Exploitation in the lab

Chris Dillow finds experimental evidence for Exploitation in the lab.

Experimental evidence suggests that Marx was right.

In Capital, Marx describes the selling of labour power thus:

He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.

And here's a recent paper by Nikos Nikiforakis, Jorg Oechssler and Anwar Shah:

We have designed a game in which exploitation can result from the hierarchical relationship between players and, in particular, from the fact that the senior worker has the power to coerce a junior worker into exerting high levels of effort. Using a laboratory experiment, we find that senior workers often attempt to exploit junior workers.

This is not an isolated finding: it's consistent with an earlier paper by Ernst Fehr and colleagues.

Emphasis Mine

Exploitation is built into the hierarchy. To remove the exploitation requires removal of the hierarchy, or to make the hierarchy accountable to everyone.