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Social Class
 
 
Can class exploitation be fitted into this framework?

But this must seem very messy. Clearly it is not easy to compare pleasures and the concept of a mathematical calculus of pleasures is a fantasy. The marxist account of exploitation seems reassuringly mathematical by comparison. The slave or serf produces more food than they themselves eat and this surplus is appropriated by their owner or landlord. You can think of it as bags of wheat. But this is a bit problematic when some of the services that serfs perform are things like changing the lord’s bed or feeding his hounds. How to mathematically compare bags of wheat and changing the lord’s bed?

So marxists generally think of it as hours of labour. The subordinate class creates a product and in doing so they use so many hours of their labour. The dominant class allows them to keep either a certain proportion of that product (for example wheat) for their own use and appropriates the rest of the product (the surplus product). So in that case the subordinate class spend a certain number of hours producing for themselves and a certain number of hours producing for the dominant class. Or the subordinate class creates the surplus product by using a proportion of their time producing some service for the dominant class. For example they spend a certain number of hours producing food for themselves and above and beyond this they do some work changing beds in the lord’s manor – expending more hours in work to produce a surplus product.

In either case, what is surplus can be considered as a surplus of time spent above and beyond the time spent in producing what they consume themselves. This mathematics of time allows Marx’s account to be transferred to the capitalist economy which, through this device, is imagined as a species of class exploitation. Here, money is the measure of hours of labour invested in production. Hours of work produce something that can be exchanged for money and the worker is paid in money proportional to their hours of work. According to this account of capitalist exploitation, the value of money that the worker receives is less than the value in money of what the worker produces. The difference is a surplus in exchange value, or money. In relation to hours of work, the worker is doing some hours of work to produce the value of their pay and the rest of the day is spent in hours of work that are producing value for the owner of the means of production.

Sometimes this kind of account of capitalism is criticized as embodying the marxist “labour theory of value”. In other words, Marx definitely believed that there was some kind of close and mathematical relationship between the monetary value of things and the amount of hours that went into producing them. Economists have tended to scoff at this suggestion, pointing out that scarcity can produce monetary value. In other words, the relative use value of objects can have a huge impact on their monetary value. If people all want diamonds and they are scarce, for the same amount of hours of productive labour, the monetary value will be higher for diamonds than for something which is produced in abundance and not in such high demand – for example wheat.

I do not believe this objection deprives marxists of what they need to see capitalism as a species of class society with a ruling class expropriating a surplus product from the work of the subordinate class. It is simply this. Taken as a whole and averaged out over a range of different examples, workers receive less value (in hours of labour) in what they buy with the money they are paid in wages than the value (in hours of labour) of what is bought with the monetary value that their work produces. Let us include all kinds of work here and not be parsimonious unlike some marxists – let us include the hours of work of the capitalist organizing production, the engineers designing plant, the accountants keeping the books, the advertisers promoting the product, the shopkeepers distributing the product and so on, along with the factory worker actually making the object in question. Let us tot all this up in hours to get a value in hours of the product as it is sold. Then let us say that the value in hours of the factory worker’s contribution is some portion of this total value = X hours and they are paid for this with their wage. With this they go out and buy a basket of commodities. Each item in this basket of commodities also can be seen as something which took a certain number of hours to produce = Y hours. The central claim of the marxist analysis of capitalism as a class society is that these two figures X and Y are not the same and that instead and systematically, Y is substantially less than X.  It is really hard to believe that this is not the case. This difference is a surplus product – the worker is producing more value in hours of labour than the value in hours of labour that they are keeping for themselves – just like in every other kind of class society that the planet has seen so far. 

We can also look at the situation within the firm, and say – how is the value in money of the product being divided up. If there was no exploitation then this value should be divided according to the hours of work put into it. Yet this is not the case, the ruling class of capitalist societies have income which implies that they must be working 50 times as many hours as their workforce, if all were being recompensed at the same rate for each hour of work. This is a clear impossibility, there are not that many hours in the week. So some people in the firm (and we could speculate about where this line of division takes place) are getting more hours of labour value in their income from the product than their input of labour would suggest – for them Y is substantially more than X. 

I do not think that any of the above commits the fallacies of the “labour theory of value” that economists write about. The only thing we are saying about money here is that it is exchanged for products which in fact embody a particular number of hours of labour.  We are not saying that the amount of money is always proportional to these hours of labour or that hours of labour are in some way the true and only origin of this monetary value.  Our interest in the money is merely as a marker. It marks the transition between the spending of hours of labour in production and the acquisition of hours of production embodied in purchase.  Our claim is merely that these hours of labour are not the same for most wage workers in capitalist societies – the first is systematically more hours than the second. 

The hidden humanism of the marxist account

We now have two broad accounts of inequality and exploitation.  The first, that used in the last chapter, compares the production and consumption of pleasures in relation to a theory of human nature (a humanism). It also identifies “work” as activities which are frustrating in their undertaking but produce pleasure in their consumption, another humanist account that can be spelled out in detail by talking about the central desires common to humans as a species and realized in distinctive ways in different social contexts. Exploitation is the production of a surplus of pleasurable activities for the ruling group at the expense of work by the subordinate group.

Marxist theory seems a lot less fanciful and more mathematically rigorous. Exploitation takes place when some proportion of the hours of work of the subordinate group are embodied in products appropriated by the ruling group. What I want to argue in this section is that this marxist account collapses into humanism when we start to examine what is meant by the terms which are being used and consider particular cases in more detail. 

I will begin by quoting at length from Mandel’s Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, a useful summary of how latter day marxists have interpreted Marx’s analysis of the origin and shape of class across history.

A.     As long as the productivity of labor remains at a level where one man [sic] can only produce enough for his own subsistence, social division does not take place and any social differentiation within society is impossible.

B.     Every increase in the productivity of labor beyond this low point makes a small surplus of products, once one man’s hands can produce more than is needed for his own subsistence, then the conditions have been set for a struggle over how this surplus will be shared.

C.     From this point on, the total output of a social group no longer consists of labor necessary for the subsistence of the producers. Some of this labor output may now be used to release a section of society from having to work for its own subsistence.

D.     Whenever this situation arises, a section of society can become a ruling class, whose outstanding characteristic is its emancipation from the need for working for its own subsistence.

E.      Thereafter, the labor of the producers can be divided into two parts. A part of this labor continues to be used for the subsistence of the producers themselves and we call this part the necessary labor, the other part is used to maintain the ruling class and we give it the name surplus labor.

F.      Thus social surplus product is that part of social production which is produced by the laboring class but appropriated by the ruling class, regardless of the form social surplus product may assume, whether this be one of natural products, or commodities to be sold, or money. (Ref. 21)

I will divide my discussion of this into two sections. One concerns aspects of this account which cannot be true and must be regarded as misleading if they are meant to be an account of real history. The second, which is more pertinent to the issue of defining inequality, is to look at what some of these terms can mean when unpacked in detail to defend an analysis of social class in history to which I am basically sympathetic.

Before I go on to do this I will give one of Mandel’s examples of social class to show how this analysis can be applied, namely plantation slavery, such as that of the Roman Empire or the West Indies in the 17^th century. The slaves produced their own food working a plot of ground on Sundays and the products from this labour were their own store of food. On six days a week the slaves worked on the plantation and got nothing in return for their labour. This is the labour which creates a social surplus product. The product belongs totally to the slave master. (Ref. 22)

Problems with this account

One problem with Mandel’s account, which has in fact bedevilled marxist theory for many decades, is the slippage that occurs in the way the term “subsistence” is being used. In point A, Mandel envisages a state of society where one “man” can only produce enough for “his” own subsistence. The productivity then increases to a point beyond this. This sugggests to us that subsistence is an historical absolute based on biological necessities. We immediately imagine that in such a society technological development is so backward that no one can produce more than they need to survive – to eat, sleep and keep warm at a minimum level necessary for life itself. No matter how hard people work, they could not produce more than this. Then, at a certain point in time, a person can produce more than this amount. A real change in technology (in other words agriculture) allows a person to produce more than they need for their own survival. 

Yet by point F, the social surplus product which is that which above and beyond subsistence is defined very differently, and with that the concept of subsistence is also defined differently. A part of what society produces is the surplus product. This is what is appropriated by the ruling class. The rest, that which goes back to the producers, is subsistence.

This second definition separates the two categories subsistence and surplus through the concept of exploitation – that value which is retained by the producers is their subsistence and the value of their labour that is appropriated by the ruling class is the surplus. It takes little reflection to understand that this second definition does not map at all readily onto the first, biological understanding of the two categories. What goes to the producers in society may actually be a lot more than any biological minimum of “subsistence” that was historically transcended at the time of the origin  of class societies. In society today, the proletariat, those working for a wage, are paid for their work at a rate that affords a great deal more than a bare biological subsistence as their share of the social product – and can include cars, brick houses, refrigerators and plasma TV screens. Yet at the same time it can still make sense to see them as exploited – because the share of the social product that they get is less than the share that they produce. The second definition still makes sense.

In this second definition “subsistence” is not defined biologically but refers to the “living” that people make. It is defined in reference to the extent of appropriation of a surplus product and the amount which is left after this for “subsistence”, or for your living. Some people work and make products – the subordinate class. Other people do not work but appropriate and consume products – the ruling class. The ruling class makes use of things that are produced, but not consumed, by those who work. Subsistence (the living) is that which is both produced and consumed by the workers; what is left after the surplus has been skimmed off.  This second definition makes a lot more sense if we are to compare various societies and make a claim that social class is a transhistorical phenomenon.

So the problem with the marxist account as represented in Mandel and in other authors is that there is an incoherence between two ways of defining the key terms of subsistence and surplus which gets papered over as these two definitions are run together. “Surplus” is used firstly in what we could call an archaeological mode as that which is produced in society which goes beyond bare necessities.  But is also used to mean that which is produced which is appropriated by the ruling class and not returned to the producers.  With this the definition of subsistence has a complementary shift. In the first case it means bare biological subsistence and in the second it means the allowance or living which goes to the subordinate class as their share of the social product.  It is this second definition of surplus and subsistence in relationship to exploitation which I find the most useful as a cross culturally valid way to conceive class relationships.

A second problem with Mandel’s account is that as history or anthropology it does not deal very well with the nature of classless societies – for example hunting and gathering societies or stateless egalitarian horticultural societies like the Munduruçu considered in the previous chapter. In Mandel’s view, classless societies are such that people cannot produce more by their own labour than what they need for their bare biological subsistence, and hence there can be no division of society and no appropriation of a surplus product. This is not a very good account of such societies. For a start, the amount of necessary labour required to produce a biological survival is but a fraction of the working day in classless societies – estimated at three hours a day by Sahlins. This means that in theory anyone working nine hours a day could provide for two other people. Any equality in the distribution of labour and surplus in these societies is a political choice, rather than a necessity imposed by technological constraints and scarcity. Then to go on with, we know that in fact a social division does exist in these societies and that a surplus is extracted from women that goes to men, as spelled out in great detail in the previous chapter.

Let us look at this more abstractly. In classless societies based on hunting and gathering, let us assume that there was no storeable surplus. Food could not generally be stored and there was a limit to the acquisition of other goods since everything had to be carried around on foot. However one person could produce more than was necessary for their own subsistence. There were a certain number of hours of necessary work. In this period as much as could be eaten by the group could be collected, if it was available. However this left a long period of leisure in which any further effort at food gathering or tool making would produce no useful results. This extra time could be considered leisure, in the sense of producing no result necessary for biological survival, although the activities that filled it, such as religious ritual, were often considered necessary for survival. There are two ways that exploitation could occur in such a situation. On the one hand food gathering and tool making activities that were more enjoyable and exciting could be portioned out to one group at the expense of another group, which ended up doing more boring work. Or one group might work longer hours at necessary obligatory work. The other group could enjoy more unconstrained leisure or be involved in activities that carried social importance, bestowed power or were an expression of creativity. These are all forms of social division and I have argued in the previous chapter that it makes sense to see them as forms of exploitation.

The humanist collapse of key terms

What we can also look at is the way the key terms of this marxist account make assumptions about the nature of “work” and the definition of a “product” that are either false or push us to define these terms with concepts that have to come from outside the marxist account as it has been stated.

Products are not just physical objects

A first issue is the tendency of Mandel’s account to portray a “surplus” as a physical object. In point F the surplus is defined to include commodities to be sold, money or natural products (in other words, objects that are produced but are not accorded a monetary value – payment in kind, tribute and the like). It might be easy to think that what is meant is “objects that have been worked upon to make them useful to someone else”. The word “appropriate” certainly suggests the idea of physically taking into possession. The historical example is that of the production of food as a physical object. In point B the reference to what can be produced with “two hands” suggests the same conclusion as does the idea of “products” to be “shared”. The physical object nature of “products” and hence of “surplus product” is a lietmotif of marxist accounts of class as a historical phenomenon, and relates to Marx’s “materialism”, something I will not examine here.

Yet the actual list of things that could be a surplus (commodities, money, natural products) do not in fact require this restriction to physical objects. A commodity is something which can be bought or sold. In capitalism today there are many commodities that do not take the form of physical objects. Vocational guidance, sex therapy, the experience of watching a movie, can all be bought. People create all sorts of useful things which are not physical products.  Yet any comprehensive account of exploitation would surely have to take these into account. When Mandel says that a surplus product can take the form of a “natural product” would he include the small glow of self satisfaction that is produced by a cheering mob, the warmth of a cuddle, the sound of music?  If not why not?  This is a humanist collapse in the following sense. What is being defined as a product is that which is useful to people. To get a handle on that it is necessary to see products as those things which produce pleasures in relation to basic desires of human nature. These are not all physical objects.

So my first claim is that the concept of a product has to be opened up to include items which are not physical objects produced by manual labour.

Work is that which produces use value

In Mandel’s account, the words “production” and “work” are interchangeable. The ruling class are not producers because they do not work. We have to know what “work” is if we are to know who the ruling class is – they are the people who are not doing any! Without this, no definition of “surplus product” can be arrived since that in turn depends on the idea of “production”. Some people produce things (by working) while others merely appropriate that production.

We could take it that “production” is any human activity that causes some use value to be produced. Work is being done if someone produces something that is useful to other people. The ruling class is a group who never engage in activity that is useful to other people. However, the subordinate class produce use values for them. The social scientist examines a social order and decides who it is who is producing use value and who is not and names the situation accordingly.

But actually, any such determination requires an observer to compare use values and to make an estimation of whether something is really useful or not. The most obvious fact about how ideology works is that the ruling class rarely presents itself as a group that is exploiting the rest of the population and giving nothing in return. The ruling class of Aztecs, Mayans and Incas were fond of ceremonies in which they ensured the harmony of the universe and created conditions for successful agricultural production. In return they received tributes of food, slaves and lives.

To nominate this as a class society according to the marxist account is to discount the mythology and declare that actually the ruling class were not producing any tangible and real benefits to the rest of the population, or at least that it was a minimal benefit. Awkwardly, this is partly a judgement based on current science – such rituals are not necessary to ensure the regular progression of the seasons, and cannot prevent climatic anomalies. This is also a judgement based on an analysis of the real needs of people as they are constituted by human nature. We are saying that nothing the ruling class was doing was really of any use to the rest of the population. We need criteria that can work across social orders. So without a comparison of use values, the whole idea of what a surplus product is, and hence of what counts as exploitation, goes up in smoke.

A marxist account needs to be able to say that the exploited group produces things that are truly useful for the ruling class and that the ruling class does not return anything in exchange that is equally valuable. The best way of analyzing relative utility, and in fact the only way if we are to look at it cross culturally, is to see how various things contribute to the development and satisfaction of basic desires of human nature. This may seem a tall order but we have seen in the previous chapter that feminist accounts of gender inequality tackle these issues constantly and with a fairly convincing degree of success and cross cultural validity.

One issue that comes up here is worth discussing. If we can compare use values, how can we avoid the contention that the ruling class, although they do not work more hours than anyone else, produce vastly more use value and are rewarded accordingly. In some sense this is the central contention of a lot of capitalist apologia for the current order. The story goes that the organizational work of the capitalist class and their entrepreneurial spirit is the font of the affluence of the working class and is rewarded accordingly. Of course a lot of the ruling class do little work and just enjoy the fruits of their share holdings, but let us leave that aside for a minute and assume that some at least work, say a 60 hour week, but receive something like 50 times the income of the people who work for them.

There are a number of ways for marxists to answer the claim that what the ruling class produces is really worth their fabulous incomes – the argument that there is no exploitation because the ruling class produces something equivalent in usefulness to the income they receive.

The first answer is to claim that the work done by the capitalist is only necessary in the context of capitalist society. What the capitalist actually does is really the political work of maintaining a system of exploitation that ends up by benefiting the capitalist class. Production and distribution do not actually have to be organized in this way. In this argument the work that capitalists do is not unlike the work of Aztec nobility in conducting ceremonies and building monuments that solidify and maintain their power over the subordinate class; these works are not really necessary to make crops grow but they could be necessary to mobilize the peasantry to produce a crop in the context of this particular class society.

A second answer is to say that any organizational efficiency that comes about through the operation of capitalist oversight could be replicated by effective democratic control of production – and to cite examples like Mondragon, or hunting and gathering societies. So in this reply we would not necessarily deny that a capitalist does organizational work that produces more use value than that produced by one of their workers – but we would argue that this organizational work could be better shared around, along with its fruits in useful production, to the greater advantage of all. In this account, what the capitalist does is certainly work, and produces use values, but this work only has to be carried out by a capitalist in the context of the capitalist system. 

A third answer is to point to the massive inefficiency created by an alienated work force who have little commitment to their work, not to mention the social cost of the political systems set up to maintain this inequality. For example consumerism could count as a political cost of alienated labour, it is what people demand as a compensation for their alienation – yet it has disastrous environmental consequences. Or we could argue that a competitive education system is a necessity for the hierarchical systems of labour control and differentiated reward that come with capitalism. Yet this educational system produces only humiliation and depression for those at the bottom of the class and creates anxiety for all concerned. The point of these replies is to deny that the capitalist organization of work is as useful as it appears to be. It seems to produce use values now but these come with rather large costs. So the organizational work of the capitalist is not just unnecessary but actually harmful to society at large.

A fourth answer rejects the view that the organizational work of the capitalist is more valuable by the hour. It is actually very difficult to compare the use value of contributions to a shared labour process. The claim that the work of the executive or capitalist is more useful per hour of labour is hard to substantiate when all parties have to carry out their role to make the product happen and produce use values for the consumer.  The work of every part of the organization is necessary to a particular productive process. This points to the conclusion that the work of capitalist organizers of production and that of their subordinates is equally useful per hour of labour; it is just different. We could agree that the capitalist works and endures suffering through their hours of labour but argue that the suffering endured through this work is no greater than the suffering endured by the worker – which certainly seems like a reasonable description at the very least! Yet the appropriation of the products of this joint work is far from equivalent.

Summing up. Marxists are not really sure that the work of the capitalist is necessary to production and distribution, though it may be necessary to ensure the conditions necessary for capitalist appropriation. Even if it is necessary, and part of what the capitalist does would be required in any organization, it does not have to be done by a capitalist to be effective, it could be distributed or delegated to some part of the ordinary workforce. Even if it is necessary and essential, at least within the current framework of capitalist society, it is no more laborious and no more essential than the work done by every individual worker and so it makes no sense to reward it more highly – this is an exploitation.

So overall, my claim here is that what is hidden in the marxist account of class is a definition of work as something that produces use value. We cannot tackle all the issues raised above without getting into a humanist discussion about what things actually have use value. To say whether someone is working or just pretending to do work we have to have a concept of use value and to be able to compare, at least roughly, the use values produced in different activities. To do this we need to be able to talk about why products of labour are useful to people and we can best do this by looking at how people can gain satisfaction from the products of other people’s work – satisfactions that relate to basic desires of human nature. When we do this we open ourselves up to the usual apologia for class society that claim the usefulness or special usefulness of what the ruling class do – but we are also equipped with a set of tools that we can use to address these issues. We are not reduced to ruling these issues out of court as though they were not relevant.

Work in class societies is a burden

My third claim is that the marxist account of class makes an assumption that work is a burden and again, this is an assumption that is referenced to notions about what things are fun to do and what things are frustrating. In fact, as Marx explains at great length in his early writings, there are aspects of the very structure of capitalist employment that make it “alienating” and prevent it from being an expression of creative and social desires. This analysis permeates and lies behind the very concepts of work, production and the like which make up the transhistorical concept of class that writers like Mandel elaborate.

Let us begin by agreeing to what was concluded in the previous discussion. Work is always that which produces something useful. But is that the end of it? Let us imagine two groups of people. One works and the other does not. Let us call them the musicians and the couch potatoes. The products are evenly distributed. According to the marxist definition, the musicians are being exploited and the couch potatoes are appropriating the products of their work. But what if making music is intensely enjoyable – a production of use values for others that is a pleasure in itself. Maybe the couch potatoes are intensely bored by their workless existence. By no means an impossible situation. Clearly it makes little sense to think of this as an exploitation and it is not what marxists are talking about when they define situations as exploitative in reference to “work”. Or let us imagine another example. There are two groups who exchange products of their labour that are equivalent in use value. Yet one group is doing work that is intensely pleasurable and creative (for example hunting) while the other group is doing work that is massively boring and frustrating (for example mashing and washing cassava tubers). It would be perfectly understandable to nominate the happy workers as exploiting the work of the bored workers. Yet difficult for marxists if work is just what produces use values and nothing more.

The hidden assumption of all marxist accounts of class is that “work” is a loss of use values, or a frustration of the basic desires of human nature, it is not a consumption of use values or a pleasure. In class societies it is always “alienated labour” and not labour as an expression of creative and social desire, as Marx recognizes it could be in a communist utopia. Of course the minute you spell this out and demand to know why some activity is being classified as “work” within a model of exploitation, you open up the considerations that the feminist model of exploitation starts with.

The wash-up

So how does all this look now? Social class in this analysis becomes a special case of “exploitation”, defined according to the humanist account developed in the previous chapter. In other words, class societies are those which allocate life chances differently to whole households or families. They operate by transferring some of the products of the work of the subordinate class to the ruling class. The ruling class may engage in some work on behalf of the society as a whole, but the use values they produce through this are never equivalent to what they receive from the work of the subordinate class. Production is here defined as a production of use values and this is related to basic desires of human nature – activities and things are useful which satisfy these desires. Work is defined as a production of use values which frustrates these basic desires.

Class society is a particular historical product, an imagined social invention. It is not by any means universal and we can see that other forms of exploitation precede, accompany and interpenetrate it. One would not want to deny the centrality of the production of a storeable and transportable food crop as historically central to how class societies operate – hunger is a very basic drive. However, a broader picture of how class societies operate must go deeper than this to define exploitation more adequately. In doing this we can see that we arrive at a concept of exploitation and inequality that can be used to consider other kinds of exploitation that are quite different from social class. We also need this broader analysis to really explain the similarity of different class societies and respond adequately to ruling class rationalizations of class as equivalent exchange. 

Class society was invented after technology allowed a stored surplus of useful goods. This was possible after the invention of agriculture and especially with cereal cultivation. So particular individuals and families could amass wealth, use it to feed armed retainers, and secure the loyalty of their children through promises of inheritance. Very largely this was enabled through the production of a surplus in material objects that could be transferred from person to person and retain their value over time. These objects embodied the life activity of their makers. The work done to produce them was generally at the expense of the satisfaction of the basic desires of human nature. To own them was to have the means to increase the fulfilment of those desires without the necessity to work. This is the historical truth behind the marxist account of class. 

Yet a full account must cover situations where what is appropriated is not a material object. It must be able to explain what it is to work and why appropriation of the products of the labour of others is thereby considered exploitation. It must be able to define an unequal exchange and explain what an equal exchange would be like. It must be able to compare products according to their use value, as well as in terms of the hours of labour that they embody. It is this double comparison which allows the claim that what the ruling class offers in exchange is not of equal value – it is neither equal in use value nor equal in terms of the work expended in production. Either what they do is not really work, because it does not produce use values. Or what they do in work is not equivalent to what they receive from the work of others. 

What is also worth saying is that social class may depend on and be centred around the exploitation of labour used to produce material objects but that is not the only kind of exploitation involved in class regimes. Inequalities of status or social regard are always relevant. For example the rules in most pre-capitalist class societies that cover dress codes and modes of respect and address through which class is expressed (Sjoberg). These deny various forms of creative expression and display to the subordinate classes and exalt the ruling class as those to be noticed, as well as being an exercise of power and control that is at the expense of the autonomy of the subordinate class. None of this is easily reduced to exchanges of labour and useful material objects. Clearly, it may be argued that the exploitation of the labour of others to produce material objects is consolidated and gives leverage to provide a variety of pleasures for the ruling class, and this is part of what is going on here, but the fact of the regime of dress codes itself is more than this in so far as it is an exercise of power that in itself is exploitative. Some of these displays can be seen as ideological, in reminding the ruled of the magnificence and power of the ruling class. To that extent they are not simply an exercise of the power of the ruling class to give itself pleasure but also a necessary outlay to sustain dominance. Within contemporary societies the hierarchical division of labour and the ideology of meritocracy and the work ethic, along with the attempt to deprive most labour of creative control, all work to intensify the exploitation of the subordinate classes beyond the mere extraction of surplus labour. These conditions end up by depriving the subordinate classes of dignity and stigmatizing them as deficient in intellect, hard work and the capability to take responsible decisions (Sennett & Cobb; Willis). 

The global class system today

A key problem for an analysis of exploitation is that the model developed so far seems to be premised on a class relationship between only two classes – the ruling class that extracts a surplus product, and a subordinate class, that is exploited.  Yet even by simplifying things massively, the structure of inequality and exploitation on a global scale that exists today is not readily put into this framework. While we can talk about a capitalist class and the global poor, we also have to acknowledge a sizeable global middle class who may be thought to be themselves exploiting some of the poorer members of the world community, even as they themselves are being exploited by the truly rich. How do we theorize this and who is exploiting who? The key elements of the capitalist system are as follows. 

The capitalist class

This is about two per cent of the global population. Within this class there are also considerable differences of wealth. These people own and control the “means of production”. That is, they own most the things that are used to produce goods and services, factories, farms, offices and so on. The richest 1 per cent alone owns 40 per cent of global household wealth (UNU-Wider 2006). For example 25 million rich Americans receive as much income as 57 per cent of the world’s people (New Internationalist 2004: 21).

The proletariat

I use this archaic term from Marx because the “proletariat” is a lot larger and more diverse than the group we normally call “working class”. It is this working class and more. We can define the proletariat as being made up of all the people who need to work to get a wage. They have to sell their labour to live, or if they are unable to sell their labour they can at most “get by” in extreme poverty. While some of this class are not actually employed it is hard for them to survive without some income. To that extent they are available for work if the capitalist class can give them a job.

Internationally today, this is a very disparate group, including rich professionals, the middle class of all countries, the employed working class of rich and developing countries, and the unemployed of all countries – both the urban poor and rural peasants eking out a living from subsistence.

We can think of this international proletariat today as divided between a global consuming class, mostly located in the rich countries, and a class of global poor. The affluent middle class of all countries and the relatively affluent working class of the developed world are this global consuming class. They are probably between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of the world’s population – no more than one billion people. For example, the richest 10 per cent of adults account for 85 per cent of the total of household wealth (UNU-Wider 2006). 20 per cent of the world’s people in the high-income countries account for 86 per cent of total private consumption expenditures (UNDP 1998: 2).  

Finally, the rest of the world’s population are the global poor – the unemployed of developed countries and the subsistence peasants, low-wage workers and unemployed urbanites of developing countries. A large fraction of these people – 840 million – do not get adequate energy and protein in their diet and at least another billion are anaemic from food shortages (UNDP 1998: 49, 50; Sachs 2005).

The arrival of affluence in the rich countries

Historically, during the 1800s and early 1900s the working class of rich countries put a lot of pressure on capitalists to increase wages. This was by forming unions and getting all the workers in an industry to strike for higher wages. It was also by forming political parties of the left – to restrain capitalism and increase living standards. The constant threat of revolution also made the ruling class more amenable to compromise. Russia, of course, had a revolution against capitalism. In the first half of the twentieth century, most of Europe and even the United States itself came close to revolution. 

The combined effect of these actions was to create a new deal for capitalism in this period – a kind of unwritten contract between capitalists and the working class of the rich countries. Wages would constantly go up as technology made work more productive. The real standard of living in goods and services would increase. Working class organizations would abandon the demand for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. The capitalist class would gain a guaranteed market to sell the products of their factories to their own workers. There would be plenty to cream off to ensure their own luxurious affluence. Politically, they could count on stability and the protection of their rights to own the economy (Cardan 1974; Hoogvelt 2001). 

By the fifties the working class of the rich countries had broadened their political struggle to achieve what has been called ‘the social wage’ (Hoogvelt 2001). This is the public provision of social security, medical services, education and even housing.  Ultimately this too was funded out of the productivity of mass production, with taxes being levied to fund this expansion of government provision. 

The situation in developing countries

Up until quite recently, all developing countries have experienced capitalism in its most brutal form – with wages pared back to bare subsistence, with long hours and awful working conditions. Competition between workers for jobs is fierce, with vast masses unemployed. This helps to keep wages low. This situation has been kept in place by colonial dictatorships at first and later by de facto dictatorships run by locals. All independent organizing by the working class has been crushed as “communist”. The workers of rich countries could be counted on to provide willing soldiers to put down rebellions in the developing world if necessary (Hoogvelt 2001; Chomsky 1982; Horowitz 1969).

The hidden reality of this accommodation was that at least some of the affluence of ordinary people in the rich countries depended on the cheap labour of the developing countries. Cheap exports of raw materials and food from the developing countries enabled cheap consumer goods and cheap food in the rich countries. The same subsidy from developing countries enabled the increasing social wage paid to workers in rich countries (Hoogvelt 2001). Later, cheap industrial goods from the developing countries and cheap tourist holidays pushed this affluence even further. 

Of course this is not the only basis for the affluence of the developed world – its own technological capacity is certainly a major factor. But at present and in the whole of the modern industrial period, this has been backed up by cheap labour and cheap exports from developing countries.

What I mean by cheap is that the hours of work put in by people in the developing world are paid at one rate – allowing a very small consumption. When what they produce is exported to rich countries it goes to make up the consumer goods purchased by the working class and middle class of the rich countries. The oil, platinum, copper, rubber, tea, and coffee go into the consumer goods and food enjoyed in the rich countries. Of course, people in the rich countries work too. The consumer goods that make up their lifestyle are a joint product of work in rich and developing countries. However, when people in the first world put in hours of work they are very well paid for their efforts – enabling them to purchase consumer goods in quantities that workers in developing countries can only dream of. The effect of this discrepancy is that first world consumers use up the lion’s share of the world’s resources. As noted above, 20 per cent of the world’s people account for 86 per cent of private consumption expenditure.

To take an example from today. In Australia, a typical rate of pay for a task like cleaning a house or gardening is $20 an hour (Australian dollars). At the rate of conversion to South African rands in 2006, this is about R100 per hour. In one 8-hour day the Australian worker can make R800. In South Africa, the government has recently legislated that the minimum pay per month for “unskilled” workers should be R800 per month. Widely, throughout South Africa, people are actually being paid at rates as low as R500 a month. Recently, security guards in Pretoria went on strike.   One demand was that the low paid workers in the industry might have an increase in pay of 11 per cent from their present rate of R1 050 a month (Ngqiyaza 2006). The strike has been bitter and prolonged and as I left South Africa in 2006, there seemed little chance of employers giving in to the demands. In another indication of typical wages, I was informed that workers at a very successful game farm were being paid R1 500 per month, whether they were gardeners, maintenance, waitresses, chefs, receptionists or lodge managers. Or we can compare the typical incomes of the poorest half of the population in South Africa – generally less than $1 000 Australian dollars per year – with the average incomes of people in the rich countries – about $38 000 Australian dollars per year. This disparity is at least in part due to the way rich world incomes are subsidized by the low wage work of people in developing countries (Terreblanche 2002; Sachs 2005). 

To maintain this situation of global inequality, the capitalist class, with the support of the working class of the rich countries, has intervened constantly in developing countries to ensure the best possible conditions for capitalism – low wages and a politically compliant population (Chomsky 1982; Horowitz 1969). This process is continuing even now with the USA constantly increasing its presence in developing countries and beefing up its armed forces (Hoogvelt 2001: 161). 

Along with this, the international capitalist class has resisted any kind of government intervention in developing economies, which might compete with their own operations. So, for example, economists have counselled governments in developing countries against printing money or taxing the rich to create employment and provide goods and services to the poor (Stiglitz 2002: Chossudovsky 2003; Perkins 2005; Hoogvelt 2001). Any such reforms would cut into the profits to be made by private business.

In this context, far from developing countries gradually catching up with the rich countries, their situation has become worse decade by decade. As developing countries competed to produce raw materials and whatever could be made very cheaply, they undercut each other. The relative price of their exports declined, their ‘terms of trade’ became worse. For example, the prices of agricultural commodities can crash as developing countries compete on the world market. Cotton by 47 per cent between 1998 and 2001 and coffee by 69 per cent in the same years (New Internationalist 2004: 18; Castells 1997c). With declining terms of trade, more goods have to be exported to access a similar set of imports of industrial goods from the rich countries.  The outcome has been a constant relative decline in incomes between the rich and poor countries. The UNDP estimates the income gap between richest and poorest countries as being 3:1 in 1820; 11:1 in 1913; 35:1 in 1950; 44:1 in 1973 and 72:1 in 1992 (Hoogvelt 2001: 90).

As Mediated Exploitation

If the picture of the global class system described above makes a certain amount of sense as a broad brush stroke summary, how do we fit it within the model of exploitation canvassed in this and the previous chapter.

One way to look at it is to concentrate on the capitalist class as the owners of the means of production globally. If we do that we can say that all the proletariat of the world are exploited by them. What that would have to mean is that people are producing more wealth through their hours of work than they are receiving in their pay packets. The hours of work embodied in the products to which their pay gives them access are fewer than the hours of work that they are doing themselves. It is the global capitalist class that is appropriating this surplus, the difference. However different the pay rates of the Indonesian peasant and the middle class London professional, they are alike in being exploited by the global capitalist class for whom they work. 

Yet in other ways it beggars belief to think that the global middle class is not exploiting the global poor. The goods and services produced at very low wages in poor countries end up by becoming part of the consumption of the middle class and working class proletariat in the rich countries (and the middle class of the developing countries). Yet this is definitely a mediated exploitation. There is no direct transaction between this global middle class and the poor on whom they depend for their standard of living.

Let us simplify this situation massively to enable us to look at what might be taking place. Let us have three characters in the drama – a capitalist owner of the means of production in the United States, an affluent worker in Germany and a poor factory worker in Indonesia. The product is a Nike shoe!  The labour producing the shoe in Indonesia is one hour. We are assuming that the capitalist himself contributes no labour, which is strictly speaking unlikely but it is probably an infinitesmal amount where each shoe is concerned.

One possibility is that the capitalist pays the Indonesian worker enough money to buy goods which have taken other workers in Indonesia a mere quarter of an hour to fashion. Then he sells the shoe to the German worker for an amount of money that equates to an hour of work for the German. The German worker has not ripped off the Indonesian since he has paid for the shoe with an amount equivalent to the hours of work that the Indonesian has put into it in the first place. But the capitalist has done very well out of the transaction. He has used the exchange rate of work and money between the two countries to receive an amount from the German worker that equates to 5 hours of work in Indonesia, let us say. But he has only paid for a quarter of an hour’s work at Indonesian rates of pay. So he can actually now buy with the surplus and additional 4 ¾ hours of work in Indonesia.  In this situation the exploitation is all on the part of the capitalist and the German worker has nothing to feel ashamed about!

But this seems an unlikely account in view of the massive material wealth of the affluent proletariat of the rich countries. Let us assume instead that the German worker pays for the shoe at the cost of a quarter of an hour of their work. The mediated exchange means that the Indonesian has worked for a full hour and the German has only paid for this with a quarter of an hour of their own work. The capitalist has still paid for only a quarter of an hour’s worth of work at Indonesian rates. The rate of exchange means that he has received money from the German for this product that enables him to buy one and a quarter hours of work at Indonesian rates. This means that, having paid his Indonesian worker, he can purchase an additional one hour of work at Indonesian rates. This is the classic situation of mediated exploitation. Both the capitalist and the German worker receive a share of the surplus extracted from the Indonesian worker.  This analysis does not preclude in any way the possibility that the German worker is also being exploited by their Germam employer. The quarter of an hour of work that they are doing to earn the money to buy the shoe is worth, let us say, a half hour of work at German rates of pay for their capitalist employer.  They are both exploited as a proletarian in Germany and also exploiting a proletarian in Indonesia through a mediated transaction.

How is mediated exploitation understood?

There is a widespread ignorance or what could be termed a denial of the reality of mediated exploitation within the rich countries. This is fostered ideologically and assists the capitalist class to maintain control in the poor countries. They have natural allies in the proletariat of the rich countries and the middle class of the developing countries. These people both benefit from mediated exploitation and fail to notice its existence. They see poverty in the developing world as a product of backwardness, of culture, of corrupt third world governments or overpopulation, caused by cultural failings. The dominant views of the situation oscillate between a fatalistic view that poverty in the developing world is a harsh reality and nothing can be done to prevent it and the view that we have a moral responsibility to step in and help the people of the developing world to reach our level of affluence. It is not too harsh to say that these ideological views make it easy to recruit an army to suppress rebellions in developing countries, whether communist or Islamic, and help to foster a climate in which complicity in violent purges in the developing world can be ignored in the rich countries. These violent episodes are all too readily viewed as an inevitable outcome of the backward culture of the developing world. This outlook is of course promoted in much popular media. A good example is the popular American war film – “Blackhawk Down”.  The film attributes the disaster in Somalia to evil and corrupt local warlords and to ancient tribal animosities. The role of the World Bank adjustment package in setting up the conditions for the famine is never mentioned. The American soldiers are portrayed as altruistic heroes rescuing the population from their evil masters. A difficult job but someone has to do it!  

This is not the only way in which the populations of the rich countries view mediated exploitation and there are certainly some more adequate responses. The following discussion considers three discourses that were found to be present in a sample of Hunter residents (in Australia) talking about environmental issues. In these interviews conducted in the mid nineties, discussions often got onto the topic of environmental problems in the developing world and led to a broader analysis of development issues.

Pessimistic Realism

The discourse of pessimistic realism was the sole preserve of male interviewees. Starting from the premise that the main environmental problems in the developing countries are population problems it goes on to conclude that these problems can only end with huge environmental and human disasters in which environmental health is restored by a process of natural culling of the human species. 

I am calling this discourse pessimistic realism, not because I believe that it's point of view is in fact realistic. In fact there are many misunderstandings of the nature of the gloabl economy which are implicit in this position. However it is primarily conceived of as being a position which is realistic as opposed to a moralistic position which is not realistic. To be blunt, this position forms itself in conscious opposition to the charitable position and has to answer the charge of being callous. It does this by affirming that from a purely pesonal point of view, the situation described is tragic, but from a more objective perspective this tragedy is unavoidable. A few examples may help to illustrate this.

Martin is a University sculpture lecturer.  After beginning by saying that "in our part of the world"  people were aware of environmental problems and that they were gradually being dealt with he named overpopulation as the greatest environmental problem:

To me the problem is that actually the earth is facing a population explosion; the qualitative leaps that are occuring in many countries which have virtually no population control, I mean it's not a very pretty picture.  The increasing demand of more and more people just on land resources, water resources so forth, the ways in which the jungles are being stripped piece by piece day by day by people with hand axes.  It isn't just the international conglomerates that is a factor.  It's also just the pressure of local human populations spreading further and further out along trails, clearing, trying to do their little patch, in Africa and South America, in Asia and the potential for total global disaster is right there, you can see it.

I'm not being cynical but the reality is that at certain levels of population biological controls come into play,  I mean my, my sad vision for the next fifty years is is massive, if the population continues to build in these sorts of ways you're going to see massive plagues of different kinds affecting different areas, it's just inevitable. 

It can be argued that this approach to the problems of poverty has a long history in Western thought. Notions of evolution as survival of the fittest are used to derive the conclusion that natural controls should be permitted to wipe out the least successful members of the human species. As in other versions of such theories the discourse does not acknowledge that the rich speakers of the discourse are in any sense members of a class that has some responsibility in creating poverty.

Within the framework of this understanding of globalisation, it is sometimes argued that Australia would be much better off if we stopped all imports from other countries and provided employment for all Australian workers.  The developing world is seen as unnaturally propped up by aid from the rich countries. The speakers resist the moral incitement to help the poor by arguing that aid just prolongs and reinforces the problems of poverty or by saying that to expect the developed countries to step in to deal with the problem is unrealistic. Often this discourse is accompanied by a sense that problems in our own country are severe and should take priority. Particular objection is taken to government taxes being used for overseas aid. 

Dave was particularly clear on this issue, seeing aid as a huge and determining part of the budget of developing countries:

Dave:    'Cause there's no, there's not enough population controls around ay, like I was saying I was saying about Africa and that. The places there. They just multiply and multiply and then we help them more and more and more and they can get bigger and bigger. I think what you've got do is just say. You're on your own now, I think and if, you know, eighty percent of the population dies well that's just the way it's supposed to be.

Terry:   But they reckon one of the reasons why those countries are poor is because they export a lot of what they produce to wealthy countries, like tea or ...

Dave:   Oh yeah, yeah. But when it comes down to all the coverage that gets. You know like now. Like umm, you know that girl that says "Great I can go to school now, I used to have to stay with my brothers and sisters", that makes at least five of them and we say well OK we'll do our best and we'll keep all them alive.  They can all grow up and have five kids each as well and we'll support all them as well and then, I mean there's a certain limit on it and without outside help things have got to like stick at a limit. 

What is particularly interesting about the above passage is the way that the left wing discourse is completely passed over, almost as though it is not heard. What has salience in the pessimistic discourse is the charitable discourse which is seen as informing the TV advertising of international aid organizations. Far from these promotions leading interviewees to adopt the charitable discourse, they are used as evidence to show that aid is a major part of the budgets of developing countries.  Because such advertisements are repeated over the years these viewers conclude that aid must be ineffective and may actually prevent a more long term solution to population problems. Martin's interview set up a similar structure of reasoning by arguing that it was unrealistic to expect rich countries to do anything to stop disasters in the developing world: 

There is this notion that some superpower, some wonderful rich group of people are going to come in and solve everybody's problems all the time.  Well they're not. It's impossible. If the United Nations isn't going to do it, who is?  What can the United Nations do unless the key players within it make particular commitments? People keep saying the United Nations should go in and solve the problem in this country of Rwanda. What can they do? What are you supposed to do?  I mean literally... they should rush in and stop, and stop the ... But how? How do you go and stop the umm?  How do you go and stop the Yugoslavs from destroying each other? Tell me. Nobody succeeded in stopping the Lebanese from destroying each other. These cultures get, just get into a spin, umm I mean I'm just saying, what global policeman is going to come in and say "Now now chaps, sit down here and we'll talk about it sensibly".

Martin goes on to point out that sending in armies to fight these battles would actually cost many lives and that the political leaders of the superpowers are not going to risk that for "the sake of saving a few Tutsis from, the somebody elses".  Again, this view pictures the rich countries of the world as essentially relating to the developing countries only through aid, or in this case through the unreal expectation that aid will be given. It is implied that the problems of the developing countries are internally generated and that it would be both paternalistic and politically unrealistic to call for international action to remedy these problems.

In another interview,  with two workers in heavy industry, great resentment was expressed about the donation of money to aid the victims of fighting in Rwanda, whether by government or by private charities. According to these interviewees, such money should have gone to local causes, such as drought stricken farmers or the unemployed in Australia. In the following passage the two interviewees were responding to my view that taxes would have to be raised to deal with environmental problems in Australia:

Ian:         I don't know, I think we pay enough taxes.  We get a government that gives so much money to overseas and bloody ...

Peter:     Yeah. that's.

Ian:         I'm going to get off that point.

Terry:    No tell us what you reckon, No go on.

Peter:     I can't understand that myself.

Ian:         Well, you had, you got the poor old farmers having a whinge at the moment, well not having a whinge, we want to give them money, right, because of the drought.  Fair enough, I give 'em the money to the gov... to the farmers but I didn't give any money to the ones overseas.

Ian:         I guess they think we've got big millions.

Peter:     Yeah, well, you get the government give them so much, Johnny Farnham did a  concert. Four million.  Right?  Johnny Farnham should have give the money to the, instead of it going overseas, it should have been for the farmers. 

Ian:         Should have been for Australia, I reckon.

Peter:     So, look after ... My point of view - I look after the people in Australia first.  Bugger what's overseas.  Whatever happens over there happens over there.  It's not our fault, we should look after your own country first.  My point of view, we should stop all imports, shut the country off and live by ourselves. 

Terry:     So what would you say if someone said to that the result of that would be that Australians would be a lot poorer.

Ian:         Why would we be poorer?

Terry:     Well because, umm, it would cost us more to produce what we import.   Like say overseas, like you know, right, your tape deck, right, your car, all that, it's made by really cheap labour OS and brought into Australia and we send our minerals, our wool, wheat, stuff over there.

Ian:         Why?  Why should we send our minerals over there?  Why can't we say right.  We got, we got we got our own car factories that went broke because the stupid Japanese mob bring their cars over here.  Right, fair enough.  We got Holden, Holden.

Terry:    We'd have to pay more.

Ian:         No we don't have to pay more money.  If Australia looks after Australia.  I mean look after ourselves.  Don't worry about anyone over there - see you should look after our own people in your own country. 

Terry:     Would they be as cheap as the Japanese imports?

Ian:        Why won't they?  We're not worried about the imports, but then we'd be making our own cars, that'd be made by Australian people. 

This passage begins with a totally exaggerated view of Australia's overseas aid as a proportion of government spending. In this analysis Australia could solve its many environmental problems merely by redirecting money earmarked for overseas aid into environmental repair. The analysis goes on to say that Australia would be better off if we did not import anything from overseas. Here there is a complete failure to acknowledge the benefits received by Australian consumers from the cheap labour performed in developing countries. Instead, this issue is perceived in terms of the jobs of Australians being lost as imports from overseas capture the local market. Later the interviewees express the view that giving surplus food to deal with overseas crises is acceptable but that sending "billions" in money is not acceptable. The interviewees are concerned that globalisation will mean a fall in the value of working class earnings in Australia and fear unemployment for their children. In other words the resistance to overseas aid is premised on a sense of despair about conditions for the working class in Australia, a resentment of taxation of any kind as an incursion into one's pay packet, and a belief that governments of either political persuasion are not to be trusted. 

In terms of gender politics the discourse of pessimistic realism is very much a man's discourse in that it urges a dispassionate and unemotional realisation that environmental problems in the developing countries can not be solved by sympathy and attempts at support but must be allowed to run their course in terms of some supposedly natural process of biological control.

Charitable Sympathy

A second popular discourse was mostly produced by women, with some men also producing it. I call this discourse charitable sympathy.  It is sympathetic to the plight of the poor in the developing world and particularizes the problems of these people empathetically. It sees the appropriate response to environmental problems in the developing countries to be aid and sympathy from the developed world. While it looks to a moral change it is pessimistic about the chances of this taking place and is depressed by the difficulty of making any difference to events through personal action. 

The discourse of charitable sympathy was produced by a number of women interviewees and a few men.  In terms of Gilligan's research on the moral frameworks of men and women, it is not surprising that this is a position more commonly associated with women.  According to her research women are likely to view moral issues in terms of a need to supply care and look after the interests of other people.

Often, speakers of the charitable discourse produced similar factual claims to those made by adherents of the discourse of pessimistic realism, but within the context of a radically different moral framework. Diane, a middle aged woman returning to work as an accountant, was convinced that environmental problems were ultimately the result of human self centredness and selfishness. Key problems were overpopulation in the developing world and overuse of resources in the developed world. Like adherents of the first discourse she had a bleak prognosis for the future:

We appear to be running out of space, I mean, not space in the sky.  There doesn't seem enough earth for us to be here because we're all, even here in this wonderful country, we're all squashed in. We're crowding ourselves out, the trees out, the animals out. We're dirtying everything,  we're messing, we're mucking everything up, we're leaving litter everywhere.  We're not getting rid of our waste, are we.  We're just transferring it from one place to the other.  There just seems to be too many of us and we're not living in India. We're living in Australia we're you can still find a bit of space to move.  That's the main problem. Just too many of us and I have a feeling this is what happened to the dinosaurs. They just got too big for what was, for the resources. And I think they just went off and died, and maybe we'll do that. I don't know.

What mostly differentiates these statements from similar positions taken in the first discourse is only a slightly different view of human nature. There is a sense that we as human beings could be less selfish, if we chose. Dealing with the problem of overpopulation in the developing world she particularizes it, empathetically describing the plight of a woman and calls on the rich world to do something about it.  It is a moral failing that we are not acting to help this woman:

Diane:    Well, I don't know, the third world and all that, they say it's because they need labour and all that.  The family is the, the family unit's the source of income so you have all these kids, to sort of suppose you could go out and earn income or work on the farm or whatever,  I don't know.

Terry:    So in their case they're making rational decisions about having more kids because this is their only way to look after their old age and all that kind of stuff.

Diane:    But I can't ... I wonder why it hasn't hit them, for instance I see on the, you know, some of these reports that you see on telly or whatever, which is probably about the only way I learn - things, you know.  You see, sort of the woman of the family walking across this barren landscape with sticks of wood on her back and she's travelled miles to find these sticks of wood to cook the meal for the family later that day.  I can't see why somebody hasn't looked and thought, we're just destroying everything here.  This has got to stop.  How much further has she got to walk.  I don't know what she can do.  This lonely woman, this lone woman walking along this barren landscape but somebody somewhere must look and think well, she's got to walk twenty miles today, thirty tomorrow, you know, what's?  It must come down to human life's so undervalued, isn't it?  Does it matter that she might drop down dead or not be able to find the wood for the family meal that night.  'Cause there's no trees left over there.  You can't interfere in another country's way, can you, their culture or whatever.  But why isn't there some world body that is trying to save the world, the whole place, not just pockets of it?

Here Diane calls for and demands the kind of intervention by developed countries that speakers in the pessimistic realist discourse  condemn.  She makes a moral judgement of the current situation in that no help of this kind is forthcoming.  While she is pessimistic about the likelihood of people, as they are now, acting appropriately she does not rule out political change as impossible.

Empathetic concern for the well being of those in developing countries was expressed in a number of interviews with women and often particularized through anecdotes that related the plight of particular individuals in the developing world. Margie, a working class interviewee, attacked environmentalists for being too emotionally involved in environmental issues to be aware of human needs:

I mean cutting down the rainforest is awful yes, but people do need fuel,  dont they and things like that. I mean you've got to sort of decide when its right to make a stand and when its right to let other people get on with their life. 

A focus group of middle class women were angry with mining companies that polluted waterways in developing countries and that allowed oil spills by not looking after their ships. They were particularly disturbed by the Australian government's failure to support a ban on land mines. Here the issue was again particularized through an example taken from a TV documentary: 
 

Margaret:       I guess this is still to do with the environment, but it's a different topic - land mines.  I didn't realise that the Australian government won't ban landmines.

Michelle:        Yes, I've heard that too.

Debbie:         What do you mean by land mines, they're bombs sort of that ..

Margaret:       Land mines are cheap little devices that are buried in the ground and they blow kids up.

Caroline:        Like what's been happening in Cambodia.

Margaret:       So there's a petition, actually I've got a petition, I should've brought it round for you to sign.  That's being presented to parliament some time in September, that the Australian government ban landmines.

Debbie:         The Australian government refused to do this?

Margaret:      They say that there's a role for this.

Debbie:          You look at the kids that have been shot up and lost legs and arms all through Cambodia, I mean.

Michelle:        Heard this one last night on the news from Somalia, a girl.

Margaret:      That's right, she was ...

Michelle:        She'd had one leg blown off, one arm, the other leg was mangled and one eye, from because she.  The kids don't.  They're shaped, some of them are shaped like butterflies and they go out into the fields and just pick them up and get blown to smithereens.

Debbie:         That's awful isn't it.  I mean that's kids.

Michelle:        But that would be aimed at children wouldn't it.

Others:          No.

Michelle:        Deliberately aimed at children.

Margaret:       Well I can't see any legitimate reason to have a landmine anyway, I don't care what people do in war.  I don't think they should be blown up like that.

Debbie:          Not maimed. 

In this extract the link between the gender role of women as nurturing mothers and the charitable discourse becomes very evident with the view that wars are men's business and that children as innocent parties should be protected. This is a far cry from the view that wars are an inevitable by product of competitive human nature.  Instead wars can and should be regulated and if possible stopped altogether.

When recommending solutions to the problems of development the charitable discourse tended to stress educational solutions. The poor of developing countries should be educated about birth control and sustainable agriculture. Along with this there was some tendency for this view to be accompanied by the patronising belief that people in developing countries were ignorant savages who should be spared from the corruptions of our way of life. As with the first discourse there seemed to be little perception of the extent to which the developing world is already integrated into a global economy and little perception of the extent to which developing countries' problems are related to unequal power relationships in which consumers in rich countries benefit from low wages in the developing world. In her discussion of the problem of deforestation,overpopulation and cutting timber for fuel Diane went on to recommend a pedagogic solution to these problems:

You can't interfere in another country's way, can you, their culture or whatever.  But why isn't there some world body that is trying to save the world, the whole place, not just pockets of it?  They'd have, you'd have to start educating them. You can't rip the trees up. They can see for themselves but I'm assured they can't see where it's going to end or anything, but they can see there's no trees. They know that. Why can't we provide coal for them to burn?  Alright, so we're gonna, it's coal going to go up and pollute the atmosphere. 

In this passage Diane wrestles with the problems of the charitable position. On the one hand these people must be fools if they can't see that overpopulation and the use of timber for fuel is deforesting their landscape. On the other hand they can't be that stupid. Maybe the problem is a cultural one. Educating them seems to be the solution but it is imperialistic to go into another culture and tell them what to do. To some exent these dilemnas are quite real but also what gets ignored is use of valuable crop land to produce luxuries for rich countries, the overgrazing of marginal land by cattle grown for export to the developed world and the exploitation of labour in developing countries in manufacturing products for the rich countries.

In another interview this pedagogic approach was combined with a slightly tongue in cheek recommendation that we do not corrupt the developing world with our bad habits of consumerism and a life burdened by work:
 

Maureen:     What about with the third world and all the sort of equation of growth and stuff. Do they have a right to try and get the same standard of living that we do, or what do you think about that?

Robb:           Do you think that we should try and provide it?

Maureen:      Do you?

Robb:           Going to be too hard I think. I think probably rather than spoil them. That sounds terrible, it's like sort of corrupting them and probably sending them on the same cycle we're already in. Try and keep them primitive and and ...  Sounds like a pet.  (laughter) But try and put them in their, try and keep them in their, it's like an Indian out of the jungle or something, try and keep them in the jungle in his environment and he's going to be happy and involved. Yeah. Bring him out and stick him out here and he'll be on heroin next week.

Andrew:        Yeah metho.

Robb:           And drunk every other day. Why spoil him with all that? Why spoil him with worrying because I've got to hurry up and get to work or worrying because I've got to get somewhere else? He's happy to sit there and eat whatever he can get off the land and he has his three kids and they all work there and that's great. Why put him into this? It's too hard for us to get off so why put him into it so let's educate them and say well, this is how you can get your water, this is how you can feed and so on, rather than rushing straight in and saying, Gee Whizz, here's a big mac and here's a computer and you should have one because we like them. Let's educate them and say well slow down having the children and make it easier on feeding yourselves and then educate them on how to feed themselves and so on. Don't give them everything else of our problems.

Here Robb is quite aware of the patronizing sound of what he is saying but he continues with it nevertheless since there is no other way to justify a position in which a group of people is condemned forever to live in a world in which the benefits of modern science are not available. The racist overtones of this discourse are made overt by Andrew's suggestion that the Indian from the jungle would soon be drinking "metho", a common racist view about Aborigines in Australia. Like the pessimistic discourse, this suggests that it is not a good idea for the developing world to attain to the materialist lifestyle of developed countries. However here this is not argued in terms of the incapacity of the earth's resources but in terms of the real needs of the developing world. It is not in their interests to get into our consumerist lifestyle. Of course, if this is the case, why don't we abandon it ourselves and put a stop to a worryingly frenetic lifestyle? Within left wing environmental discourse these issues are resolved by suggesting that people in the developed world should indeed work less and reduce their standard of material consumption. 

In terms of undestanding problems in developing countries,  adherents of the charitable discourse had little understanding of the economic relationship between poverty in the developing world and affluence in the developed world.

Left Wing Critique

Neither of these accounts see problems in the developing countries as coming about through the orientation of their economies to supplying consumers in the first world.  This is a key argument of the discourse of left wing critique which also maintains that capitalist multinationals are the main culprits in environmental damage in all countries. This third discourse was produced by only a minority of interviewees, both men and women. 

This discourse presents a marxist structuralist analysis of problems in the developing world by relating them to structures of the global capitalist economy. This is an available discourse in some TV documentaries and press articles, in magazines such as New Internationalist, in the literature of NGOs such as Freedom from Hunger and Community Aid Abroad as well as in much academic writing. Its relative absence in public discussion in Australia could be regarded as the result of a capitalist media hegemony. However I also believe that it is the implications that this discourse has for massive and fundamental social change which make it unpopular with most affluent and politically secure Australians.

A central element in the left wing critique is that capitalist multinationals are at the heart of problems such as environmental destruction in all countries and also that this is not the result of some choice on the part of the capitalist class but comes about through the competitive structure of ownership which is capitalism.  Three workers in a maritime industry made these connections quite plain in the following discussion:

Brian:          Like we're the worst enemy [of the environment] and we are the answer, but nobody wants to, people are very reluctant to do anything but the main thing to me is the big push by the companies, they who control the government so they're not going to do nothing.

Prawn:        It's  a matter of, like you say Brian, I believe that we're the problem and we can be the answer but the thing is, but you know, you hear it all the time, people say "Oh, you know, what can I do?", you know.  That's why I believe that you, it really needs to start from the head, it really needs to start from the money people and politicians and they say they're doing it but they're not, you know I don't believe they are 'cause if they were and they were showing some leadership and some alternatives and that, I'm sure that the normal person could then see a bit of hope and a bit of light at the end of the tunnel and would grab, like the sheep we are, follow along.  But, you know, you think you're doing the right thing.  I try to do the right thing at home, bit of recycling, chasing the kids around turning the lights off, you know all those sorts of things and trying to explain to them, you know, but you may as well go and hit your head against a wall as far as I think, as far as the total global situation, you know.  'Cause look what they're doing in, sort of, like the rainforests in the Amazon and that.

Brian:         Yeah, it's hell.

Prawn:        Just to feed a bit of meat to the Yanks.

Brian:         Yeah, Macdonalds.

Prawn:       Yeah for Macdonalds you know.

Brian:          But that's how to do it,  not only get rid of the ...

Prawn:        That's what I mean it's got to be the, at the top level, they've got to take a stand and say.  You know, how are you going to get a company like Macdonalds to say,  "Oh OK well we'll forego our, you know, our profits, you know we won't worry about, you know increasing our profits for our shareholders.  It just doesn't happen, it can't happen, you know under the present system.

Prawn begins this discussion begins by calling on the rich to give a lead by developing environmental alternatives to the present industrial order. He goes on to argues that individual domestic action can only be a small part of the solution to global problems.  As an instance of these problems he picks the destruction of the Amazon rainforest to produce cheap meat for the American market. Here it is interesting that American consumers are not themselves blamed for this decision - it is the multinational Macdonalds which is causing this destruction.  Finally he despairs of his opening suggestion. Macdonalds cannot forego profit because to do so would be to lose shareholders. It is the structure of the capitalist system that makes environmentally responsible choices difficult. In terms of mediated exploitation this analysis understands for a start that affluent consumers benefit from the exploitation of the developing world but makes the claim that they are not morally responsible for this exploitation since the real holders of power, those who are responsible, have set up the situation.  While this moral position could be seen as self serving, they are clearly open to a solution in which this mediated exploitation would be reversed, regardless of the impact this might have on first world consumers.

In another interview these elements of left wing environmentalist discourse followed upon the charitable discourse cited above. After Robb concluded his pedagogic solutions for developing countries with the view that we "should not give them everything else of our problems"  Andrew said that from what he had heard that was the opposite of what was happening at present.  He had heard from the boyfriend of a sister who was "pretty leftist and radical" that Nestles was promoting infant formula in hospitals in Bangladesh through kickbacks to hospital staff at the expense of the eventual good health of the babies. He had also heard that people in Brazil were forced to grow cash crops because of debt peonage to local monopoly stores. He finished this passage by saying that although people in developing countries had a right to get to the same standard of living as people in rich countries, this was unlikely, because multinationals would come in and exploit them. 

A common slogan within this discourse is that the rich must live simply so the poor can simply live. In other words, ultimately we must solve problems of inequality and environmental problems together by abandoning affluence in the developed countries.  This view was taken up in a number of ways by interviewees. Phillip,  a case manager working for a government welfare organisation put this point of view succinctly:

I suppose what it basically is is that we in our society have what is termed a higher standard of living and I believe that with a higher standard of living we actually produce quite a lot of pollution. I think I've read somewhere the USA is a certain percentage of the population. However they produce about fifty percent of the world's pollution. So with society's trying to increase economically, I see it as a major threat there to the earth. Maybe we should all look at being, is it less well off, and maybe looking at different ways to utilise the resources and looking at different resources like solar power, is what I'm trying to say ... Looking at the way the world's going you have all these countries in South East Asia, the emerging economies. You all can't have access to what we have because I don't think the earth has the resources to produce those and I think, in the long term it's just going to be worse for the planet, which is going to be worse for everybody. And that sort of thing. Is that alright?

In the pessimistic realist discourse capitalism is merely an expression of the greedy competitiveness inherent in human nature. Consequently the developed countries would never sacrifice their affluent lifestyles for the sake of the planet. Further, as Martin pointed out, within this frame of reference such a gesture would be foolish since the people of the developing countries would only express their human nature by greedily taking up the resources foregone by the affluent countries. 

However Phillip implies a solution to this conundrum through some kind of pact between the peoples of the world; a pact which is designed to minimize environmental damage for the good of everybody in the long run. By implication the developed countries make a deal with the rest of the world's population. They simplify their lifestyles to the point where the whole population of the world could sustainably live at that level of material consumption. In return they seek agreement from others not to exceed this level of consumption. It is interesting that this argument actually works by assuming that the people of the developed countries are acting out of self interest to cut back their standard of living. The pessimistic realist position has the strange corollary that everyone acts to serve their self interest to the point where humanity as a whole dies out like the dinosaurs. 

The denial of mediated exploitation

What this empirical excursion reveals is that mediated exploitation is not very well understood or acknowledged by the global middle class that benefits from it. Even the marxist account shies away from addressing the complicity of the ordinary people of the rich countries in mediated exploitation. The mediated nature of these transactions makes it particularly easy for people to ignore the exploitation involved and to even congratulate themselves for their participation in development through their purchase of consumer goods produced in developing countries. While it is true that the capitalist class sets this system of transactions up to its own benefit, the willing participation of the global middle class in receiving these dividends certainly assists in this. The most clear cut example is the support for wars conducted by the rich countries in developing countries and the participation of troops from rich countries as soldiers in these wars. These wars are most often conducted and defended from within the terms of the discourse of charitable sympathy. The failure of these wars and of international assistance to bring about lasting improvement in developing countries and the fear of globalisation in relation to unemployment drives the discourse of pessimistic realism, which while it denies the reality of mediated exploitation, cannot be regarded as a totally complicit discourse within capitalism. Similarly, the discourse of charitable sympathy, while also in denial with regard to mediated exploitation, implies a more robust policy of international aid which does not serve the interests of capital either. In some ways, it is the combination of these two discourses as setting up the alternatives, which enables the maintenance of the system as a whole. Looking at particular wars in developing countries where troops from rich countries have been involved, there have often been rationalisations that are based on both of these discourses. From the point of view of pessimistic realism, trouble in developing countries comes out of the backwardness of their culture and can become a danger to our stable way of life – the falling dominoes of Australian involvement in Vietnam or the need to fight terrorism over there of the recent American involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is combined with charitable sympathy – we are rescuing them from dictatorship and bringing civilisation. Where proxy wars and other problems in developing countries are concerned, both discourses blame the people of the developing world and their governments for the trouble and ignore the role of economic interests from the rich world.

Racism and conquest

Clearly patriarchy and social class are not the only forms of structured exploitation and inequality. I do not want to assimilate racism as a form of social class or even as a by-product, a mere buttress of social class. Conquest is another issue in that the conqueror does not necessarily conquer in order to gain the surplus labour of a new subordinate class; though that may come out of the conquest for those who survive. These kinds of inequality can also be considered as unequal exchanges in terms of a humanist understanding of inequality. Racism is like class in so far as structured inequality impacts on families. However it is not necessarily based in the exploitation of the subordinate race as a work force supplying surplus products. Differentiation may or may not include that, but also goes beyond it to be about a variety of attacks on dignity and social regard, as well as various kinds of deprivation of access to material conditions for life.