Several important criticisms have been made of Marx's concept from different sides:

1) The ambiguity of the concept - does it have a purely objective, economic significance in terms of the yield of labour utilisation, or does it rather have a moral-political significance?

2) All factors of production can add value to products, invalidating Marx's law of value and his claim that workers are exploited.

3) None of the five measures that Marx cites express anything directly about the intensity of labor-exploitation, which can increase or decrease without being reflected in his ratios. Exploitation in the workplace might involve much more than Marx envisaged (see also productivity).

4) Marx disregards the fact, that workers may be doubly exploited, not just at the point of production, but at the point of their consumption; when they spend their wages on goods and services, they are "taxed" again by the profit and tax component added to the value of the goods and services they buy (this point is not theoretically developed in most Marxist literature, although it can give rise to consumer resistance and consumer boycotts). This importantly affects our understanding of the economic value of labour power.

5) Marx theoretically largely disregards state intermediation which can strongly influence the magnitude of both wages and profits earnt, in many different ways.

6) Marx equates wage costs with labour costs, but labour costs may involve much more than wages (taxes, social security levies, employer contributions to schemes benefiting employees, bribes and all sorts) (see also Compensation of employees).

7) Marx disregards the unpaid labor of (mainly) women in the household, and associated voluntary labor necessary and indispensable for the reproduction of labour power. Market relations depend to a large degree on non-market relations.

8) Viewing the labor process in terms of exploitation is not conducive to anything, since it disregards the constructive role of employers in developing production. If they are just viewed as exploiters, this distracts from the problem of how else you could organise production with better forms of association.

9) Marx largely disregards that employers of labor might be exploited by each other, or that workers might be exploited by each other (this is obviously not completely true, but Marx's main focus was certainly on the capital-labor relationship).

The overall result of these criticisms is that many people believe Marx's whole notion of exploitation was either too narrowly defined or else too sweeping.