Capitalist-worker exchange is formally equal but substantively unequal

Evidence

The equality in this exchange manifests itself in the fact that the capitalist can say to the worker: ‘Please, you’re expending such-and-such amount of labourpower,I’mgoingtogiveyoujustenoughtoreproducethislabour-power’.Meanwhile, the inequality lies on the one hand in the difference between the ‘reproduction costs of the average social labour-power expended by the worker’, and on the other in ‘the labour-power calculated in the labour-hours which the worker spends in the apparatus of production’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1365

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: All capitalist growth rests on a gap between wages and value created — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1137; Full automation is incompatible with capitalist private exploitation of labor — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 197; Marx maintains inequality and unfreedom are inherent realizations of exchange-based freedom. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 804 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Formal legal equality obscures real inequality because equivalence as a legal norm ignores difference #expands (0.95) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 786
• Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production #expands (0.92)
• The demand for equality originates in wage labor’s commodity equivalences #expands (0.85)
• Exchange society is immanently critical because equivalence contradicts itself #expands (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1382