I chains are not analytically restricted to commodity production. In the realm of market exchange, one can easily think of a tenant subletting her apartment through a formal or informal contract, or of the rise of asset managers and their effect, mediated by the companies they acquire, on consumer exploitation through housing rent or infrastructure prices (Christophers 2024). Similarly, an I chain would describe a situation where a grocer imposes high selling prices on its retailers, with costs then passed on to consumers, or conversely, if a retailer is forced to collect unpaid debt from its clients to repay its own account. Finally, connected exploitation by the state can also occur if, for instance, the government of a (developing) country faces pressures to repay its sovereign debt, exerted by (Western) creditors. In this case, local taxpayers may either face higher fiscal pressure on their income or be forced by austerity plans to purchase more social services on the private market. In all these configurations, a similar chain of actor–rector/actor–rector thus emerges, with both an intermediary acting both as exploiter and exploited, and power being distributed downstream to the final link.

2.3. V Chains, or Dual Exploitation

Dual chains of exploitation can occur within a multitude of settings where an exploited faces more than one exploiter, with similar forms of appropriation. Typically, this can involve cumulative patterns, where exploiters are of the same type of rectors—such as for a worker with more than one occupation, or a debtor facing multiple claims to her resources—yet this can also involve exploitative relationships of different economic nature, with perhaps the most explicit expression standing in the long historical articulation of debt and labor (Muldrew 2016).

Consumer credit represents a standout case since it embodied what Marx referred to as a “secondary exploitation, which proceeds alongside the original exploitation that takes place directly within the production process itself” (Marx 1981, 745). Yet as varied historical research has shown, the connection between the two is often more direct: to take the example of the industrial transition in the early twentieth century, Albert (2021) and Bittmann (2024) have shown that in France and the U.S., credit contracts were increasingly tied either to fixed or secure pay, or the possession of small collateral in connection to one’s job; all of which could be garnished in cases of default. The stratification of credit and labor markets thus became increasingly intertwined: in early twentieth-century Georgia, Black working women were thus overrepresented among clients of second-tier lenders, especially for certain occupational segments, such as washerwomen. As these faced little competition from white women, they were perceived as relatively good risks in the eyes of creditors, especially compared to male Black workers, who often had to move around to secure precarious contracts, as in the railroad industry (Bittmann 2024, 50). However, whether and to what degree wage garnishments should be allowed raised heated political debates, both in France and the U.S., regarding what balance to strike between workers’ contractual freedom and the risk of “financial slavery.”

Resorting to credit indeed produced strong disciplining effects, with worker-consumers having to adapt their behavior and budgets to convince lenders or brokers of their good standing. In Birmingham, Alabama during the 1910s and 1920s, dozens of collection agents thus sat outside steel factories every week on payday, to collect interest from Black workers, reminding them of their contractual duty: as one loan employee phrased it, “so long as he [the steel worker] pays the interest on this money,” the worker knows that the pledge made on his wages “will never be turned over to his employer for payment.” Since it was common for indebted workers to face a threat of dismissal, keeping with payments was also a way to protect one’s occupation and livelihood, an attitude lenders typically interpreted as a form of blind submission (Bittmann 2024, 63). In a more contemporary context, Desmond and Gershenson (2016) have similarly shown that evictions increase the risk of job loss in Milwaukee, with, conversely, the place of residence being often used as a basis for discrimination in hiring (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004; Bunel et al. 2016). Desmond and Gershenson (2016) thus argue that “involuntary displacements” function as an “overlooked mechanism of social stratification” similar to that emphasized through consumer credit. In this type of configuration, neither the notion of “predation” (from “loan sharks”) nor the simple juxtaposition of two dyadic exploitative relationships (credit-debtor and employer-worker) can fully account for the dual ties involved. Indeed, on top of a direct subordination to employers, managers, or overseers, debtors face the hovering threat of physical or institutional violence, from financial agents or judicial intermediaries, which reverberates through debt obligations and complex manifestations in terms of race and gender. Labor and market exploitation therefore intersect according to distinct local arrangements and phases, yet without one ever subordinating completely to the other.

Finally, this duality is not a pure analytical construction, as it can inform actors’ political claims against these chains. As a rare example, in Macon, Georgia, a trade union of local washerwomen wrote a petition to the city mayor in 1916, asking for protection against “loan sharks.” Yet in their statements they equally blamed the “collectors,” and “white people” who did “not pay them enough”; that is, white families exploiting their labor in exchange for insufficient wages (Bittmann 2024, 65). Here, the wage relation was foregrounded by workers as a cause for their indebtedness, as debt further increased the plight of low wages. Put differently, voicing their claims to better life conditions involved a dual criticism of debt and labor exploitation. Whereas Krippner (2017) has shown that debtors often connect their assertion of financial rights not to labor claims, but asset ownership (either individual or collective), this example shows that apprehending debt and labor exploitation as a V chain can help understand how “debt resistance” connects to more traditional labor-based forms of claims making (Sorg 2025).

2.4. L Chains, or Hinged Exploitation

In L chains, as in I chains, an actor/rector B simultaneously acts as exploited and exploiter. Yet in this configuration, exploited C remains an “other” to B’s exploiter A, suggesting two forms of exploitation operating on different planes. In its typical determination, where a worker-breadwinner, exploited on the labor market, is exploiting his spouse outside the formal economy,¹⁵ (male) labor thus plays a “mediating role . . . between the housewife and capital” (Seccombe 1974). Put differently, “in its relative form [labor power] it is linked back to domestic labor and in its equivalent form [the wage] it is linked forward to capital” in a way that distinguishes this hinged exploitation from a direct interconnection. The representation of such a relational structure remains, however, a contested issue: according to the “social reproduction theory” (SRT; Bhattacharya 2017), the family remains a distinct unit to which reproductive labor is outsourced by the capitalist class, pointing either to an I chain or even two distinct economic sites.¹⁶ Here we adopt the L representation, in line with recent criticisms of SRT, and calls for a more “unitary” approach to production and reproduction (Vogel 2014; Quick 2023): among others, Munro (2019) argues that this decoupling “de-emphasizes a central insight of Marxist feminism—the necessary role that household production plays in the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole”—arguing that “social reproduction” should be integrated within a broader analysis of “societal reproduction” including the “productive economy.”

Despite some early empirical studies (Meillassoux 1981; Barthez 1984; Delphy and Leonard 1992), empirical approaches to the articulation of labor and domestic work have been long overshadowed by “household microeconomics” (Becker 1981), a literature offering a purely individual-transactional take on exploitation, treating the spousal unit as a productive dyad maximizing a utility function under time, budget, and technological constraints—with outputs including food, child-rearing, leisure, or housing. Women’s domestic work is thus interpreted as a part of an optimal division of labor, with gendered differences in both productivity and preference treated as given. The literature has progressively moved beyond Becker’s “unitary” framework to introduce intra-couple bargaining, with more or less complex rules (Chiappori et al. 2022) and rely extensively on time-use data to explain several stylized facts regarding time-allocation patterns. Typically, marriage is associated with a “premium” for men and a “penalty” for women, and hence unequal benefits both in terms of labor supply and income (Petersen et al. 2014), with specialization choices being better explained by relative rather than absolute wages, and men’s inelastic labor supply being consistently observed across a range of measures and countries.

Yet this literature bears major, and well-known, shortcomings: it accounts poorly for intertemporal dynamics, how behaviors are affected through marriage or divorce, and cannot convincingly explain the sexual division of labor between spouses at the heart of domestic exploitation (Chiappori et al. 2022). The main economic narrative has consistently relied on comparative advantages to explain specialization choices. Yet as Siminski and Yetsenga (2022) have shown through Australian data, according to this model, women should be 109 times more productive in paid labor in order to achieve equality in domestic chores, which is highly unlikely. Rather, economists now routinely rely on notions of “norms” and “identity” to fill in the empirical gaps, mostly through a psychological understanding of utility penalties in cases of deviance (Bertrand et al. 2015). Yet this still fails to move beyond the individual-transactional level, on top of major methodological limits: since “intrahousehold allocation” is never directly observable, these approaches build conditions and testable restrictions derived either from labor market choices or naturalized psychological attributes, making it “unclear whether or not the final conclusions obtained by household collective models of labor supply are accurate” (Chiappori et al. 2022).

In its current state, microeconomics is thus poorly armed to study exploitation in or linked to the domestic sphere; and yet reversely the “political economy of patriarchy” has also been largely neglected within sociology since a few foundational studies (Meillassoux 1981; Barthez 1984) carried in the 1970s (Bessière and Gollac 2023, 215).¹⁷ First of all, while time-use surveys document the increasing externalization of domestic tasks, the consequences of these evolutions for women as a social group are less frequently examined. As such, through outsourcing, within-couple exploitation is often displaced unto lower, racialized segments of the female working class, many of whom are excluded from minimal wages, collective agreements, or remunerated through non-monetary transfers of gifts and favors. Alleviating one site of exploitation (the horizontal link of the L chain) here increases other exploitative segments, less tractable through quantitative household studies. In rich households, this “golden exploitation” serves to mask actual work conditions, with longtime workers frequently presented as “family members” (yet consistently excluded from money transfers or patrimonial arrangements) precisely to frame work exploitation as willful devotion (Jansen 2019; Delpierre 2022). This further outsourcing thus requires adding a vertical link to the L chain, from the household (as an exploiter/rector unit) down to account for the exploitation of paid domestic workers.

Second, the broader, life-cycle effects of domestic exploitation (appropriated time or informal labor) on wealth accumulation are much less consistently explored (Schneebaum et al. 2018). Gaps in assets, tied to aforementioned specializations between partners, trickle into further life stages, through “divorce penalties,” access to lower retirement pensions and long-term wealth accumulation (Bó 2022). This is true both in contexts where formal equality is not achieved, such as many former colonial societies (N’Diaye 2014), and countries where it is. And even in the latter, wealth gaps are amplified by legal intermediaries, such as notaries and judges, whenever divorce or heritage settlements are negotiated (Bessière and Gollac 2023). The same goes for relational accounting between spouses: How is money pooled, allocated across expenses and bills depending on each partner’s contribution? How is capital accumulation, such as real estate, negotiated through gendered norms and interactions, further excluding women? Data on both capital assets and spending is often pooled at the household level in national surveys, except in rare cases such as France and Germany, thus stalling our understanding of individualized wealth accumulation (Grabka et al. 2015; Frémeaux and Leturcq 2020). Further research on family exploitation would thus be needed to better apprehend the complex set of imbalanced monetary transfers between couples or kins, as compared to respective income, time and capital contributions, all the way from marriages through breakups and deaths.

2.5. C Chains, or Complicit Exploitation

In this configuration, we consider the exploitation of actor C by an “other” A, through the intermediation of rector B. The typical case studied in the literature involves consumers and sweatshop labor: while A retains the full control of her or his spending decision, she or he exerts very little control over the downstream appropriation—at least without some form of collective organizing such as in the case of boycotts or white-labeling campaigns—making A “complicit” but not participant in C’s exploitation (Ferguson and Ostmann 2018; Wieland and van Oeveren 2019; Ferguson 2021).¹⁸ The question of labor exploitation has, historically, been at the heart of consumer activism, at least in the U.S. since the early stages of mass consumption in the early twentieth century (Glickman 2015). Florence Kelley’s National Consumer League famously campaigned against child labor, but also for shorter hours and better wages, directly appealing to (women) shoppers and targeting department stores who distributed mass-produced garments. Rather than bystanders of labor exploitation, this form of activism is meant to turn consumers into direct rectors of manufacturers’ decision-making, the latter in turn becoming actors submitted to demand pressures, even if these actions can often feel superfluous (Wieland and van Oeveren 2019). While the case of sweatshop labor has attracted the most attention from philosophers, one can think of similar examples, such as that of a retired worker earning his monthly pension through a pension fund, exerting no influence—especially in cases of employer-imposed schemes—over the financial decisions to invest in potentially exploitative circuits downstream.

Finally, one understudied arena where complicit exploitation can occur is through the fiscal system, as tax systems define a social contract where “relations of extraction” and “relations of redistribution” need to be equated (Daunton 1996). Though not direct exploitation by the state, such as in the case of penal labor or LFOs, fiscal exploitation can arise whenever those are perceived as imbalanced. Indeed, through the fiscal system, consisting of both direct taxes (on revenues or wealth) and indirect tariffs (on consumption), the state plays a major distributive role, socializing expenses through collective levies, thus raising issues of allocative fairness. Since taxation does not involve direct relations between exploiters and exploited, formulating an explicit counterfactual can help shed light on what some social groups might consider an unjustified burden on their revenues. In this regard, the history of tax resistance proves insightful to understand how constituents claimed that their communities were exploited through fiscal policymaking. Time and again, these have been at the root of major revolutions and political upheavals, either to oppose costly conflicts waged abroad by feudal “domain states,” demand more retribution through welfare from later “tax states,” or simply lower the levies captured by the Leviathan (Schumpeter 1918).

Adepts of liberal or libertarian creeds have actively voiced such rejections: as early as the eighteenth century, Say (1971, 130) referred to taxes as “mere spoliation”: even if “levied by national content,” taxes remained in his eyes an extractive device used by the “unproductive classes” to prey upon the “industry of individuals.” Closer to the present day, partisans of a “nightwatchman” state have repeatedly endorsed tax resistance on behalf of similar precepts (Martin 2008). Among the California tax revolts during the 1970s, public choice theorist James Buchanan (1980) thus explicitly spoke of “fiscal exploitation” to support property tax reductions (through Proposition 13), levies he believed were detrimental to consumers and economic efficiency. However, fiscal sociology has also strived to emphasize the complex roots of tax resistance, often resting in the defense of a specific segment or territory. The California tax revolts were no exception, with, for instance, many African American taxpayers arguing that “their tax money” was being used to finance industrial and urban projects in suburban white areas, thus diverting capital away from local investments (Self 2005, 131, 195). As Martin (2008) has argued on a broader scale, despite these movements being later recuperated by right-wing conservatives, many constituents originally mobilized to defend an “invisible welfare state,” in the form of local and “informal fiscal privileges” which the federal administration was precisely trying to curb.

Fiscal reforms can thus directly affect distributive politics at the local or national level, with specific groups being fiscally exploited at the expense of others: as an example, with major tax cuts implemented since the 1980s in the U.S., municipal and state fiscal capacities have been drastically undercut, evolutions which proved advantageous to many white homeowners through hidden “privileges” (Martin and Beck 2017; Henricks and Cheyenne-Harvey 2017). Manduca et al. (2025) have thus recently shown that the “tax base fragmentation”—defined as the “unequal allocation of taxable property wealth across jurisdictional boundaries”—affects both the amount and type of fiscal revenue raised by local governments, forcing local jurisdictions under fiscal stress to turn to fees or nonrevenue taxes. This directly connects to racial “macro-segregation,” between metropolitan areas, with Black residents paying property tax rates close to double those of whites (Manduca 2025), through what is described as the “Black tax” (Kahrl 2024). While local polities might argue that they represent independent economic bodies, thus refusing to pay for poorer, neighboring municipalities, the imbricated scales of U.S. fiscal federalism still raise issues of distributive justice at the national level.

The case of imperial and colonial taxation provides an even more striking case of decoupling between “extraction” and “redistribution” (Daunton 1996), or taxation and welfare. Historians of fiscal systems have just started to understand how displacing the “tax burden from metropole to the periphery” contributed to the univocal extraction of resources from distant subjects, thus shaping enduring inequalities at the global level (Bhambra and McClure 2022, 1). These imbalanced arrangements were commonplace throughout empires, often leading to a “racialized . . . fiscal hierarchy” (Woker 2022, 47). Furthermore, fiscal and wage exploitation were closely tied in this context: in the French Empire, the poll tax (capitation) was primarily made to “force colonial subjects into wage labor” with, conversely, fiscal seizure being facilitated by formalized labor, especially on public works. In these contexts, colonial subjects were thus submitted to a dual exploitation (V chain) by the state and colonial firms, yet exploiter status also extends to metropolitan taxpayers through a C chain, since those benefited from the extraction of cheaper colonial products, often through forced labor, as well as geopolitical influence, despite a low fiscal burden. Symmetrically, for (exploited) imperial taxpayers, formulating a political alternative often combined demands for distributive equality, with more radical claims at political autonomy.