Bio: (1945-) American economist and sociologist. John Roemer received his doctorate from the University of Berkeley, taught at the University of California at Davis, and today teaches at Yale. Roemer is one of the most important representatives of analytical Marxism. At the beginning of his career, he developed the theory of exploitation in the book General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982). Roemer conceives the general theory of economic exploitation, which has its special forms, so there are feudal, socialist, status, neoclassical and Marxist exploitation, which are special cases of the general theory of exploitation. According to Remer, for economic inequality to be a consequence of exploitation, there must be a special causal link between the incomes of different actors, that is, for the rich to exploit the poor, their wealth must be directly caused by the deprivation of the poor. Roemer thus comes to his definition of exploitation: "A group can be considered exploited if there are some hypothetically feasible alternatives in which its members would be better off than in its present situation" (Roemer: 1982). Roemer's theory of exploitation is broader than Marxist's and can be applied to many situations, other than capitalism.

Roemer sees the distribution of the means of production as the basis of exploitation because ownership of these means is sufficient to explain the transfer of surplus labor, while different types of assets determine different systems of exploitation. Classes represent positions within social relations of production that are based on property relations that determine patterns of exploitation. In Remer, relations within the production process or within the work process do not enter into the definition of class relations. Roemer has also written several books exploring ways to achieve market socialism - Market Socialism (1993), Future for Socialism (1994), and Equal Shares: Making Market Socialism Work (1996). In addition to economic topics, Roemer also wrote about the problem of distributive justice and human cooperation.

Main works

A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982);

Analytic Marxism (1986);

Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory (1988);

Market Socialism (1993);

Future for Socialism (1994);

Equal Shares: Making Market Socialism Work (1996);

Theories of Distributive Justice (1998);

Equality of Opportunity (2009);

Political Competition (2009);

How We Cooperate: A Theory of Kantian Optimization (2019).