marxism

Marx never really completed a theory about imperialism. I mean, he definitely talked about the global character of capital and the world market, but he didn't theorize about superexploitation (profit acquired by systematically depressing wages of certain sections of the global working class) which is arguably the defining characteristic of modern 21st century capitalism. And of course in the decades after Marx's death, it was Lenin (and many others) who had to pick up where Marx left off with regard to imperialism.

It bears emphasizing, none of these posthumous Marxian theories replace Marx, they only carry on the theory as any science carries on.

There is a lot of talk about a "labor aristocracy" in the West. I think there is some truth to that, but it is often taken to such absurd ends that one would consider an impoverished American a "labor aristocrat" simply because the $5/day they receive from hand-outs is more than many workers in the Global South receive in a week or a month.

Above all, Marx defined exploitation in terms of relations of production. A worker in Bangladesh is exploited by their employer to some degree, but the dominant force in their overall relation to (global) production is the force of imperialism, which at the national scale prevents moving up the value chain and externally constrains the wages of all workers in the country. This is why communist revolutions in the Global South take on a specifically anti-imperial character rather than a more proletarian character as seen earlier in the western industrial nations.

Alienated labour. You might have golden handcuffs chaining you to your office desk, but you don't own that desk or the computer or the product you're selling. If you're socially discriminated against at that job, you aren't an equal member of your team. That job degrades the air outside you have to breathe and the water you have to drink.

The western left sometimes gets a bad rap, but one of the best voices about this are marginalized people IN the western left. Huey Newton or MLK are good places to start. Zinn’s famous People’s History is a good history book to get you up to speed and unlearn some propaganda.

To be a bit anecdotal, read about Huey Newton’s theories on the lumpenproletariat. With all the mass layoffs, the current job shortage, unaffordable housing, the ruling class is intentionally creating as many lumpenproletariats as they can. Hard to get out there and oppose the rich if you’re depressed and hopeless. Exploitation can most certainly impact you simply by not even being hired in the first place.

You wouldn't be hired by companies if they couldn't exploit you. Exploitation is the difference between what you could make and what you do make, the former in the case of where you fully own the means of production that you use. Without exploitation, there simply cannot be profits.

Notably, exploitation is not just performed by business owners. Rent, interest and taxes are also paid from surplus value. This is both the rent, interest and taxes that you are paying personally out of your wages, and also the stuff that your employer is paying (since your employer pays it out of the surplus they got from you).

Another way to look at it is that exploitation falls out naturally from a theory in which the labor theory of value is true. In a capitalist economy, everything roughly sells around its value Wages are the value of workers, aka the labor/money it takes to reproduce the working class. For a society that has the ability to produce more stuff than the bare minimum, any excess production (which is called surplus) is naturally appropriated by the ruling class.

In modern capitalism, many people have the illusion that they are not exploited, because their ideas of exploitation and alienation are deeply liberal (the hegemonic ideology). They see themselves as different than the 19th century English factory man, or the child sweatshop workers that produce shoes/garments. "How can I be exploited when I can afford consumer goods and luxuries?". "How can I produce surplus value when my labor involves typing on spreadsheets?".

The problem with such thinking is that exploitation and alienation are not moral categories that exist for the purpose of drawing sympathy or divide the working class into productives and unproductives. That's the liberal/fascist goal. Exploitation in Marx's theory is that bit of energy being extracted from you to power the present order. It is a numerically quantifiable number (that stands in the range of 40-50% for most western economies).

Just as a car engine might produce net 150 horsepower but doesn't get to decide what is done with that power, your net power output is surplus. You do not control it. Your boss who has rented you decides what happens, and his job is to whip you into working hard and working for his ends. That is exploitation.

Let's say your example is a Microsoft programmer. They work on a software product that Microsoft sells and they are paid $200k per year. Even at that high wage, Microsoft is pocketing their surplus labor value, otherwise they wouldn't have profits. When companies are so large and have so much income, the exploitation in raw value can actually be even higher than that of a low wage worker. The Microsoft programmer just doesn't feel the pain as much because their labor value is scarce and hard to replace and so they are paid better.

The rest of capitalist relations still exist there as well. Microsoft wants to pay their programmers less. This is why they promote STEM education, bootcamps, etc. They want a large number of unemployed programmers competing for that job so they can drive wages down.

The Marxist concept of exploitation does not imply that all workers are impoverished. The labor aristocracy was already a thing in Marx's time. But it does mean that there is a tendency to drive down wages, i.e. increase exploitation to maximize profit. So over time, in a closed system (e.g. the global working class), wages are driven down.

everything that's still legal

I think it’s quite simple to explain to people that they generate the value of their wage for their boss in a fraction of the time they actually work, and then they work for the boss for free for the rest of the day. Especially obvious to explain to anyone that works in retail or sales or hospitality or whatever, when they can literally see the amount of money going into the register versus how much they make an hour.