RacIaL exPLoItatIoN ( 123 )the exploitation of their fellow R2s, for example, the small number of black
slaveholders in the pre- bellum South.)
In what does this determination or modification consist? We are a bit
handicapped here by the fact that the transaction has to be described in
suitably general terms, encompassing (as I will soon argue) such a wide
range of possibilities. But I suggest that the paradigm case of racial exploita-
tion is one in which the moral/ ontological/ civic status of the subordinate
race makes possible the transaction in the first place (that is, the transaction
would have been morally or legally prohibited had the R2s been R1s) or
makes the terms significantly worse than they would have been (the R2s
get a much poorer deal than if they had been R1s). And the term “transac-
tions” is being used broadly to encompass not merely cases in which R2s
are directly involved but also (and this is another significant difference
from classic class exploitation) cases in which they are excluded. In Marx’s
vision of class exploitation, surplus value is extracted through the expen-
diture of the labor power of the working class, so obviously the workers
have to be actually working for this transfer to take place. But I want to
include scenarios in which R2s are kept out of the transaction but are none-
theless exploited, because R1s benefit from their exclusion (for example, in
the case of racial restrictions on hiring). For me, then, racial exploitation
is being conceptualized so as to accommodate both differential and infe-
rior treatment of R2s in employment (for example, lower wages) and their
exclusion where they should legitimately have been included (for example,
the denial of the opportunity to get the job in the first place).
It needs to be noted that the role of R2 normative inequality is in sharp
contrast to Marx’s vision of class exploitation under capitalism. In the
class systems of antiquity and the Middle Ages, the subordinate classes
did indeed have a lower normative status. But capitalism, as the class sys-
tem of modernity, is distinguished by the fact that these distinctions of
ascriptive hierarchy are leveled. So in Marx’s discussion of capitalism, the
whole point of his analysis— what made capitalism different from slave and
feudal modes of production— was that the workers nominally had equal
moral status. Hence his sarcasm in Capital about the freedom and equality
supposedly obtaining on the level of the relations of exchange, which are
undercut at the level of the relations of production.^21 But at least juridically,
that freedom and equality are real. So it is not that the subordinated are
overtly forced to labor for the dominant class (as with the slave or the serf ),
since such coercion would be inconsistent with liberal capitalism. Rather,
it is the economic structure that (according to Marx anyway) coerces them,
reduces their options, and forces them to sell their labor power.
But in what I suggest is the paradigm case of racial exploitation, the R2s
do not have equal status, which implies that liberal democratic norms either