Do you think exploitation of labor is definitive of capitalism or could extra capital be achieved through other avenues like technological development? — NotAristotle
I don't think these are at odds, exactly.
We have to be careful here because Marx's use of "exploitation" is specialized to capitalism. For instance we might easily say that slavery exploits labor, but it is not, for that, capitalism. Capitalism as Marx describes exploits labor
through the free exchange of labor: that's the important part. The way the bourgeois economist describes our economy is due to the perspective of the owner: attempting to build a firm which produces goods and services and turns a profit requires theorizing things like firms, supply, demand, and exchange which in turn requires a state to enforce these claims to property.
So yes the exploitation of labor is part of capitalism, but it's a particular kind of exploitation: Slavery, in the Marxist sense, is primitive accumulation -- our tribe took your tribes shit and made you into slaves so we now have more wealth. Greece's economy was a slave economy which exploited labor, but not as a capitalist does.
Also it's something of a Marxist point to note how technological development is part of the process of the economy in general (and therefore also a part of capitalism in particular): The whole base-superstructure notion is basically to note that as technology changes so do our societies. Capitalism required more than the worker-boss relationship, but needs to expand into Rents to absorb surplus-value, and also must expand railroad systems (or systems of transportation, generally) so that the world may even be able to be treated as an open market where we can all trade and make different firms more competitive depending on their environment (and thereby make the market more efficient).
So, yes, capital can be achieved through other avenues, but exploitation and the development of technology aren't at odds with one another. If anything the development of automation has allowed for an increase in the rate of exploitation as manufacturing centers drift across this global economy: With automation you can hire fewer workers and have a labor-reserve which depresses wages of those who have a job because there's another person waiting to take your place.
This isn't to say automation is bad, though. It's the social relationship of capitalism which puts automation in the service of exploitation (rather than in the service of freeing us from labor).
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I can understand being wary of Marxist thought. We're pretty much conditioned, in the states at least, from a young age to have negative associations with the USSR, Marxism, and all that rot. We are taught it's bad because Stalin was evil (List all the Big Bads here as you wish like Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh: but note that Pol Pot was deposed by a Marxist state)
But here we're just using the words of a philosopher and not building a worker's paradise. Instead we are describing the hell we see before our very eyes: the hell of capitalism.