this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Marx never really completed a theory about imperialism. I mean, he definitely talked about the global character of capital and the world market, but he didn't theorize about superexploitation (profit acquired by systematically depressing wages of certain sections of the global working class) which is arguably the defining characteristic of modern 21st century capitalism. And of course in the decades after Marx's death, it was Lenin (and many others) who had to pick up where Marx left off with regard to imperialism.
It bears emphasizing, none of these posthumous Marxian theories replace Marx, they only carry on the theory as any science carries on.
There is a lot of talk about a "labor aristocracy" in the West. I think there is some truth to that, but it is often taken to such absurd ends that one would consider an impoverished American a "labor aristocrat" simply because the $5/day they receive from hand-outs is more than many workers in the Global South receive in a week or a month.
Above all, Marx defined exploitation in terms of relations of production. A worker in Bangladesh is exploited by their employer to some degree, but the dominant force in their overall relation to (global) production is the force of imperialism, which at the national scale prevents moving up the value chain and externally constrains the wages of all workers in the country. This is why communist revolutions in the Global South take on a specifically anti-imperial character rather than a more proletarian character as seen earlier in the western industrial nations.
On re-reading the OP I realized I didn't directly answer the question...
Exploitation in the imperial core I think still occurs in the standard Marxian sense of surplus-value. Though, the point doesn't hinge on whether that calculates to be numerically true or not (if that were even possible). Workers in the imperial core are still paid just enough to eat and sleep so that they can return to work for 40 more years, with no ability to escape that social relation. People have tried and failed to start communes in the United States for example. Many of the early religious sects in the United States, such as the Mormons, in fact tried to start up their own non-capitalist relations of production, but the might of capital is too overwhelming for these small experiments.
The capture of the means of production under the control of an exceedingly small number of individuals in the United States, coupled with the near impossibility of survival without accepting wages from these individuals, is the most direct proof that exploitation exists still to an incredible degree even within the imperial core.
Sorry just returning to post another distinct thought.
It is a mistake to analyze exploitation on an individual basis. You already mentioned unproductive labor, for example, a cashier or a security guard who does not directly add value to the products for sale. These workers are nevertheless necessary for the continued production of surplus value. (Recall Marx: "Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value.")
If one analyzes the individual worker within the imperial core and finds that they do not individually produce surplus-value, this says nothing about their individual relations of production and therefore nothing about their class. If the worker was not necessary for the continued production of surplus-value, they would not be hired. The exact mechanism of this necessity could be extremely roundabout, for example, by "paying off" the masses of the imperial core so that they don't protest against the exploitation of the imperial periphery. But in any case, there is no requirement — even within the confines of Capital vol 1, let alone later Marxist theory — that an exploited worker is individually productive of surplus value. They can be unproductive and exploited.
It's interesting where to draw the line at for who is getting exploited and who is the exploiter. Is it only the workers at the bottom of the hierarchal structure? The middle managers as well? I suppose all who are not the owners of the means of production are exploited.
Good quote to remember when libs/conservatives expose their understanding of socialism to be when you don't produce commodities. I would like to say to them socialism and capitalism can both produce commodities, but capitalism requires there to be a surplus value aka profit
In capital volume 1, Marx frequently refers to individuals in his narrative, but it is always after first assuming that an individual is an average, representative member of their class. E.g. many of the examples assume that a laborer works with average skill and intensity.
Later discussions, such as productive and unproductive labor, the assumption of homogeneous value production on an individual basis is questioned. How does the analysis change if some workers do not produce value, but nevertheless receive wages? And the analysis continues forward dialectically as usual, re-treading the same ground with a different set of assumptions to see how things appear to change, before reflecting on those changes relative to the first perspective and integrating the new perspective into the theory.
The important takeaway is that, as a class, the proletariat are collectively exploited and that, as a class, the bourgeoisie are collectively exploiting. This doesn’t mean every single labor must mechanically produces a linear amount of surplus-value each hour in order to “count” as exploited. Nor does it mean that every single capitalist must receive an amount of surplus-value each hour — or even turn a profit! The theory is oriented toward the aggregate of society, the understanding of class dynamics as a whole and the large-scale structure of society’s relations of production.
It is already a well established part of Marxist theory that there are intermediate classes such as the petty bourgeoisie. However Marx and Engels insisted that the defining struggle is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and that the proletariat is the class with revolutionary potential. (It should be noted that, in the context of China, Mao included also the lumpenproletariat as a revolutionary class.) The intermediate classes are typically ephemeral and historically unimportant relative to this larger struggle.