VALUE, EXPLOITATION AND CLASS
(Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics, Volume 4)
John E. Roemer
Harwood Academic Publishers (1986)

"Marxian microeconomics has long been thought to consist primarily of the labor theory of value and its associated puzzles, such as the transformation problem...I maintain this view is obsolete. I claim Marxian microeconomics is interesting mainly for what it enables us to say about class formation and exploitation. Class formation is interesting as a sociological category ...Exploitation is important, in my view, as a normative category: it is a type of distributive injustice. Marxian economics has much to say about exploitation: within modern economics, it has remained the most unabashedly moral voice, claiming that positive and normative analysis, or scientific and ethical work, can be done together....

...Marxian microeconomics, then, is not interesting primarily as economics, narrowly interpreted as the theory of price formation, but rather as a foundation for important sociological and ethical categories...."John E. Roemer, Value, Exploitation and Class, "Introduction," page 1

"...A rigorous foundation remains for two concepts, class and exploitation, which are of sociological, ethical, and above all of historical importance. These concepts are not ones that have been of traditional interest to non-Marxian economists. They may come increasingly into their own in economics as economists struggle more seriously with problems of collective action and distributive justice....The success of Marxism must in large part be evaluated by the extent to which it produces ideas that are viewed as coherent and important by all social scientists, not simply by those who have some privileged access to the mysteries of dialectics.

Such success requires, among other things, that Marxism be done with the standards of logic which are expected of contemporary social science. In economics, these standards require the use of mathematics and models..." John E. Roemer, Value, Exploitation and Class, "Introduction," page 3

BOOK DESCRIPTION
PUBLISHER
Drawing on models of contemporary mathematical economics and economic theory, Roemer puts forward a refined extension of the Marxian theory of exploitation, labor value and class. Critical of the labor theory of value, this book skillfully addresses current and often controversial issues—price formation, exploitation and profits, the transformation problem, class-exploitation correspondence and the normative use of exploitation theory, among many others—to sharpen the perceptions of research economists, political philosophers, and political theorists.