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Abstract
Since Marx published Das Kapital, nearly everyone has read his theory of exploitation as arguing that the capitalist class robs the working class of some surplus. Since robbery is wrong, people believe Marx was arguing that capitalism rests on an injustice. However, Marx also says that the capitalist’s acquiring of surplus value is “by no means an injustice.” This seeming contradiction led to an intense debate in academic scholarship about the justice of capitalism. This debate involves such important commentators as G.A. Cohen, Allen Wood, John Rawls, Steven Lukes, and Normas Geras. My thesis aims to re-orient this debate by showing that the concept of exploitation has been misunderstood, and that these authors misinterpreted Marx’s ordered method of analysis and presentation, subsequently failing to see that exploitation is about time management, not surplus extraction, and this occurs independent of class relations; capital and not capitalists, exploit the working class via reification and fetishization and reification.