Analytical Political Economy

11A PROGRESS REPORT ON MARXIAN ECONOMIC THEORY: ON THE CONTROVERSIES IN EXPLOITATION THEORY SINCE OKISHIO (1963)

Naoki Yoshihara

University of Massachusetts AmherstKochi University of Technology, and Hitotsubashi University

1. Introduction

Given the recent and common trends of growing disparity in income and wealth and the increase in poverty among advanced countries, the issue of the long-run distributional feature of wealth and income in the capitalist economy should be at the heart of economic analysis, as Piketty (2014) emphasizes. Piketty (2014) also suggests that divergence in the distribution of wealth and income is explained by the significant inequality between the earnings rate of financial assets and the growth rate, since the former represents the increase in rewards for capital holders while the latter does the increase of the real wage rate. Although controversial, his argument reminds us of Marx's view of the capitalist economy as a conflicting distributional relationship between capitalists and workers.

Marx recognized the conflicting distributional relationship as exploitative, and argued that an exploitative relation between capitalists and workers is generic and persistent in the capitalist economy. Since then, the notion of exploitation has been one of the prominent concepts relevant to capitalist economic systems, particularly in a number of debates and analyses of labor relations, especially focusing on the weakest segments of the labor force (see, e.g., ...