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AbstractMarx's concept of exploitation, developed in Capital, retains the laissez‐faire premises of classical liberal political economy, whereby capitalist wage labor denotes a contract between formally free, legally equal, employers and workers. Marx, though, inserts the political‐economic conflict between capitalists and workers over surplus value, rendering the concept distinctively 'Marxist'. Both liberal economists and 'free marketeer' politicians had long since distanced themselves, to varying degrees, from the classical laissez‐faire construction, during the debates and campaigns leading to the UK's series of Factory Acts (1802–1853). A dialogue of socioeconomic justice had emerged, driven primarily by public outrage over employment conditions in the textiles industry. In engaging with this dialogue, Marx's critique of capitalist wage labor extends beyond the parameters of his own, political‐economic concept of exploitation, intersecting with other, moral‐economic critiques of capitalist wage labor. This paper examines these points of intersection, going on to evaluate the possibilities of analytical and strategic pluralism. It concludes by assessing the contemporary relevance of Marx's concept of exploitation: to what extent and in what ways might it retain analytical and strategic relevance, with respect to the achievement of socioeconomic justice?

This review essay addresses an apparent paradox of recent decades: the concurrence of diminishing academic and political interest in class issues alongside the polarization of class inequalities under the neo-liberal ascendancy. Both the departure from class and the occasional attempts to re-assert its theoretical and political significance have assumed diverse forms. This diversity is represented in the three books discussed here. The first comprises a collection of Marxist, non-Marxist and explicitly anti-Marxist chapters on class analysis, edited by Erik Olin Wright. The second is Michael Zweig's edited volume of Left-oriented interpretations of class in its various political, economic and social dimensions, with consistent reference to gender and race. Finally, there is Charles W. Mills's rejection of class and Marxism in favor of a black radicalism underpinned by the concept of white supremacy. The essay goes on to explore the possibilities for a reinvigoration of the radical potential of class, through its theoretical and political integration with other bases of difference and division, most notably gender and race.

A review essay on books by (1) Erik Olin Wright [Ed] Approaches to Class Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2005); (2) Century Michael Zweig [Ed], What's Class Got to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004) & (3) Charles W. Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).