Legal/semi-legal? What kind of distinction is that and why should it matter? Exploitation is exploitation, laws are just made up bullshit, especially when written by the bourgeoisie
You're missing the point, labor laws as they are in most of the US, if you're working legal hours for legal wages you're not being exploited, you're actually being paid above the value of your labor, capitalists can afford to do this because exploitation in the global south is so great capitalists can afford to throw first world workers a bone. Plus it gives them a class of well off consumers to sell all the cheap shit the workers of the global south produce.
Most of the stories you hear about explorations in the first world actually violate labor laws, or at least come close to it.
It still seems like a very non-materialist distinction.
If you're working legal hours for legal wages
Why do you need to make this caveat? If people are being put in a position where they have to accept extralegal conditions of employment in order to survive, they're being exploited. Hand waving that away because it's not "legal" seems naive at best and intentionally misleading at worst.
I think the point is that if you're working legal hours for legal wages in the empire, you're being paid more than the value of your labor because of superexploitation of the global south. The Marxist definition of exploitation is not keeping the whole value of your labor; given this framing, an imperial subject working legal hours for legal wages is keeping more than the value of their labor, and so cannot be exploited in the Marxist sense.
Legal/semi-legal? What kind of distinction is that and why should it matter? Exploitation is exploitation, laws are just made up bullshit, especially when written by the bourgeoisie
You're missing the point, labor laws as they are in most of the US, if you're working legal hours for legal wages you're not being exploited, you're actually being paid above the value of your labor, capitalists can afford to do this because exploitation in the global south is so great capitalists can afford to throw first world workers a bone. Plus it gives them a class of well off consumers to sell all the cheap shit the workers of the global south produce.
Most of the stories you hear about explorations in the first world actually violate labor laws, or at least come close to it.
It still seems like a very non-materialist distinction.
Why do you need to make this caveat? If people are being put in a position where they have to accept extralegal conditions of employment in order to survive, they're being exploited. Hand waving that away because it's not "legal" seems naive at best and intentionally misleading at worst.
I think the point is that if you're working legal hours for legal wages in the empire, you're being paid more than the value of your labor because of superexploitation of the global south. The Marxist definition of exploitation is not keeping the whole value of your labor; given this framing, an imperial subject working legal hours for legal wages is keeping more than the value of their labor, and so cannot be exploited in the Marxist sense.
Yes, you worded this much better than me.
Read the Zak Cope book he lays it out well. Westerns are being overcompensated for their labor.
that's pretty fucking relative
lmao
Read the Zak Cope book he lays it out very well.