Shelby on "The Exploitation Objection" to Reciprocity

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Shelby's fascinating account of the perpetuation of the injustices plaguing ghettos considers reasons for which the ghetto poor might refuse to work (and are justified in doing so). Of the reasons he offers, three, he believes, cannot be accommodated without changing the structure of US society (192): the injustice objection, the exploitation objection, and the expressive harm objection. This blog post will focus on the exploitation objection and propose further extensions of Shelby's explanation of this objection. 

Shelby argues that the ghetto poor may refuse to work because work requirements are exploitative, taking advantage of the poor's "weakness and vulnerabilities" and forcing the poor to work under unjust conditions. Shelby attributes these vulnerabilities to the historical mistreatment of African Americans (e.g. slavery and Jim Crow Laws), which resulted in the ghetto poor becoming a source of cheap and exploitable labor. 

He extends this argument by characterizing this system of exploitation as a "self-reproducing exploitative relationship" between poor and affluent citizens. In such a relationship, the poor are forced to make sacrifices that benefit more affluent citizens, resulting in a power-based relationship that is perpetuated by the poor's constant need to make sacrifices. This relationship is important to consider in Shelby's argument as it reveals the seemingly cyclical nature of the obstacles the ghetto poor are subject to. While Shelby's account of the exploitation objection is sound, I argue that there may be another unmentioned factor that demonstrates that the system of exploitation is even graver than described. 

It is possible that because the exploitative social relationship between poor and affluent citizens is self-reproducing, the poor begin to view the relationship as one that is not only necessary for their sustenance but also accepted by the poor as an unchanging condition and truth. I call upon Marx's "The German Ideology" in making this argument. Marx argues that the ruling class's ideology is the prevailing one and in compromising the individual freedom of the proletarian class, becomes the truth for the proletarian class. While the proletarian class believes that it is securing its freedom by participating in the ruling class's system, it is actually being enslaved. I believe that a similar principle can be applied to Shelby's account: because the ghetto poor are constantly subject to an exploitative social relationship with more affluent citizens, it is possible that this relationship becomes an acceptable truth to the poor. 

This is bolstered by the fact that many of the schools available to the poor "are so substandard that they do not enable upward mobility" (197). I argue that without adequate educational systems, it becomes more difficult for the poor to even realize the exploitative nature of the relationship they engage in with more affluent citizens. Moreover, as Shelby states, "a shockingly high percentage of the black poor were born into ghetto conditions" (196). If a certain generation of the ghetto poor is subjected to the "continuance" (197) of the self-reproducing exploitative social relationship, is it not reasonable to hypothesize that this relationship simply becomes an unchanging, accepted truth for the next generation? 




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