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Generalized Commodity Exploitation Theorem and the Net-Production Concept

TADASU MATSUO


The present paper examines the validity of the Generalized Commodity Exploitation Theorem (GCET) as a criticism against the Fundamental Marxian Theorem (FMT). The FMT showed the equivalence between positive profit and positive exploitation of labor, but the GCET claims that positive profit is equivalent with exploitation of every commodity. The present study focuses on the net-production concepts, which accompany with the exploitation concepts, and shows that the sole exploitation concept, which is equivalent with positive profit combined with the ordinary physical net-production condition, is the exploitation of labor, not the exploitation of any other commodity. The exploitation of another commodity needs another net-production condition to be equivalent with positive profit. It is pseudo net-production condition, which is not purely physical condition but contains social distribution condition. This pseudo net-production concept contains inputs for the production such as fertilizer for banana trees, but it does not contain workers’ consumption goods. Thus we will confirm that the exploitation concept of any commodity other than labor is not appropriate for the economic analysis based on the ordinary net-production concept, which considers that net-products are used for human.