You’re entirely right, but my point was that passively taking half a salary from someone for the privilege of having a roof over their head, and buying a microscopic amount of stock of a company that holds small amounts of stock in a bunch of companies are quite literally on the opposite sides of the spectrum of exploitation.
Yeah, right, because children in the cobalt mines, prisoners stamping out license plates, and underpaid middle managers are sure exploited equally.
You don’t know what exploitation means in this context.
Exploitation, Marx’s term, is the mechanism by which the owning class reproduces their living via the labor of others. It is not a spectrum, it is a phenomenon with an unambiguous boundary. As an owner of stocks, you are benefiting from the increasing value of the property which is created by the people who work in those companies. As an owner of rentable properties, you are benefiting from the labor of workers who produce the value that built the property and the workers who produced the value that is converted to cash to pay the rent. As a middle manager, sales person, or marketer, your entire salary comes from the value produced by others, most often those laboring in extraction and manufacturing.
Exploitation is the phenomenon in which value is taken from the people producing it and used to reproduce a way of life for someone else.
