11. Those terms have of course been altered over time under the pressures of organized labor and left of center politics. It is useful here to distinguish between exploitation and oppression, not only because they are often confused with each other analytically, but because there is a strong overlap between them. When used carefully, exploitation refers to production relationships, those between workers and their employers. Oppression refers to the social relationships making for ethnic, gender, racial, and religious injustices. Clearly, in a society where one gender or race dominates another, oppression is very likely to make exploitation easier, even inevitable.

Clarity is important in these matters, for political as well as analytical reasons: for example, it is quite common for someone to be oppressed without being exploited – a woman married to a rich man who mistreats her with impunity in any number of ways; or exploited without being oppressed. (A white racist who works at exploitive wages and accepts such wages the more easily because he is able to oppress. In the latter respect, a most illuminating historical analysis is that of David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class [New York: Verso, 1991]).