If you want to map the trajectory of my medical career, you will need a large piece of paper, a pen, and a high tolerance for Brownian motion. It has been tortuous, albeit not quite to the point of varicosity.
Why, for instance, did I spend several months in 2023 working as a GP at a Qatari visa center in India? Mostly because my girlfriend at the time found a job listing that seemed to pay above market rate, and because I needed money for takeout. I am a simple creature, with even simpler needs: I require shelter, internet access, and enough disposable income to ensure a steady influx of complex carbohydrates and the various types of Vitamin B. For all practical purposes, this means biryani.
Why did a foreign branch of the Qatari immigration department require several doctors? Primarily, to process the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there. I would say they were 99% of the case load - low-skilled laborers working in construction, as domestic servants, as chauffeurs or truck drivers. There were the odd handful of students, or higher-skilled workers, but so few of them that I could still count them on my fingers even after several hundreds of hours of work.
Our job was to perform a quick medical examination and assess fitness for work. Odd chest sounds or a weird cough? Exclude tuberculosis. Weird rashes or bumps? The absolute last thing Qatari urban planners wanted was an outbreak of chickenpox or fungal infections tearing through a high-density labor dormitory. Could the applicant see and hear well enough to avoid being crushed by heavy machinery, or to avoid crushing others when operating heavy machinery? Were they carrying HIV? It was our job to exclude these possibilities before they got there in the first place. Otherwise, the government wasn't particularly picky - a warm body with mostly functional muscles and ligaments would suffice.
This required less cognitive effort than standard GP or Family Medicine. The causal arrow of the doctor-patient interaction was reversed. These people weren’t coming to us because they were sick and seeking healing; they were coming to us because they needed to prove they weren't sick enough to pose a public health hazard or suffer a catastrophic workplace failure.
We were able to provide some actual medical care. It's been several years, so I don't recall with confidence if the applicants were expected to pay for things, or if some or all of the expense was subsidized. But anti-tubercular meds, antifungal ointments and the like weren't that expensive. Worst case, if we identified something like a hernia, the poorest patients could still report to a government hospital for free treatment.
A rejection on medical grounds wasn't necessarily final. Plenty of applicants returned, after having sought treatment for whatever disqualified them the first time. It wasn't held against them.
While the workload was immense (there were a lot of patients to see, and not much time to see them given our quotas), I did regularly have the opportunity to chat with my patients when work was slow or while I was working on simple documentation. Some of that documentation included the kind of work they intended to do (we'd care more about poor vision for a person who had sought a job as a driver than we would for a sanitation worker), and I was initially quite curious about why they felt the need to become a migrant worker in the first place.
Then there was the fact that public perception in the West had soured on Qatari labor practices in the wake of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Enormous numbers of migrant workers had been brought in to help build stadiums and infrastructure, and many had died.
Exact and reliable numbers are hard to find. The true number of deaths remains deeply contested. The Guardian reported that at least 6,500 South Asian migrant workers died in Qatar since the country was awarded the World Cup in 2010 - many were low-wage migrant workers, and a substantial share worked in construction and other physically demanding sectors exposed to extreme heat. However, this figure is disputed. Critics noted that the 6,500 figure refers to all deaths of migrant workers from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh regardless of cause, and that not all of those deaths were work-related or tied to World Cup projects.
Qatar's official position was far lower. Qatari authorities maintained there were three work-related deaths and 37 non-work-related deaths on World Cup-related projects within the Supreme Committee's scope. But in a striking on-camera admission, Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, told a TV interviewer that there had been "between 400 and 500" migrant worker deaths connected to World Cup preparations over the preceding 12 years. His committee later walked the comment back, claiming it referred to nationwide work-related fatalities across all sectors. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both called even the 400-500 figure a vast undercount.
It is worth pausing here, because the statistics are genuinely confusing in ways that I think matter. The 6,500 figure, as several researchers have noted, covers all-cause mortality for a very large working-age male population over twelve years - a group that would have a non-trivial background death rate even if they stayed home and did nothing dangerous. Some analyses, including ILO-linked work on Nepali migrants, have argued that overall mortality was not obviously higher than among comparable same-age Nepali men, though other research found marked heat-linked cardiovascular mortality among Nepali workers in Qatar. The Nepal report also (correctly) notes that the migrants go through medical screening, and are mostly young men in better health on average. They try to adjust for this, at least for age.
I raise this not to minimize the deaths - dying of heat exhaustion in a foreign country, far from your family, in service of a football tournament, is a genuine tragedy regardless of the comparison group - but because I think precision matters. "Qatar killed 6,500 workers" and "Qatar had elevated occupational mortality in difficult-to-quantify ways" are meaningfully different claims, and conflating them makes it harder to know what we should actually want to change.
I am unsure if there was increased scrutiny on the health of incoming workers to avoid future deaths, or if the work I was doing was already standard. I do not recall any formal or informal pressure from my employers to turn a blind eye to disqualifying conditions - that came from the workers themselves. I will get to that.
I already felt some degree of innate sympathy for the applicants. Were we really that different, them and I?
At that exact moment in my life, I was furiously studying for the exams that would allow me to move to the UK and work in the NHS. We were both engaged in geographic arbitrage. We were both looking at the map of the global economy, identifying zones of massive capital accumulation, and jumping through burning bureaucratic hoops to transport our human capital there to capture the wage premium. Nobody really calls an Indian doctor moving to the UK a "migrant worker," but that is exactly what I am right now. The difference between me and the guy applying to drive forklifts in Doha is quantitative, not qualitative.
I could well understand the reasons why someone might leave their friends and family behind, go to a distant land across an ocean and then work long hours in suboptimal conditions, but I wanted to hear that for myself.
As I expected, the main reason was the incredibly attractive pay. If I'm being honest, the main reason I moved to the UK was the money too. "Incredibly attractive?" I imagine you thinking, perhaps recalling that by First World standards their salary was grossly lacking. To the point of regular accusation that the Qataris and other Middle Eastern petrostates are exploitative, preying on their workers.
First World standards are not Third World standards.
This is where Western intuition about labor often misfires, stumbling into a sort of well-intentioned but suffocating paternalism. The argument generally goes: This job involves intense heat, long hours, and low pay relative to Western minimum wages. Therefore, it is inherently exploitative, and anyone taking it must be a victim of coercion or deception.
This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences: the idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in forty-degree heat for $300 a month. But for someone whose alternative is working in forty-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices doesn't save them. It just destroys their highest expected-value option.
You cannot legislate away grinding poverty and resource constraints.
The economic case for Gulf migration from South Asia is almost embarrassingly strong when you actually look at it. India received roughly $120 billion in remittances in 2023, making it the world's largest recipient, with Gulf states still accounting for a very large share, though the RBI's own survey data show that advanced economies now contribute more than half of India's remittances. For certain origin states - Kerala being the clearest case, alongside Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu - remittance income is not a rounding error in household economics; it is the household economy. The man sending money home from Doha is participating in a system that has done more for South Asian poverty alleviation than most bilateral aid programs combined. This is not a defense of every condition under which that labor is extracted. It is simply a fact that seems consistently underweighted in Western discourse.
Consider the following gentleman: he had shown up seeking to clear the medical examination so that he could carry sacks of concrete under the sweltering heat of a desert sun. Out of curiosity, I asked him why he hadn't looked for work around his place of birth.
He looked at me, quite forlorn, and explained that there was no work to be had there. He hailed from a small village, had no particular educational qualifications, and the kinds of odd jobs and day labor he had once done had dried up long ago. I noted that he had already traveled a distance equivalent to half the breadth of Europe to even show up here on the other end of India in the first place, and can only trust his judgment that he would not have done this without good reason.
Another man comes to mind (it is not a coincidence that the majority of applicants were men). He was a would-be returnee - he had completed a several year tour of duty in Qatar itself, for as long as his visa allowed, and then returned because he was forced to, immediately seeking reassessment so he could head right back. He had worked as a truck driver, and now wanted to become a personal chauffeur instead.
He had been away for several years and had not returned a moment before he was compelled to. He had family: a wife and a young son, as well as elderly parents. All of them relied on him as their primary breadwinner. I asked him if he missed them. Of course he did. But love would not put food on the table. Love would not put his son into a decent school and ensure that he picked up the educational qualifications that would break the cycle. Love would not ensure his elderly and increasingly frail parents would get beyond-basic medical care and not have to till marginal soil at the tiny plot of land they farmed.
But the labor he did out of love and duty would. He told me that he videocalled them every night, and showed me that he kept a picture of his family on his phone. He had a physical copy close at hand, tucked behind the transparent case. It was bleached by the sun to the point of illegibility and half-covered by what I think was a small-denomination Riyal note.
He said this all in an incredibly matter-of-fact way. I felt my eyes tear up, and I looked away so he wouldn't notice. My eyes are already tearing up as I write this passage, the memories no less vivid for the passage of many years. Now, you are at the point where my screen is blurry because of the moisture. Fortunately, I am a digital native, and I can touch-type on a touchscreen reasonably well with my eyes closed nonetheless. Autocorrect and a future editing pass will fix any errors.
(Yes, I do almost all my writing on a phone. I prefer it that way.)
There. Now they're drying up, and I'm slightly embarrassed for being maudlin. I am rarely given to sentiment, and I hope you will forgive me for this momentary lapse.
I asked him how well the job paid. Well enough to be worth it, he told me. He quoted a figure that was not very far from my then monthly salary of INR 76,000 (about $820 today). Whatever he made there, I noted that I had made about the same while working as an actual doctor in India in earlier jobs (as I've said, this gig paid well, better than previous jobs I'd had and many I had later).
He expected a decent bump - personal drivers seemed to be paid slightly better than commercial operators. I do not know if he was being hired by a well-off individual directly or through an agency. Probably the latter, if I had to guess, less hassle that way.
I asked him if he had ever worked similar roles in India. He said he had. He had made a tenth the money, in conditions far worse than what he would face in Qatar. He, like many other people I interviewed, viewed the life you have the luxury of considering inhumane and unpalatable, and deemed it a strict improvement to the status quo. He was eager to be back. He was saddened that his son would continue growing up in his absence, but he was optimistic that the boy would understand why his father did what he had to do.
One of the reasons this struck me so hard then, as it continues to do now, is that my own father had done much the same. I will beat myself with a rusty stick before I claim he was an absentee dad, but he was busy, only able to give his kids less time than he would have liked because he was busy working himself ragged to ensure our material prosperity. I love him, and hope this man's son - now probably in middle school - will also understand. I do not have to go back more than a single generation before hitting ancestors who were also rural peasants, albeit with more and better land than could be found in an impoverished corner of Bihar.
By moving to the Middle East, he was engaged in arbitrage that allowed him to make a salary comparable to the doctor seeing him in India. I look at how much more I make after working in the NHS and see a similar bump.
I just have the luxury of capturing my wage premium inside a climate-controlled hospital, sleeping in a comfortable bed, and making enough money to fly home on holidays. I try to be grateful for the privilege. I try to give the hedonic treadmill a good kick when it has the temerity to make me feel too bad for myself.
There are many other reasons that people decry the Kafala system other than the perceived poor pay and working conditions. The illegal seizure of passports, employer permission required to switch jobs, accusations of physical abuse and violence are all well-documented, though the link to the 2020 Reuters article claims the system was overhauled and “effectively dismantled”.
I make no firm claims on actual frequency; I have seen nothing with my own two eyes. Nor do I want to exonerate the Qatari government from all accusation. What I will say is that "exploitation" is a word with a definition, and that definition requires something more than "a transaction that takes place under conditions of inequality." If we define exploitation as taking unfair advantage of vulnerability, we need a story about how the worker is made worse off relative to the alternative - and the workers I spoke with, consistently and across months, told me the opposite story. They are not passive victims of false consciousness. They are adults making difficult tradeoffs under difficult constraints, the same tradeoffs that educated Westerners make constantly but with much less margin for error and no safety net.
The people who know best still queued up for hours in the hopes of returning, and I am willing to respect them as rational actors following their incentives. I will not dictate to them what labor conditions they are allowed to consider acceptable while sitting on a comfy armchair.
I do not recall ever outright rejecting an applicant for a cause that couldn't be fixed, but even the occasional instances where I had to turn them away and ask them to come back after treatment hurt. Both of us - there was often bargaining and disappointment that cut me to the bone. I do not enjoy making people sad, even if my job occasionally demands that of me. I regret making them spend even more of their very limited money and time on followups and significant travel expenses, even if I was duty-bound to do so on occasion. We quit that job soon; you might find it ironic that we did so because of poor working conditions and not moral indignation or bad pay. I do, though said irony only strikes me now, in retrospect.
Returning to the man I spoke about, I found nothing of concern, and I would have been willing to look the other way for anything that did not threaten to end his life or immediately terminate his employment. I stamped the necessary seals on his digital application form, accepted his profuse thanks, and wished him well. I meant it. I continue meaning it.
(If you so please, please consider liking the article and subscribing to my Substack. I get no financial gain out of it at present, but it looks good and gives me bragging rights. Thank you.)
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Notes -
Maybe this is just a quibble about language then, but language carries with it smuggled implications and connotations that can be quite important. So quibble I will.
It's not exploitation if both people are profiting and fully informed and mutually consenting and no shenanigans are going on. Exploitation is when the Company Town charges 10x market value for food and services because it's a monopoly and there's literally nowhere else to buy your stuff and then takes it out of your wages until you have negative money and wish you'd never started the job. Exploitation is when an employer threatens (implicitly or explicitly) to turn their illegal immigrant workers over to the authorities if they complain, or when a Pimp threatens to beat the crap out of his prostitutes if they don't earn enough, or when children are forced to work in Diamond mines at literal gunpoint.
Exploitation is when someone wants to leave but can't, and the inability to leave allows their employer/captor to pay them less than market wage. Exploitation is things like indentured servitude and slavery. This is bad. People don't like this, people don't want this, and it makes the world a worse place.
Exploitation is not "the market has lots of labor but not a lot of capital, so people with capital can capture most of the profits from their joint ventures". If both parties are profiting and are glad for the presence of the other party, then neither is being exploited. If you call this exploitation then you in turn have to come to counterintuitive conclusions like "exploitation is sometimes good for the exploited people and we should encourage more of it". Instead, you should use a different word for it, that doesn't carry all the negative connotations and connections to actual bad exploitation.
Of course it's not as good as some hypothetical utopian ideal that we haven't yet discovered which distributes resources equitably while simultaneously being at least as productive as capitalism. But it's better than anything we've found so far, and it's better than literal exploitation. It deserves a better name.
If capital accumulates and accumulates and accumulates in your area and you stay just as immiserated does it not eventually become rational just to size it or at least not unreasonable ?
This just reeks of envy. Other person has a thing, I don't have the thing. I want the thing. I feel entitled to it. I am going to steal it, because I want it.
If someone is not harming you, is not unfairly manipulating the market to spite you, is not oppressing you, is not even interacting with you except voluntarily in positive sum ways then what do their possessions have to do with you at all? If your next door neighbor suddenly had 1000x as much wealth as they do now and then didn't tell you about it or share it, your life would not meaningfully change. It's not your business. It is unreasonable to throw away freedom and property rights to feed your envy and desire for things that other people have, simply because they have more than you.
This is not an absolute rule. I am willing, and in fact enthusiastic to accept exceptions to this in cases where they are manipulating the market via monopolies, especially in cases where they are snatching up non-renewable things like land, and their wealth actually does affect you. But the default state of mankind is that people are born without anything and have to struggle and labor and in some cases literally battle against nature in order to survive. It is only by the accumulation of capital and knowledge gathered generation after generation that society has enabled us to crawl out of the dirt and be slightly less immiserated.
If capital accumulates and accumulates in your area then a competitive market should cause wages to rise as demand for labor does. Which creates opportunities for you to gather more for yourself than you did before, even if it's not as much as the capitalists get. This is what we see: across the globe absolute poverty has plummeted regardless of what "inequality" is doing. Don't worry about how rich your neighbor is, just be the best you that you can be instead of trying to kill the golden goose.
What is there to do? It’s looking like people will not suffer inequality like will not despite its economic benefit to them it’s almost as if they would rather be worse off
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I think you gloss over quite a lot of nuance with this. Is it explotation to give my mentally deficient neighbor a piece of candy to mow my lawn and clean my pool? Is it exploitation to give a homeless alcoholic a bottle of vodka in exchange for him pulling out his tooth on camera? Is it made worse if I sell copies of the recording for a pretty penny? The consent aspect, to me, is muddied by the fact that there is a strong imbalance in power and leverage. There is a threat inherent in the subtext to the impovrished. Work yourself to the bone, or starve. Both people profit, one enough to fill his coffers, the other enough to keep them going through the next day of labor. A market wage does not make the claim that it is fair or humane.
I think the nuances you claim I'm glossing over are embedded into the term "market wage". I agree that consent alone is not sufficient, but would argue that. Rational and collective consent That is, if everyone consistently trades X for Y, and agrees that X is worth Y, and X is causally necessary for Y or at least strongly related to it, and there's no realistic way for someone who wants Y to get Y without X, then it's not exploitation for one more person to come along and also offer Y for X.
The problems with the examples you are offering below market rate for those exchanges. A rational actor can buy a piece of candy for a couple of cents, and can mow a lawn for quite a few dollars. The exploitation is that the mentally deficient neighbor could mow a lawn and clean a pool and earn much more money and buy much more candy if they knew better. The exploitation is the difference between what they could get if you didn't deceive them, and what they do get. Similar-ish with the homeless alcoholic. A bottle of vodka is like $10, a tooth is worth way more than $10, and the alcoholic is in an irrational position where they're not really considering the long term impact of their choices. The term "market wage" bakes into it the assumption that there are no better alternatives available (or they would determine the market wage). If you can get a job paying 100 pieces of candy (or the equivalent in cash) and don't know about it so choose a job paying 1 piece of candy, you are not getting paid the market rate. If you pull out a tooth for $10, you are not getting market rate (There isn't a well established market for teeth, but order of magnitude given how much it would cost to add a fake tooth via a dentist plus a bunch for pain and suffering, it'd probably be fair and non-exploitative at a few thousand dollars)
The rationality here isn't quite the issue though, so much as the reason why the people in your examples would accept an obviously bad offer. The offer is bad because better alternatives exist. In a world where candy did not exist but you invented candy for the first time and offered it exclusively to people who mow your lawn I would argue that this is NOT exploitative. Because people who want to try out candy and can't get it any other way could benefit from your invention. Similarly, in the case of migrant workers traveling to get a 10x pay raise, that 10x pay raise is not exploitative even if small in absolute terms because it's improving their lives and it's the best offer they have available. Rational people want 10x pay raises, even if it's not 100x. I think this might be the crux of the issue here.
-I believe that a trade offered by party A is exploitative if it offers/forces/coerces/deceives people into accepting a worse exchange rate compared to other offers available to them from parties other than A. Someone is worse off than if party A had never existed.
-You appear to be arguing that a trade offered by party A is exploitative if it is a worse exchange rate compared to other offers party A could make and still profit from.
That is, the question appears to be whether someone is obligated to be generous in their trades. Actually, even then there seems to be an asymmetry where you expect people in power to be generous in their trades but not the common people (otherwise you would have to argue that someone who buys a cheap lawnmower and uses it to earn 100x as much as the lawnmower costs is exploiting the store they bought it from unless they donate half of their pay). Similarly, hopefully you'd agree that in our world, someone getting paid $200/hr to mow a lawn is not being exploited. However in a world where lawnmowing talent was extremely rare and most lawnmowers got paid $1000/hr, then someone who didn't know this getting paid $200/hr would be exploited, despite it being the same absolute amount of money. The existence of alternatives modulates what is "fair" or "exploitative" because the opportunity cost of someone's labor and talents is whatever else they could be doing with them.
I would argue that it is greedy and not very nice to offer someone the bare minimum you can get away with. I do not think it is "exploitation", or should be illegal or ostracized or criticizes especially harshly. Again, I think the key distinction is "if you did not exist, would they be better or worse off?" We want people to make other people's lives better, even if only a little. it's better than none. And it's especially better than people who make other people's lives worse, which is evil and is what we should use the word "exploitation" for. Tarring people who make other people's lives only a little bit better but less than they could with the same brush as people who ruin lives just dilutes outrage and discourages progress. The more these fake exploiters there are, the more they have to compete with each other and the higher the market wage grows. We should encourage more of them, not discourage them.
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This is one of many cases where Marxist Language and ordinary language hit friction. "Exploitation", in Marx, is a very precise concept that is supposed to be a technical term, different from ordinary use (iirc, the employer's capture of surplus-value, as in asdasd's examples). Of course, in practice, it becomes a case of using the scope of the technical term with the moral connotations of its ordinary use. I sympathize with the ornery back-to-the-text Marxists who also find this frustrating, but it's an inherently frustrating thing about arguing Marxist theory and the majority of "Marxists" seem to enjoy the motte-and-bailey games it enables. Honestly, I think Marx did, too, there's always a tension in his work between the serious economist and the firebrand pamphleteer.
This is a feature, not a bug, and one of my main gripes with leftist ideologies. I have no sympathy, because the entire point is the deceive people but get away with it under the guise of "not technically lying". It's a step beyond the media version where you use words which are literally true but heavily imply something false. Here they use words which are literally false but with made-up definitions that would be technically true if that's what those words actually meant. And they spend however many years or decades publishing articles that nobody reads establishing those definitions so they have something to point to when called out on their deception. But the deception is the point.
Fundamentally it's the same as calling your political opponents "child molesters" and then when called out you say that you've redefined the term "child molester" to mean whatever political point they hold. It's a difference in magnitude, being less egregious and much more carefully laundered in order to get away with it, but it's the same kind of rhetorical trickery, and deserves the same level of respect.
In your post, you just define "exploitation" to be what the standard capitalist thinks exploitation should mean. The fact that you have a different intuition than Marx does not mean deception is the point. The Marxists could (and did/do!) accuse capitalists of all the same critiques you are leveling at Marxists and their critiques are equally valid.
For example:
The obvious counterexample to this claim would be the Roman practice of molesting young boys. Both parties here profited from the exchange (the elder statesman receiving sexual gratification and the young boy receiving political tutelage), both entered into the practice willingly, but up-to-lizardman's-constant, every modern American considers this to be exploitation.
So it seems to me you are redefining the term exploitation away from its common-sense meaning into a technical one to perform the exact same motte-and-bailey you accuse the Marxists of.
This is a bad counterexample, because the problem in the Roman case is not the quantity of the exchange but in the kind. That is, the exchange of political tutelege for sexual gratification is fundamentally illegitimate. It should be possible to gain political tutelage without resorting to sexual favors, and anyone who refused to give sexual favors would be blocked out of the system. This is exploitative because it forces people to perform actions they shouldn't be forced to perform. If the ratio were 10x more favorable to the boys (they get 10x as much tutelege per sexual act) it would still be fundamentally exploitative. Sex work is demeaning and degrading and nobody should be forced to do it. Good faith political tutors should offer their services for non-sexual compensation.
Meanwhile, the exchange of labor for money is inherent to... reality. You can't create things without labor. Someone somewhere is going to have to labor. The labor in combination with the capital creates the wealth. Capitalists cannot offer money for not doing labor, they would immediately go bankrupt. You can make a quantitative argument (working for $5/hr is exploitative but working for $500/hr is not) but this is fundamentally different from saying exchanging labor for money is inherently exploitative. Unless the argument is that labor itself is inherently demeaning and degrading, in which case Marx just has an irreconcilable problem with reality itself, because if nobody labors then everyone just starves to death.
Exploitation comes from the monopolistic seizing of something that by all rights ought to be a public good and holding it hostage at distorted prices that wouldn't persist if it weren't being monopolized. Some Marxists would argue this is true of capitalists monopolizing capital, but this is a really stupid take and doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. Capital didn't spawn on the Earth, it was made by people. A good rule of thumb is "if this person had never been born, would everyone be better off, or worse off." In this case of political people forming networks and functionally ostracizing people who didn't go through their tutelege, the world where they didn't exist is one where young boys could grow up and not get molested and control politics themselves. They are better being exploited compared to being ostracized in a complicated system designed to force people to need tutors, but they're worse off than if this system didn't exist.
In the case of capital, if the capitalists didn't exist then neither would their capital. It's not like the world had this factory sitting there and the capitalist came along and snatched it up and prevented the workers from owning it themselves*. It wasn't there before the capitalist paid to have it built! If you want a world where the capitalists don't exist, literally pretend that they don't and go physically build your own factory, and then you'll own it. The fact that most people don't do this (or can't afford to do this) suggests that the capitalists are providing real value.
*In cases where this is untrue, like natural resources that people did snatch up and exclude others from, I agree this is exploitative and bad, which is why I am tentatively in favor of Georgism and think they should have to pay Land Value Taxes. Marxism is just an inferior proto-version of Georgism that fails to comprehend the distinction between land and capital.
This sounds entirely post-hoc justified to me. Every primeape understood the exchange of sex for favors long before homo sapiens invented money.
Yeah but it's gross and bad. They also understand the drive to murder your enemies and take all of their stuff and territory. Of course people want to do these things, to give into their base animalistic urges. To be selfish and horny and greedy and gross. That doesn't make it good. That doesn't mean we should run a society that way if we can make a society that discourages these things.
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I_consent_I_consent_I_dont.jpg
Sex is labor, usually performed in exchange for vital resources (modern welfare states excepted). Even the feminists acknowledge this, though considering feminism is in a very literal sense a union of the dedicated sex-laborer gender, and a cartel interested in driving the price of that sex as high as possible (and your "shouldn't" happens to be one of their slogans), I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for pointing that out.
No it isn't, per the above.
No further comment.
Who "ought" decide that? You can say "the community", but there's nothing that backs that up outside of its members' capacity for violence in the service of reaching a consensus. Which is kind of just how socialism works.
Horseshoe theory. I agree with your assessment of feminists unionizing to increase its market value, but think that this makes them just as bad as the dudebros who want to minimize its market value. Sex as labor is bad. It leads to bad outcomes, weak relationships, and frustration on both sides. Having sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with you in exchange for resources dilutes, destroys, and delegitimizes the value of actual loving sex, marriage, and child rearing. This is related to the divorce crisis as well.
-Sex releases all sorts of hormones and psychological effects designed to make people fall in love. People having sex either form these bonds and then experience great emotional distress when breaking up, or eventually stop forming these bonds and then fail to bond properly with an eventual long term partner. -People who don't love each other having sex often leads to unintended pregnancies. Even in the modern era with birth control, it still happens quite frequently. This either leads to abortion (which is a form of infanticide), or unloved children who grow up disfunctional/miserable/criminal.
I look at all the people angry about gender issues, and see that almost all of their problems wouldn't have happened a hundred years ago. If the dating norm were still: find one person, marry them in your early 20s, have sex with only them, have kids with them, the vast majority of them would be happy. The feminists are mad that men are sleeping around and don't want to commit. The men are mad that it's so much effort to get laid and the women don't respect them. None of them are actually friends with or spend time with people of the opposite sex.
Even if on some level someone doesn't really like sex and only does it because it makes their partner happy, that can still work if they actually like their partner and want them to be happy. Relationships shouldn't be treated as markets of exchange. Markets are free, open, impersonal, interchangeable. Relationships are not. You can't funge sex with one person for sex with another. Not if you want a real relationship. Sex as labor is a poor substitute for desperate people who don't have the real thing. I don't see how you can look at the modern dating market and go "this is basically fine, nothing needs to change". It's not fine, and people are not happy, and sex as labor is a significant contributor to this.
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You don't believe that sex is labor. Not really. Not even in the Lysistratan sense, where the old women demand that they be given their fair share of young and handsome men. Because then a rapist isn't a violator of a woman's chastity, but merely a robber of a stranger sort. The average prostitute charges less for her time than the $950 dollar mandatory minimum that California demands for larceny.
You can see where this is going.
Let me assemble this man of straw for you and jump straight to the point. Knowing all of these facts, are you willing to live in a world where sex work is labor, with all the implications therein? Theft is just an abstract form of stealing labor, after all. The remedy for theft is return of the property stolen or recompense of the service owed. (Assume that pain and suffering are baked into the prevailing rate of prostitution).
Can I rape you for an hour and pay a state a fine of 300-600 dollars?
I can't believe anyone still seriously thinks "well sex is just labor its just an action" anymore after in absolutely unfathomable evidence we have to the contrary.
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The baseline reality of a sexually dimorphic species is quite literally just this. I've talked about this before, and you know that.
We can pretty it up with a bunch of things- something about "inherent dignity" or whatever (which can be valid, if you can command enough violence to enforce it)- but at the end of the day this is the condition.
Robbery is the main crime, but rape also generally involves a bunch of other more interesting types of robbery (assault and unlawful confinement being the usual two, but there are others). Those things also come with significant costs that push the cost of that action far beyond the 300-600 dollars a naive assessment would suggest.
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This is a bit confusing. If sex is labour, isn't rape more akin to forcing someone to labour against their will, which is likely to involve committing a serious crime, not just an instance of robbery?
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My sympathy is strictly with the textualist Marxists who also find this annoying when the kids around them are doing it. They do exist and I appreciate their grumpiness.
But it's inherent to the redefinition in the first place. Marx could have picked a different word to begin with. If Marx did not want to smuggle in all of the connotations of the word "exploitation" he would have used a different word for his technical definition. You can't just appropriate words that everyone already uses and means for something and then redefine them and then get annoyed when people keep using them for their original meaning.
This is some basic rationalist A Humans Guide to Words stuff. Socrates fell afoul of this thousands of years ago and get roasted by Diogenes for it. They should know better by now. They do know better. I don't for an instant believe that Marx did this by mistake. He wanted to expand the definition of exploitation in order to include people who normally wouldn't be included and thus smear them with the same brush. Any textual Marxist who is autistic enough to genuinely think that the new definition is what this word is supposed to mean is a victim of Marx himself, not the kids using it the way he intended.
I do think the word had a different valence in the 19th Century, more neutral - in part because of its entirely negative use by socialists. Think of the the way the word is used for the exploitation of mineral deposits, for instance (that is to say, "exploitation" had the connotation of treating people as resources, still mildly negative but not as inflammatory as today). For what it's worth, the robot agrees - but I may be wrong, this is just the vibe I get from old books. At the same time, Marx was very much a pamphleteer as well as economist, so I think it's partly both.
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Thank you. You've made any argument I could have made, and with more detail and rigor than I could bring myself to muster right now. I've very appreciative.
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I'm pretty sure I have at at least one point exploited my employers by collecting full wages in spite of decidedly poor performance.
Checkmate socialists.
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