In ope-l 5386, Paul Cockshott defines "exploitation" in such a way that a
necessary condition for exploitation is that a positive net product results
from production. One may do so, of course, but I'm not aware of any evidence
that Marx did.
He conceived exploitation in terms of the labor-time that workers work as
against the labor-time congealed in their wages. According to this concept,
if we imagine that the workers' wages are zero, then their surplus-labor
equals the total amount of time they work. If they work at all, they are then
exploited in Marx's sense -- they perform labor without receiving any
equivalent in return. Yet, in my example, the simultaneist profit rate would
be -11.1 0f wages were zero (9 bushels of seed corn yield 8 bushels at
harvest time). So, clearly, a definition that makes exploitation dependent on
the production of a positive net product is incompatible with Marx's
definition. But all versions of the "Fundamental Marxian Theorem" do just
that, so they really do not replicate Marx's results in the general case, in
which negative net products may be produced.
The general case is actually very important, because, as Alan Freeman
stresses, in reality the Hawkins-Simon conditions are not met. 486 computers
produce 586 computers instead of 486 computers, and so forth. Can
simultaneism even deal with this?
Andrew Kliman