It is a truism that the Left and Right disagree about exploitation. For the Left, and Marxists in particular, exploitation offers the ultimate normative condemnation of capitalist markets. “Capital,” Karl Marx wrote, “is dead labor that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor.” It is the exploitative extraction of workers’ labor, transformed into capital, that perpetuates the domination of the working classes. Libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick disagreed — to put it politely — arguing in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that because Marxists misunderstand the nature of price and value and ignore the contributions of capitalists, “Marxian exploitation is the exploitation of people’s lack of understanding of economics.”

It would be hard to sketch a deeper ideological gulf. The Left and the Right appear to operate in completely different moral universes — a chasm that shouldn’t surprise anyone who has witnessed the polarization that has shaped our political discourse over the past two decades. Pundits insist that when it comes to the economy, there is no common ground.

And yet our research finds that this picture is simply false, at least when it comes to exploitation. When asked what they think exploitation is, participants on both the Left and Right agree. And perhaps surprisingly, the pattern that emerges is one that vindicates the common claim of those on the Left that exploitation involves one party’s unjust use of power to gain at the expense of another. The results of our study provide a striking vindication of the Left’s structural critique of economic relations. And as we will argue, they suggest a way forward for the Left’s political strategy.