The Epistemology of Exploitation: Carchedi’s Class Theory of Knowledge
Under capitalism, knowledge is not a neutral collection of facts, but a precise mechanism regulating value flows and social obedience. According to Guglielmo Carchedi, the epistemology of exploitation is the nervous system of class dominance, where science answers questions defined from the perspective of capital. This article analyzes how control over the means of mental production shapes our understanding of labor and why scientific objectivity within this system is merely an ideological mirage.
Material vs. Mental Labor: The Dialectics of Production
Carchedi distinguishes between material transformation (processing raw materials) and mental transformation (creating concepts and models). Both forms are inextricably intertwined within a single production process. Science under capitalism cannot be neutral, as universities and laboratories remain in the hands of the non-producing class, ensuring that the selection of research problems and standards of success serve the interests of exploitation.
In this context, the proletariat possesses cognitive privilege. This is not a metaphysical trait, but a materialistic one: only those who actually transform the world can fully grasp its internal contradictions. The experience of labor provides the raw material for knowledge capable of piercing the ideological veil of the bourgeois perspective.
Exploitation and the Systemic Role of Migration
Exploitation is an objective relationship in which the owner appropriates the surplus value produced by the worker. Carchedi breaks down the value of labor power into three components: Formation (F)—education costs, Regeneration (R)—daily maintenance, and Maintenance (M)—security during periods of inactivity. Migration serves as a tool of super-exploitation, as it allows core economies to avoid the F and M costs incurred in the migrants' countries of origin.
Analysis shows that the Nordic and German models, despite institutional differences, follow the same logic of capital. In both cases, migrants serve as economic shock absorbers, often working in unprotected sectors. In this system, knowledge about migration is treated as a resource for profit optimization and risk management, masking the structural nature of exploitation.
Political Hegemony and Challenges for Management
The political class reproduces the logic of capital accumulation, acting as professional managers of public institutions. Through political hegemony, it defines the horizon of permissible questions, marginalizing critiques of ownership as "unserious." In this way, the knowledge system colonizes the worker's lifeworld, imposing a technocratic language of efficiency instead of a language of justice.
Corporate boards face a contradiction: models that ignore the full costs of labor reproduction are accounting-correct but systemically risky. Liberated science outside the paradigm of dominance would require not just a change in researchers' intentions, but a radical transformation of ownership structures, so that producers regain control over the goals and tools of knowledge.
Capitalist Ownership Sets the Limits of Reformism
Carchedi’s analysis leads to the conclusion that the democratization of wages alone is not enough to free science from its class determination. Capitalist ownership sets the limits of reformism, because as long as the means of mental production are concentrated, knowledge will serve the reproduction of the system. Can we create a science that serves emancipation? This requires handing control over the production of truth back to those who actually transform the world—the producers of material and mental goods.
📄 Full analysis available in PDF