Like all big thinkers, Marx could not escape the times and places in which he lived. He was born in a part of the world (Prussia) that was still feudal. He lived in France when it was an autocracy. He lived in England when it was the home of capitalism in its earliest stages, which no one can deny was horribly exploitative, however that might be technically defined. That personal history caused him to see private property as the source of all social evil and its eradication as the cure.

The best way to think about exploitation in the contemporary economy is to think in terms of “wage slavery” [from Marx]. In bondage slavery the people in chains are capital, not labor. In terms of economics they are considered as machines or draft animals.

In capitalism employers pay people to be employed as machines — or draft animals. Human machines operating other machines are still machines. ‘Thinking machines’ are still machines.

Self-interested people are deciding how much to share of the revenue that all of the people employed in every business help to generate. According to capitalist theory, whoever who decides such things in each business must seek to remunerate other employees in as niggardly a fashion as possible. That maximizes the amount of money they can keep for themselves.

There is a capitalist equivalent to the LTV, the idea that employees are remunerated according to their marginal contribution to output/revenue. No business sits down and calculates that figure. If it were true for the economy as a whole wages would keep pace with productivity. Since the demise of labor unions in the U.S., who demanded a fair share, (and the transition to a service-based economy) that has not been the case.

So today we can see that income is the key to a more just — or fully just — economy: “For Crying Out Loud, ACCEPT That A SOLUTION Actually EXISTS” (a “3 min read” — including options for further reading — here in Medium). Believe me, people from all ideological perspectives who go there will be surprised.