ABSTRACT
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels accept many of the descriptions of capitalism that are given by the defenders of the prevailing economic system. They acknowledge that capitalism is a market society, that it depends on the work of entrepreneurs, and that it may well be called a "free enterprise" system. Under capitalism, as under feudalism and slavery, labor is exploited. Marx's concept of exploitation and the support for the claim that capitalism systematically exploits workers presupposed the truth of the labor theory of value. Exploitation has three aspects: workers produce more than they receive in wages; the surplus is appropriated by someone else; and this arrangement is imposed on the workers by force. Exploitation deprives workers of freedom in the economic sphere. Insofar as the workers have little power in the economic sphere, they have little control over what sort of world they live in and their place in it.
