10 Scholarly Critiques of Capitalism and Imperialism
By Glen T. Martin / radford.edu
1. “Capitalism is the accumulation of resources by means of exploitation in the production and sale of commodities for profit. Capitalist exploitation is an unequal exchange wherein capitalists extract income from economic exchanges solely because they hold legal title to productive assets. There are two types of exploitation – primary and secondary. Primary exploitation, which takes the form of profit, is an unequal exchange with labor wherein capitalists appropriate all the “value added” in production, net of wages, because they own the business in which production takes place…. Secondary exploitation, which takes the form of rent and interest, is an unequal exchange between the capital-rich and the capital-poor, including between wealthy and poor countries…. As a result, at all points of exchange in production, capitalists have institutionalized coercive power as employers, bosses, lenders, and landlords. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx considered exploitation to be the application of coercive power in markets to obtain an unequal exchange.
(Boswell, Terry and Chase-Dunn, Christopher The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism, 2000, pp. 20-21)
