By Matt Underwood Yes but that’s also literally what makes it capitalism. Your job exploits your capability to make them money at a greater rate than they have to pay you. You aren’t all fairly compensated for your work because some of the proceeds of that work are instead funneled off to compensate those who did nothing more than provide capital for the company to utilise, in the form of stocks.
That’s what makes this form of work naturally exploitative. Contrast this with, say, a work situation where you barter your work on X project, for their work on y project for you; you cut my hair, I give you some carrots I grew. The sum total of each person’s work is balanced out by the other, because the work is done for that exchange and the benefit of the exchange isn’t siphoned off to other non-contributing parties.
The central lie of capitalism is that you’re being paid fairly for your work, that the more you do and the harder you work and the better at it you are, the more you will be compensated. But that’s not true and hasn’t been for a long time; you get paid as little as they are able to get away with based on legal protection and market forces, and they extract as much wealth as they can from you.
The void in the middle is exploitation.
There are other ways to work, other ways to measure input and output; in a communist society that was truly communal in nature (or nothing we have ever seen on earth, a fictional utopia) all of the benefit of your work would be held collectively by society as a whole, and in exchange all individuals would have access to those benefits fairly and equally.
There are obvious pros and cons to each system, but you can see the key difference when it comes to the imbalance between your work and your compensation is control; in a communist system the collective pooling and distribution isn’t exploitative, even when it may be unfair relative to other individuals, because nobody is controlling that disparity, whereas in a capitalist system that disparity is directly the result of a decision by the capitalist power, ie company board of directors, private owner or whoever, choosing not to compensate by amount generated, as part of the system.