A new study in the American Journal of Political Science tested whether Left and Right really have irreconcilable ideas about exploitation. The short answer: they don’t. People across the political spectrum agreed on what exploitation is — even when they disagreed about how much of it exists.
The researchers used abstract vignettes about mug production (to strip out partisan bias) and tested hundreds of professional philosophers and ordinary people in the US and UK. The results were remarkably consistent:
- The most important factor across all political groups: injustice — whether the power advantage comes from a prior rights violation
- Second: asymmetric power and inequality of gains (tied)
- The power + inequality combination produced an effect stronger than the sum of its parts — exploitation is recognized as power being leveraged to extract unequal outcomes
- Disrespect mattered more to the general public (+12) than to academics (+2) — everyday people experience disrespect as the lived manifestation of structural vulnerability
Key political implication: libertarians, conservatives, and socialists all ordered the factors the same way. Libertarians just scored every scenario lower. “The view of exploitation that emerges from our study is not that the truth lies somewhere between Marx and Nozick,” the authors write. It’s “much closer to Marx’s view.”
The takeaway for the Left: the public already shares a structural, anti-capitalist understanding of exploitation. The strategic opportunity is to reanchor political conversation around the policies — sectoral bargaining, universal public housing, healthcare, wealth taxes — that actually dismantle power asymmetries.