Concomitant with the surging inequality of recent decades has been the development of exploitation theory, which concerns the form and moral import of transactions between stronger and weaker parties. As capital is concentrated in fewer hands, more people are relegated to demeaning and precarious work. Sweatshops multiply. Labor migrants are denied basic rights. Surrogacy and prostitution proliferate. Such exploitative practices can be consensual and mutually beneficial-they typically are. Yet that does not seem to vindicate them. How precisely should we account for the injustice they exhibit, and how central is that injustice to the capitalist order? The focus of our special issue is Nicholas Vrousalis' recent book, Exploitation as Domination (OUP, 2023), which represents a major advance in the debate over these questions.Vrousalis' argument shifts our focus away from the damaging, disrespectful, or distributively unequal character of exploitative relations, towards the victim's subordination, how her free purposive agency is compromised in ways that no compensatory welfare gains can morally redeem. Exploitation is a species of domination, the wrongful control by one agent over another's power to set and pursue their own ends. By virtue of that control, the powerful extract productive service from the vulnerable, without ever having to extend their own labor service in return. When capital goods are scarce and privately held, as under capitalism, owners of the means of production necessarily possess this dominative control. Workers are not the masters of their own purposiveness. This is a structural condition: the unfreedom of workers is administered not only by capital owners themselves, but through an array of mediating regulators, who endow these social relations with their systematic, durable character. And these relations are global in scope. Political communities in the rich world still dominate those in the old colonial periphery, under a pervasive order of neo-imperialism. Whatever globalization's effect on poverty rates, it has not freed the developing world from relations of exploitation. Or so Vrousalis argues.Our symposium on Exploitation as Domination includes critical notices by S.M. Love, Lucas Stanczyk, and Gulzaar Barn, along with a reply to their arguments by Vrousalis. While broadly sympathetic to the aims

One of the perennial fault-lines in monetary theory is that between commodity and credit theories of money. The emergence of alternative payment systems based on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, of which Bitcoin is the most prominent example, has raised a host of important questions in relation to this debate. This article considers two. The first is ontological: Are Bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies’ best conceived of as money? The second is political: Do these money candidates represent an emancipatory development over state-backed fiat currency? The ontological question, we will argue, invites the political one. If it is the case, as Chartalists maintain, that (i) for some X to be money it must have certain properties which can only be imparted by political authority (broadly understood) and if (ii) political authority ought to be subject to public control, then attempts by private actors to usurp a social ‘money function’ cannot count as legitimate political developments. We will argue in support of this position. This discussion is limited to Bitcoin, though its implications generalize for relevantly similar cryptocurrencies. Our method involves considering, first, claims made by Bitcoin’s defenders about its status as money, and what accounts for that status. While these claims are often thought to extend Mengerite or generally Austrian lines of economic argument, they resonate more with Marx’s theory of monetary value. Moreover, a close assessment of that theory’s defects yields specific normative conclusions that potentially undermine the notion that Bitcoin constitutes a valid means of resisting state monetary authority.

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Capitalism is not only an economic order, but a form of life. Market socialism is proposed as an alternative, and should be assessed according to the standards of second-order coherence and social rationality that make a form of life habitable. I argue that it fails to meet those standards. Competitive market practices encode values that determine specific reasons for action and belief, reasons antithetical to those given by the principle of community. That principle, however, validates the politics under which common capital ownership is secured. The selfsame agents, in their fulfillment of essential and non-negotiable functional roles, are required to be equally responsive to incompatible reasons. This undermines the case for market socialism's general stability.

This paper offers a brief account and defense of freely associated production as a political ideal. I discuss its conceptual structure, specifying what is meant by free association in terms of economic production, the sense in which it is a value for political order, and its approximate place in an historical lineage of reflection on freedom. Given that our economic arrangements are constitutively determined by law and public policy, and involve relations of governing power, the values that legal authority must subserve bear directly on the productive sphere. One of those values – arguably the highest – is relational freedom. Reigning structures of production violate its demands. Without understanding the ways in which that violation occurs, we cannot effectively address some of our most urgent social crises.