Surplus Labor Extraction Is Structurally Involuntary Under Capitalism

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When Marx says capitalist labor relations are marked by “exploitation” he doesn’t just mean unfairness or one group having a comparative advantage. He means that some of the hours worked by proletarians are ones in which they create the equivalent of what they get back in their wages while others are hours in which they work for the benefit of their employers — and that this extraction of “surplus labor” is essentially involuntary, since working-class people have no realistic way of making a living other than to sell their working hours to capitalists. These relations of production are in turn downstream from the level of development of the forces of production — i.e., the capacity that a society has to produce things to meet people’s needs

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