Do capitalists exploit us?

Yes and they get in the way.

I notice a lot of introductions to Marxism write about how capitalists exploit us by extracting surplus value. The workers only a get a part of what they produce while the capitalists get the rest. This is fine as far as it goes but it does not address the claim that workers are not exploited because they are made better off by the capitalists, who ensure a bigger economic pie than if they were left to their own devices.

Even without relying on Marxist economic theory, we can certainly say that workers are exploited because the word just means employed, and no one objects to that word. They both just mean - made use of. So the argument really is that they are exploited but it is for their own good.

So a future revolutionary movement will have to make the point that the capitalist are not doing the rest of us any favors and that workers would do far better without them. This means being able to explain how, after disposing the capitalists, we will be able to transform the relations of production and society generally in ways that will make us into more productive, prosperous and functional human beings. This endeavor will be all fresh ground in developed capitalist countries but there will be the grim lessons from revolutions in backward countries to draw on.

This of course is a different matter from the question of bourgeois governments taxing, regulating or nationalizing capitalists. There is a lot to be said for the argument that we “need” capitalists and the profit motive under the present system, and that politicians and bureaucrats can make a hash of things. In any time and place there is no doubt a least worst mix of market and government. Reds don’t have a natural preference for the bourgeois government over the capitalists, unlike social democrats or “socialists”.