Free to Lose

John Roemer's reconstruction of the concept of exploitation and his elaboration of its relationship to class constitute the most important theoretical innovations on these problems in contemporary Marxism. Free to Lose presents these ideas in a clear, nontechnical, and engaging manner which will make them accessible not only to undergraduate economics students, but to sociologists, political scientists, and historians as well. -- Erik Olin Wright

Roemer challenges the morality of an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production. Unless you start with a certain amount of wealth in such a society, you are only “free to lose.” This book addresses crucial questions of political philosophy and normative economics.Attacking the usefulness of such central Marxian concepts as the labor theory of value and surplus value, John Roemer reconstructs Marxian economic philosophy from the concepts of exploitation and class, showing that exploitation can be derived from a system of property relations. He then looks at the causes of the unequal distribution of wealth, including robbery and plunder, willingness to take risks, differential rates of time preference, luck, and entrepreneurship. He further examines the evolution of property systems—slave, feudal, capitalist, socialist—from the perspective of the theory of historical materialism, and ends by analyzing the properties of a social system in which ownership of productive assets in the external world is public, while ownership of internal productive assets—skills and talents—is private.