Attacking the usefulness of such central Marxian concepts as the labor theory of value and surplus value, John Roemer reconstructs Marxian economic philosophy from the concepts of exploitation and class, showing that exploitation can be derived from a system of property relations. He then looks at the causes of the unequal distribution of wealth, including robbery and plunder, willingness to take risks, differential rates of time preference, luck, and entrepreneurship. He further examines the evolution of property systems—slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist—from the perspective of the theory of historical materialism, and ends by analyzing the properties of a social system in which ownership of productive assets in the external world is public, while ownership of internal productive assets—skills and talents—is private.

• Contents 
• 1. 
• Introduction
• The Private Property System
• Exploitation
• Classes
• Historical Materialism
• Capitalism and Freedom
• Method
• A Preview
• 2. 
• The Origin of Exploitation
• An Egalitarian Distribution of Capital
• The Technical Definition of Exploitation
• Unequal Ownership of the Capital Stock
• The Causes of Exploitation
• The Industrial Reserve Army
• Concluding Comments
• 3. 
• Feudalism and Capitalism
• A Brief Account of Feudalism
• A Difference between Capitalism and Feudalism
• 4. 
• Exploitation and Profits
• Embodied Labor and Exploitation
• Prices and the Profit Rate
• The Relationship between Exploitation and Profits
• An Economy with Many Produced Goods
• The Social Division of Labor and the Perception of Exploitation
• The Labor Theory of Value
• 5. 
• The Morality of Exploitation
• Exploitation as the Source of Profits
• The Initial Distribution
• Justification of Unequal Distribution
• 6. 
• The Emergence of Class
• A Definition of Equilibrium for a Corn Model with Assets
• Class Formation
• Class and Wealth
• Class and Exploitation
• The Significance of Class
• Exploitation Deemphasized
• 7. 
• Exploitation without a Labor Market
• The Corn Economy with a Capital Market
• Capital Market Island: The Five-Class Model
• Capital Markets and Workers' Cooperatives
• Exploitation without Labor or Capital Markets
• International Capitalism: Imperialism and Labor Migration
• Domination versus Exploitation versus Property Relations
• 8. 
• Historical Materialism
• Economic Structure, Productive Forces, and Superstructure
• The Role of Class Struggle
• The Logic of the Theory
• Challenges from Economic History
• Evolving Property Relations
• 9. 
• Evolving Forms of Exploitation
• Historical Materialism and Private Property
• The Failure of Surplus Value as a Measure of Exploitation
• A Property-Relations Approach to Capitalist Exploitation
• Feudal Exploitation
• A Comparison of Revolutionary Transitions
• Socialist Exploitation
• Socially Necessary Exploitation
• Syndicalization versus Socialization
• 10. 
• Public Ownership of the Means of Production
• The Case for Public Ownership
• Three Political Philosophies
• The Story of Able and Infirm
• Characterization of an Economic Constitution
• Evaluation
• 11. 
• Epilogue
• Appendix: 
• Statements and Proofs of Theorems
• Bibliographical Notes
• References
• Index