The 2023 prize winner is Professor John E. Roemer (Yale University) based on his book, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class, Harvard University Press, 1982.
John E. Roemer is currently the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor in the Department of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. He was a professor at the University of California, Davis, in 1982, when the book for which he was awarded, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (hereafter GTEC), was published. His early writings (in the 1980s), including GTEC, were devoted to the aim of reviving the theory of Marxism and socialism. While writing GTEC, he joined what would become known as "analytical Marxism," a group that became central to the critical examination of Marxian theory in the USA.
GTEC focused on the basic Marxist concepts of "exploitation" and "class.” Rather than situating them in the capitalist relations of production according to historical materialism, as conventional Marxists did, Roemer took the approach of logically and mathematically reconstructing the two concepts. Specifically, he showed that the exploitation of surplus labor (i.e., the amount of labor embodied in the producer's reward (product) is less than the amount of labor he/she has performed) is also possible in non-capitalist societies. As a universal proposition, he proposed the Class Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP), which states that the unequal distribution of initially given property determines each person's place in the relations of production and whether or not he/she is "exploited.”
His argument, based on the neoclassical method of general equilibrium analysis, was a renovation in the application of mathematical analysis in Marxian economics. He explored the state resulting from the rational behavior of economic agents seeking to maximize utility under given production technologies (the reproducible solution). He demonstrated that "exploitation" can be constituted even by sophisticated neoclassical arguments. This is in itself a major contribution. His view that the root of "exploitation" does not lie in the relations of domination in the production process but in the unequal ownership of scarce production goods at the starting point has provoked controversy among those who emphasize domination and subordination in production. However, it is clear that the relations of domination in the production process are important in the analysis of actual "exploitation," and developing a comprehensive analytical framework is desirable for the progress of critical economics.
After GTEC, he has accumulated a number of publications, two of which have been translated and published in Japan. A Future for Socialism (1994) was translated by the late Makoto Ito, the second recipient of this prize. The other is Theories of Distributive Justice (1996). The issues of socialism and ethics (distributive justice) that both books represent were two of Roemer's major themes since GTEC. In his introduction to GTEC, Roemer states that the crisis of Marxism and socialism motivated him to write the book and that in GTEC, "socialist exploitation" due to differences in "status" can be assumed even in socialism, where the means of production have been socialized. He believed that socialist thought could not be revived without a conception of socialism that could avoid the real inequalities and oppressions that were so severe in the former communist countries.
In his 1994 book, translated into Japanese, he proposed a market socialism consisting of enterprises in which ownership (shares) were distributed among the people and examined its operating mechanism. Today, his theory of socialism extends to the cooperative ethic that underpins the operation of a socialist economy.
In Theories of Distributive Justice, he analytically examines "equality of welfare," "equality of resources," and "equality of opportunity" in light of the parallel development of welfare economics and ethics since J. Rawls, J. Harsanyi, and A. Sen. While this book is not written for the general public, this is one of the must readings for scholars advancing in this interdisciplinary field. In it, Roemer argues against the criticism of equality through self-ownership by libertarians such as R. Nozick, arguing that it justifies a given distribution of assets (inequality through "luck") beyond the range of "individual responsibility" that one can influence the situation through one's own decisions. It is clear that this anti-criticism is a corollary of CECP.
In recent years, Roemer has vigorously argued that a "Kantian" principle of action, in which an individual regulates his/her behavior with the same standard as others, is beneficial not only to the problem of cooperation in socialism but also to the problem of cooperation in dealing with environmental and other problems. (e.g., How We Cooperate, 2019) The Optimization based on this behavioral principle guarantees a Pareto optimum. This is a sharp alarm to the modern economics community, which is nearly brainwashed into thinking that the Nashian principle of action without regard for others is the only valid economic principle.
It is impossible here to exhaustively introduce Roemer's abundant achievements. However, it is clear that his "lifetime achievement" since the 1980s is of great value to the development of critical political economy.