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Wage theft is not the same thing as the Marxist concept of capitalist exploitation (surplus value extraction). Wage theft is not a socialist concept it's a literal crime under capitalist law insofar as it's a form of literal theft in addition to contract and labor regulation violations. Paying an employee a paycheck below the minimum wage and promising to make up the difference and never following through is a form of wage theft, stealing employees' tips and claiming them as "business revenue" is a form of wage theft, not paying employees overtime is a form of wage theft, etc. Wage theft is a form of economic super exploitation via even greater surplus value extraction than possible under legal conditions but economic exploitation can and does exist even without wage theft.
If Jane's work produces more than $30/hr in value and she makes less than whatever that is then she is exploited regardless of whether she's a fulltime employee or a freelance contractor. There's literally no difference in material relations between being a fulltime employee or a freelancer so what is even the point of this hypothetical? Exploitation is about the material difference between the value one creates through their labor and the value they receive back in wages not whether they're "self employed" or not.
>If Jane's work produces more than $30/hr in value and she makes less than whatever that is then she is exploited
So how do you calculate the true value of Jane's labor? Please explain.
Surely the easiest way to reveal Jane's true value of her labor is to remove herself from the exploiting entity and sell her labor in her own terms?
>Exploitation is about the material difference between the value one creates through their labor and the value they receive back in wages not whether they're "self employed" or not.
How do you know what the difference is? It seems like nobody can answer this.
What if Jane takes on an employee in a co-op arrangement. Does that now make a distinction between business owner and free lancer? And let's say she still does work for me at $30 an hour and is very happy with the income. It's she still being exploited? She literally owns her company, the means of production and it's selling her services and keeping all the proceeds
>So how do you calculate the true value of Jane's labor? Please explain.
Value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce the commodity in question a.k.a. the average amount of time it takes a worker (or workers) of average skill, working with average quality tools to produce/render the good/service.
So using your example let's say it takes Jane, a highly skilled graphic designer, a full workday (8 hours) to design a single website from scratch. Now let's say Jane is a better than average worker and that it takes most graphic designers two workdays (16 hours) to design a single website. At the end of the work week Jane has designed 5 websites worth 80 SNLT each despite only putting in 40 hours of work herself. Let's say she did this in a place where everyone learns graphic design in public school so that it's an entry-level job with no additional training needed and that the minimum wage is $30 an hour (both are unlikely but stay with me) so that 1 SNLT of Graphic Design=$30. Jane has brought in $2,400 in revenue but was only paid $1,200 in wages.
Now it wouldn't matter if she was an employee paid $30 an hour or if she was a freelancer charging $30 per website designed, in either scenario she'd be paid only half of the value of what she produced.
>Surely the easiest way to reveal Jane's true value of her labor is to remove herself from the exploiting entity and sell her labor in her own terms?
No the easiest way to determine how economically exploited anyone is (or, conversely, how much they're exploiting others) is to look at the discrepancy between their productivity and their income. Whether Jane is a full time employee or merely a part time contractor is just semantics, the actual material relationships between her, her work and the fruits of her labor remain unchanged.
>How do you know what the difference is? It seems like nobody can answer this
No, it seems like you refuse to listen to the people who answer you and then go off on your own tangents.
>What if Jane takes an employee in a co-op arrangement.(?) Does that now make a distinction between business owner and freelancer? And let's say she still does work for me at $30 an hour and is very happy with the income. It's (sic) she still being exploited? She literally owns her own company, the means of production and it's (sic) selling her services and keeping all the proceeds
You can't "take an employee in a co-op arrangement". Do you mean take a partner or do you mean a sub-contractor? If you meant the latter then it's possible Jane can be exploited by you while also exploiting somebody else herself. It doesn't matter whether she's happy with her $30 an hour, exploitation is an objective measure not a subjective one. Some people are "happy" in abusive relationships, it doesn't make those relationships healthy. It doesn't matter if Jane owns her own means of production, even the petite-bourgeoisie can be economically exploited in certain circumstances such as the ones you've described.
> No, it seems like you refuse to listen to the people who answer you and then go off on your own tangents.
I disagree, your explanation of SNLT is the first ive heard it after probing this question forever. It sounds absurd to me, but at least it addresses my question directly. All i've gotten so far is some variation of
- there is no dollar value
- its all dependent on the relationship only
- not exploitation if wages set by collective or gov committee
You are the first to give a definition of how to calculate an objective dollar value of true output.
> most graphic designers two workdays (16 hours) to design a single website.
how is this going to be calculated and defined economy-wide? Or even industry wide? Are they going to time how long it takes design a website? What if one guy has a troublesome client that keeps changing his mind and it takes 8 weeks to design a website, and another guy has a great professional client that can give him a precise and accurate design brief?
What about things that don't have a SNLT? I make custom coffee accessories out of plaster that gets poured into molds. Where is the SNLT for that in case i have to hire a worker?
What about something that isnt about making widgets or things that can be quantified? How about a online marketing person that increases brand awareness? How many brand awareness-es does he product a week?
The idea that there is some standard unit of labor sounds absurdly impractical? But at least you addressed my issue headon.
> It doesn't matter if Jane owns her own means of production,
see this is also a the opposite of what most lefties say in this sub.
> it doesn't make those relationships healthy
If both employer and employee are happy in a consensual transaction, who has the right to deem something unhealthy and make moves to stop it?
>I disagree, your explanation of SNLT is the first ive heard it (sic) after probing this question forever. It sounds absurd to me, but at least it addresses my question directly. All i've gotten so far is some variation of
\*there is no dollar value
\*its all dependent on the relationship only
\*not exploitation if wages set by the collective or gov committee
You are the first to give a definition of how to calculate an objective dollar value of true output.
There doesn't need to be a dollar value for SNLT for exploitation to exist. There could be and in the past there was economic exploitation via surplus value extraction in many economic systems without money or where money was scarce. You could, hypothetically, have capitalist exploitation in a barter system.
The relative power imbalance(s) between exploiter(s) and exploited aren't, in and of themselves, the **only** important thing in determining whether exploitation exists but it's not unimportant or inconsequential either. Whenever exploitation is happening someone is coming out ahead unfairly, that is to say someone is profiting off of someone else's work and it's a rare case indeed when they're not keenly aware of that fact. When people are partners like in a workers' co-operative it makes exploitation a lot less likely to happen (but not impossible).
Now in regards to the whole "not exploitation if wages set by the collective or gov committee" bit, I'm 110% sure you're knowingly misrepresenting the arguments of the people making them. There are cases, in workers co-ops or democratic governments for example, where everyone will need to vote on what to spend revenue on and the minority, being a minority, will lose, but however the vote turns out the remainder of the revenue will be distributed as normal, that is to say commensurate with each workers' productivity.
Say you have a workers' co-op with 9 members and one of them, let's call him Bob, works twice as hard as everyone else who works the same as each other so that Bob produces 20% of the weekly revenue and everyone else produces 10% each for 100% in total. Let's say the co-op makes 10k one week so Bob should be entitled to 2k and everyone else to 1k, however before the revenue is given out in "wages" a vote is held on whether to spend 20% of the total revenue on a new widget (what it is or does doesn't matter) and for whatever reason Bob is opposed to the idea and votes against it. Despite Bob's protests the vote passes anyway 8 yays to 1 nay. Now you probably think Bob's been exploited and robbed of the $2,000 in value he produced right? Wrong, because Bob's still paid proportionately to the share of the revenue he produced. He's still paid 20% only now it's 20% of 8k instead of 10k and even though he may not have wanted it, he's still technically a part owner in the new widget as long as he's a member of the co-op so he didn't even lose wealth so much as a fraction of his wealth's liquidity. And this is all assuming the other 8 members didn't decide to leave Bob's 2k alone and buy the widget from their own 8k share of the original 10k, which is also a possibility the other 8 workers could choose or Bob himself could propose.
I'll get to your other questions in the second half of your comment later.
>What about things that don't have a SNLT? I make custom coffee accessories out of plaster that gets poured into molds. Where is the SNLT for that in case i have to hire a worker?
You don't use the SNLT in a sort of microeconomic business plan. The SNLT of a product can be determined when there's a market for a product and you have extensive data.
>What about something that isnt about making widgets or things that can be quantified? How about a online marketing person that increases brand awareness? How many brand awareness-es does he product a week?
Brand awareness isn't a thing of value in itself (stay calm). Of course brand awareness might be desirable to you, the seller of a product, as it increases your customer base, but your customers don't purchase your "brand awareness", they buy your product.
Imagine a scenario where every producer of chairs is just in a randomly sorted database and ads don't exist, causing every manufacturer to sell the same number of chairs. Now imagine a scenario where there's ads everywhere and the effectiveness of one's ad campaigns plays a major role in cultivating a customer base.
There's, in the end, the same number of chairs produced and society is equally rich in chairs in both circumstances. Brand awareness may allow you, the individual, to siphon a larger share of an existing customer base, but nothing *more* has been produced.
>If both employer and employee are happy in a consensual transaction, who has the right to deem something unhealthy and make moves to stop it?
Anyone whom some sort of legal entity empowers with some right. It doesn't matter. Who has which rights is a codification of preexisting economic realities.
>see this is also a the opposite of what most lefties say in this sub.
Shouldn't this prompt you to inform yourself on the subject and then argue against your own knowledge on the matter?
> There's, in the end, the same number of chairs produced and society is equally rich in chairs in both circumstances. Brand awareness may allow you, the individual, to siphon a larger share of an existing customer base, but nothing *more* has been produced.
But you're missing the point. Society is irrelevant in this scenario. The point is the online marketing person is creating value for the person paying for his services. The customers (or society) aren't involved in this transaction at all
Which is worse- the client supposedly exploiting the online marketing guy by paying him an agreed upon wage for the value he creates with both parties happy? Or some bureaucrat that decides brand awareness "isn't a thing" and telling these two consensual adults you cannot do this?
Why does a bureaucrat or "some legal entity" with powers (which sounds very sinister by the way) get to inject himself into a win-win trade because "he knows best"?
>Shouldn't this prompt you to inform yourself on the subject and then argue against your own knowledge on the matter?
I mean thats what Im doing now, I already made at least 3 posts trying to understand the lefty concept of exploitation and I think im getting closer? There must be a few hundred comments by now all with different definitions and concepts.
>The point is the online marketing person is creating value for the person paying for his services. The customers (or society) aren't involved in this transaction at all
What I'm saying is that without a market for some product, there is no value. Pepsi will not buy a coca cola ad. The marketing person is creating a market advantage for the business owner, that's what their wage is for. But without a marketplace for Coca Cola ads, we can't deduce the value of one. What isn't bought isn't a product.
Edit: what I'm saying is that work that results in no value does not contribute to the rate of exploitation
What *is* a market product is the labor power of the marketing person. Labor power means the ability to perform marketing-based work. Many people possess and are willing to rent it out, other people are willing to rent it from them. The value of that labor power is the SNLT that's involved in producing it, just like any other product. So what's the SNLT of someone's ability to make ads comprised of? Tuition costs. Rent. Food. Clothes. All of these are necessary components in order for someone to be able dispense marketing-labor. And assuming that the market is absolutely flooded with marketing people, that's what their wage will be pegged to.
Exploitation then happens when you create value in excess of that labor power. This all sounds pretty convoluted but allow me to illuminate this with a very simple example:
Say a Bike is worth "5 SNLT" and your food, rent and so on are worth "10 SNLT", if you've created two bikes at work today, all you've done is sustain your own existence. There's no surplus because you've created exactly as much value as you've consumed. If you've created a third bike, thus generating more value than you've consumed, you've created surplus. Now some of your surplus you probably get to keep (I.e, you can cover your rent and then some) and some surplus will go to the capitalist who employs you (I.e. they're making a profit). Say of the 5 surplus you get 2.5 and your employer gets 2.5.
Now of course, the "5 SNLT" of the bike will also include the tools and raw materials of the bike that the final assembler did not mine themselves. Instead, other workers have already created "2.5 SNLT" that you're served with to assemble the bike.
Conventionally, capitalists will argue, "well yeah, and those initial " 2.5 SNLT" are the value that the capitalist provides, he paid for the tools and raw materials, ergo that part of the surplus is correctly attributed to him. And In a sense, that's correct. The capitalist has already paid for those things so they can hardly be attributed to the bike assembler's effort.
And this is where the crux of exploitation lies: the capitalist has the monetary ability to pay for his own survival in addition to his ability to pay for metal and tools. This monetary advantage over the assembler is what is exploited. The bike assembler has only hisblabor power, his work, to sell, whereas the capitalist can offer the tools to make that labor useful.
There's no issue with this particular arrangement and keep in mind that historically, "exploitation" simply meant "making use of something".
What Marxists will typically argue for is not "ending exploitation" in and of itself, rather the debate that you're observing is one group, for example the capitalists on this board say "this economic arrangement is good and just and it gives the most freedom", where I would just say "That's how things currently work, I don't see any argument for why this particular economic arrangement must be maintained".
>Why does a bureaucrat or "some legal entity" with powers (which sounds very sinister by the way) get to inject himself into a win-win trade because "he knows best"?
Because that bureaucrat has the power to do so. I don't know if that's good or bad. That's not the point. The point is that rights aren't actually instilled by god, they're some words written on a piece of paper.
>I mean thats what Im doing now, I already made at least 3 posts trying to understand the lefty concept of exploitation and I think im getting closer? There must be a few hundred comments by now all with different definitions and concepts.
What do you think would happen if you asked "How do quantum mechanics work?" on this subreddit? Would you, in the end, be content to finally know how it all works? What if different people gave conflicting answers? How will you know which one's are correct? You'll have to read some sort of material that has acclaim in the corresponding field.
>And this is where the crux of exploitation lies: the capitalist has the monetary ability to pay for his own survival in addition to his ability to pay for metal and tools. This monetary advantage over the assembler is what is exploited. The bike assembler has only his labor power, his work, to sell, whereas the capitalist can offer the tools to make that labor useful.
If the assembler truly feels they are being "exploited" in this scenario and are dissatisfied, they should live below their means, build up their savings and buy their own metal and tools (i.e. become a capitalist).
As I've mentioned, it has less to do with feeling exploited. It's about leveraging some advantages for economic gain. Whether this is good/bad/warranted/just/fair is a different question.
>Whether this is good/bad/warranted/just/fair is a different question.
Then "exploitation" is the wrong word to use because it means to treat someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work. If it is not unfair, it is not exploitation.
If the fools spending their mental energy and time cooking up notions like SNLT and trying to assign theoretical values, instead spent that time and mental energy producing something useful, that others were willing to pay them for, they would be significantly better off economically.
>What about things that don't have a SNLT? I make custom coffee accessories out of plaster that gets poured into molds. Where is the SNLT for that in case i have to hire a worker?
>What about something that isnt about making widgets or things that can be quantified? How about a online marketing person that increases brand awareness? How many brand awareness-es does he product a week?
These are fair questions, but any difficulty in answering them would be as damning for capitalist efficiency and managerial competence as for any Labour Theory of Value. SNLT is the reciprocal of labour productivity.
How will you know how much to pay your workers, or in what proportions to employ various type os labour, if you've no idea how much they contribute to your revenue?
Keep in mind that one of the main defences of capitalism is that owners are competent managers of capital. The Economic Calculation Problem is premised on the notion that markets economise over inputs, such as labour.
In some cases you'll have direct record of their contributions for example sales people.
Others are a cost center where wages is generally the lowest that you can pay them and still achieve your desired level of performance or quality.
And you'll know you're paying them too little when they leave for another company that pays them more. This is much simpler than SNLT
>In some cases you'll have direct record of their contributions for example sales people.
Well, there you go then!
I don't deny that the productivity of a given type of labour may *sometimes* be unknown to management, or unknowable to, say, an economist researching productivity. I only say that that undermines two key defences of capitalism. E.g, to the extent that Marginal Revenue Product is unknowable, the neoclassical marginal productivity theory of wage determination is unfalsifiable.
But I don't think it's *always* unknown, or unknowable. (Perhaps I, an anti-capitalist, view capitalism as more rational than you, a pro-capitalist, do?!)
>...wages is generally the lowest that you can pay them and still achieve your desired level of performance or quality...
>...you'll know you're paying them too little when they leave for another company that pays them more.
Obviously you'll pay the minimum required *to obtain a given output*. If you're only employing one type of labour, the average productivity of your workforce is obvious. Only when multiple types of labour are employed could it become difficult to determine their relative contributions to output.
If you know the *cheapest* way to "achieve your desired level of performance", you know the productivity of the various forms of labour. If you don't know this, then you don't know how to maximise profit; you are superfluous even from the point of view of capital.
You'd also need to know labour's contribution to revenue in order to decide whether to invest in labour-saving technology instead of hiring more labour.
I don't think there's a dollar figure to the contribution of an employee to revenue (outside of those examples like sales), that's kind of the point of my post.
When I ran my businesses, I didn't have a record of John makes me this much money, Rita makes me this much, Bob makes me this much. That's not how people run businesses.
You have fixed and variable costs and if your profit exceeds this you make money.
The thing is, you've simply invented the numbers. Suppose the socialist position is that capitalists are able to exploit workers *because* they own means of production while workers do not. Of course, you can confect a scenario in which workers own their own means of production yet are still exploited, but that's a work of fiction, not a counter-example.
In fact, Jane is significantly worse off in the latter scenario (assuming you are her sole customer), since she now has to cover all her costs yet receives the same revenue. Hence she would prefer to remain as your employee if this was the only alternative.
It's a hypothetical.
But this happens all the time in the real world, employees leave and contract for their old companies all the time.
Are you pointing out that I fabricated the numbers because you think it's unrealistic she would bill him the same amount as a freelancer?
Is it more realistic that she say, hey I used to work for you $30/hr, now that I'm my own boss, I'm going to charge you $50/hr for the same work, can you sign here?
So anyways how about you address the question-
1) Was she exploited as an employee?
2) Does she own 100% of the value of her labor as her own boss?
How about someone who works for themselves, but contracts for piece work? For example, say I own a factory, and I give you a contract to do some work and pay you by how much you get done.
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wage-labour-capital.pdf](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wage-labour-capital.pdf)
Pages 5 and 6.
Keep digging. Maybe if you were to actually study into it you would not have to ask. I mean, it is a very elementary question. But I believe you're searching for a "gotchya".
I see.
So let's say she charges the same amount as an employee and as a freelancer $30/hr.
In the former she is exploited, in the latter she isn't.
So where did the surplus value go that was stolen?
So where did the surplus value go? You didn't answer.
I agree exploitation can come in different forms. I didn't say it was the only way.
I'm just saying the idea of surplus value is subjective
Lefties do not believe adult people can consent to whatever arrangements that do not harm third parties. They call it specific exception for example. And business is that exception. Sort this one out first with them before trying to understand their delusional minds
good point!!! America is a free country in which there are a 30 million businesses. Many of them formed because workers wanted to own the means of production themselves. Funny that no one ever noticed but they are not making a fortune merely by owning the means of production and keeping all the profits for themselves. In fact most of them are on the verge of bankruptcy because profits are so tiny. Competition it turns out drives profits down until there is little to no profit left.
(WOW. This website and thread is all screwed up! I posted this to the OP!!)
>Let's say I run a one man business designing websites. I hire a graphic designer Jane to help me with my workload, for $30/hr. According to lefties, I'm stealing Jane's excess value and making a profit from her.
Yes, because she is your "subject", your employee, and as such she lacks an equal say in running the business and sharing in the gains.
>Let's say Jane quits, starts a company and starts doing freelance work.
>I like Jane's work, so I hire her through her company and pay the same rate as before, $30/hr
>Since she owns her own company and works for herself, in theory she gets 100% of the value of her labor.
>Is Jane no longer exploited? Yet she makes the same money as money as before. Where did the excess value go?
First of all she probably wouldn't work for $30/hour because she probably couldn't afford it with all her overhead. But let's say to get started she accepted $30/hour initially. She is no longer exploited. (*I know you're trying very hard to trap socialists into being unable to explain with your contrived fantasy. But let's go on*.) She now has control. She has no need to submit to anyone else, so she can charge what she wants to charge and she must manage the consequences. She has that freedom. (That's the capitalist concept of "freedom".)
>First of all she probably wouldn't work for $30/hour because she probably couldn't afford it with all her overhead. But let's say to get started she accepted $30/hour initially. She is no longer exploited.
So she was "exploited" when she earned **more** money working for wages?
So are you a market socialist? Employees shouldn't be free in terms of dictating what to do inside job obligations. If a job is telling you to clean, you clean, not slack off.
The Marxian concept of surplus value appropriation through wage labor is incoherent.
All exchanges involve surplus value. If I buy a chair from you for $50, I do so because the chair has a value to me GREATER than $50. Therefore, surplus value was created in that exchange. Did I “exploit” you because I gained surplus value by paying you less than the chair was worth?
No, that’s nonsense. Ultimately, surplus value “comes from” the fact that we all have differences in our subjective valuations of things. A worker values her time less than $30/h and is therefore willing to trade it to you. You value at more than $30/h (because it helps you conduct business) and are therefore willing to pay that wage.
Surplus value is created during exchange, not production. Marx was wrong.
>All exchanges involve surplus value. If I buy a chair from you for $50, I do so because the chair has a value to me GREATER than $50. Therefore, surplus value was created in that exchange.
The above is nonsense. That is not what surplus value means. This has been explained again and again. Here is Karl Marx:
>So far as regards use-values, it is clear that both parties may gain some advantage. Both part with goods that, as use-values, are of no service to them, and receive others that they can make use of. And there may also be a further gain. A, who sells wine and buys corn, possibly produces more wine, with given labour-time, than farmer B could, and B on the other hand, more corn than wine-grower A could. A, therefore, may get, for the same exchange-value, more corn, and B more wine, than each would respectively get without any exchange by producing his own corn and wine. With reference, therefore, to use-value, there is good ground for saying that “exchange is a transaction by which both sides gain.” -- Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, [chap. 5](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch05.htm).
Why are use and exchange value fundamentally different things? Wouldn’t a good’s use value simply be expressed in its exchange value? A good that has no use value will certainly have no exchange value, right?
> Wouldn’t a good’s use value simply be expressed in its exchange value? A good that has no use value will certainly have no exchange value, right?
The observation you make implies, at the least, that use value acts as a sort of logical gate. For something to have exchange value, it must have use value. It's not clear that it implies that the exchange value must be an *expression* of use value, which seems to mean something stronger: namely, the two covary in some sense. When something has greater use value, it has greater exchange value, and vice-versa.
Setting aside the somewhat tenuous notion of "greater use value", is there a reason to expect that this is true? I can think of several commodities that are comparably useful, but have wildly different exchange-values in the market.
I don't think that Marxists tend to see exploitation as a fact about exchange, but rather a fact about production mediated by exchange.
I recently had a similar conversation with someone else here. People such as the OP want to obfuscate the material gains that both parties in an exchange receive with profit or surplus value. But when I purchase and consume an apple, the gains that I get are subjective and temporary. My hunger is quenched, for today. But I'll need to buy some food again tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. These "use values" don't accumulate. After 10 years of buying apples, I've no more "surplus" than I had 10 years ago.
If I were a producer, however, my goal would be to reliably produce apples in such a way that the revenue I get from each sale exceeds the cost of producing the apples. Over the same 10 years, this allows me to gradually accumulate wealth in the form of profits. The factors that allow me to do so involve aspects of both exchange and production. On the exchange side, it is indeed true that I need to be able to find people for whom selling my apples would be a mutually beneficial exchange. On the production side, I need to *somehow* make my production process efficient to the point where I'm producing more "value" in apples than the "value" I expend during production. This is where Marxists believe exploitation of labour occurs.
Use value sounds an awful lot like utility in contemporary economics. If this is the case, you are correct that the you cannot accumulate the utility of an apple, and that you need a new one everyday for it to fulfil its purpose. But this is not the case for every good we consume. I do not need to buy the same book everyday for its utility, for example, and books are definitely something that I can accumulate.
There are essentially two markets at the play here, the goods market and the labour market. The two markets and their subsequent supply and demand graphs are fundamentally the same, except for who exactly fills the role of the producers and consumers. The goods market is the one in which the traditional firms supply the goods, and the people act as the consumers of said production. The labour market is flipped, where the the people are now the suppliers, and they supply the labour that the firms consume/buy.
You are saying that in the labour market, the consumers would never offer the suppliers the full value of what they produce, such that the value of what the suppliers receive in a wage is less than the value of their production. But anything that can be said about the labour market, can be said about the goods market. Then, it would have to be the case that in the goods market, the consumers would never offer the suppliers the full value of what they are buying, and exploitation would be occurring in both markets.
This zero-sum thinking is mediated by the fact that a producer surplus and consumer surplus occurs [simultaneously](https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microeconomics/consumer-producer-surplus/consumer-producer-surplus-tut/a/lesson-overview-consumer-and-producer-surplus). Where the consumer surplus is the difference between the willingness to pay for an additional unit and the marginal benefit received from it, while the producer surplus is the difference is between the price a seller receives for each additional unit and their willingness to sell, expressed by the marginal cost. Note that this applies in both the goods and labour market.
The theory you outline happens to be wrong and incoherent. A comment is not enough to even get started on demonstrating that.
I will say this. In cross-paradigm discussion, one should avoid unknowingly imposing concepts for one on terms in another. Marx’s use value is not the marginalist utility. It does not help that Ricardo uses the term ‘utility’ for Marx’s concept. Producer and consumer surplus are not Marx’s surplus value.
Supply and demand are problems. I hold that Ricardo and Smith had different concepts for the same terms. Marx sometimes has what sounds like a function for demand, for example, somewhere in the volume 3 chapters on rent. J. S. Mill was much more explicit in talking about functions.
It is quite impressive how quickly after Ricardo, British economists lost the ability to understand his theory.
value decided between free buyers and sellers is the only relevant value unless you have a Nazi socialist fascist government determining the value of everything.
> With reference, therefore, to use-value, there is good ground for saying that “exchange is a transaction by which both sides gain.” -- Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1,
You must now explain how surplus value qualitatively differs form use value.
What motivation would anyone have to hire anyone if you must pay all the money they make for you?
Pass a law that says that and you simply end employment.
Entrepreneurs take all the risks, invest all the capital, pay all the marketing just to create jobs for employees while they get zero return …
Incentive people— the economy runs on incentive — get it through your brainwashed minds ….
Wage theft and other negative things about work can happen because becoming a freelancer is very difficult. There are a lot of people that have jobs that they don’t like and they would rather make their own company if it weren’t for the fact that making a company is very difficult. One cost with making a company is that you must buy workers compensation insurance. If a boss makes fun of an employee just because the boss knows that the employee feels like they have no choice but to work for them then there is no good argument that that is a good thing. There is no reason for the boss making fun of them, it doesn’t make the company more productive. If the employee can’t just quit when a boss starts making fun of them then bosses will start to make fun of their employees. In that situation it would be incorrect to say that the market is perfectly efficient or that the employee subjectively enjoyed being in that situation.
Its seems like your scenario has nothing to do with the question in your question.
Wage theft is a form of theft of services, whereby the employer "steals" the employee's contracted services by either not paying for services performed or underpayment w-r-t what's in that employee's contract
Great point. You would think once self-employed people got all that surplus value for themselves they would be getting rich and yet the majority of them are on the verge of bankruptcy. How on earth does a lefty explain that and how in earth does he explain that half of the Fortune 500 in the year 2000 is gone today?
The only relevant value is value established by free buyers and free sellers unless you have a Nazi socialist governor deciding the value of everything.
Others have explained to the OP some of his confusions. But, I want to emphasize that, for Marx, [exploitation](https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/18dl4ij/marx_and_engels_exploitation_of_labor_no_injustice/) is not an ethical or moral judgement.
Here is [Engels](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/pre-1885.htm):
>
>According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does *not* belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact. But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness. This is not the place to deal more closely with the significance and history of the theory of surplus value.
Comrades do not always agree.
You wouldn't think that from hearing socialists complain about exploitation. If it weren't a moral judgment, why should we care about it or think that it's bad?
It is an intellectually dishonest attempt by Marx to introduce ambiguity so that he can promote socialism with bad arguments.
Exploitation
Surplus labour consists of unpaid labour
Embodied labour.
etc
As a scholar one ought to choose wording carefully to avoid confusion, instead he introduces as much ambiguity as possible.
I'm not even talking about morality. I'm trying to highlight the contradictions and absurdity of trying to quantify value in terms of anything other than what someone will pay for it.
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Wage theft is not the same thing as the Marxist concept of capitalist exploitation (surplus value extraction). Wage theft is not a socialist concept it's a literal crime under capitalist law insofar as it's a form of literal theft in addition to contract and labor regulation violations. Paying an employee a paycheck below the minimum wage and promising to make up the difference and never following through is a form of wage theft, stealing employees' tips and claiming them as "business revenue" is a form of wage theft, not paying employees overtime is a form of wage theft, etc. Wage theft is a form of economic super exploitation via even greater surplus value extraction than possible under legal conditions but economic exploitation can and does exist even without wage theft. If Jane's work produces more than $30/hr in value and she makes less than whatever that is then she is exploited regardless of whether she's a fulltime employee or a freelance contractor. There's literally no difference in material relations between being a fulltime employee or a freelancer so what is even the point of this hypothetical? Exploitation is about the material difference between the value one creates through their labor and the value they receive back in wages not whether they're "self employed" or not.
>If Jane's work produces more than $30/hr in value and she makes less than whatever that is then she is exploited So how do you calculate the true value of Jane's labor? Please explain. Surely the easiest way to reveal Jane's true value of her labor is to remove herself from the exploiting entity and sell her labor in her own terms? >Exploitation is about the material difference between the value one creates through their labor and the value they receive back in wages not whether they're "self employed" or not. How do you know what the difference is? It seems like nobody can answer this. What if Jane takes on an employee in a co-op arrangement. Does that now make a distinction between business owner and free lancer? And let's say she still does work for me at $30 an hour and is very happy with the income. It's she still being exploited? She literally owns her company, the means of production and it's selling her services and keeping all the proceeds
>So how do you calculate the true value of Jane's labor? Please explain. Value is determined by the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce the commodity in question a.k.a. the average amount of time it takes a worker (or workers) of average skill, working with average quality tools to produce/render the good/service. So using your example let's say it takes Jane, a highly skilled graphic designer, a full workday (8 hours) to design a single website from scratch. Now let's say Jane is a better than average worker and that it takes most graphic designers two workdays (16 hours) to design a single website. At the end of the work week Jane has designed 5 websites worth 80 SNLT each despite only putting in 40 hours of work herself. Let's say she did this in a place where everyone learns graphic design in public school so that it's an entry-level job with no additional training needed and that the minimum wage is $30 an hour (both are unlikely but stay with me) so that 1 SNLT of Graphic Design=$30. Jane has brought in $2,400 in revenue but was only paid $1,200 in wages. Now it wouldn't matter if she was an employee paid $30 an hour or if she was a freelancer charging $30 per website designed, in either scenario she'd be paid only half of the value of what she produced. >Surely the easiest way to reveal Jane's true value of her labor is to remove herself from the exploiting entity and sell her labor in her own terms? No the easiest way to determine how economically exploited anyone is (or, conversely, how much they're exploiting others) is to look at the discrepancy between their productivity and their income. Whether Jane is a full time employee or merely a part time contractor is just semantics, the actual material relationships between her, her work and the fruits of her labor remain unchanged. >How do you know what the difference is? It seems like nobody can answer this No, it seems like you refuse to listen to the people who answer you and then go off on your own tangents. >What if Jane takes an employee in a co-op arrangement.(?) Does that now make a distinction between business owner and freelancer? And let's say she still does work for me at $30 an hour and is very happy with the income. It's (sic) she still being exploited? She literally owns her own company, the means of production and it's (sic) selling her services and keeping all the proceeds You can't "take an employee in a co-op arrangement". Do you mean take a partner or do you mean a sub-contractor? If you meant the latter then it's possible Jane can be exploited by you while also exploiting somebody else herself. It doesn't matter whether she's happy with her $30 an hour, exploitation is an objective measure not a subjective one. Some people are "happy" in abusive relationships, it doesn't make those relationships healthy. It doesn't matter if Jane owns her own means of production, even the petite-bourgeoisie can be economically exploited in certain circumstances such as the ones you've described.
> No, it seems like you refuse to listen to the people who answer you and then go off on your own tangents. I disagree, your explanation of SNLT is the first ive heard it after probing this question forever. It sounds absurd to me, but at least it addresses my question directly. All i've gotten so far is some variation of - there is no dollar value - its all dependent on the relationship only - not exploitation if wages set by collective or gov committee You are the first to give a definition of how to calculate an objective dollar value of true output. > most graphic designers two workdays (16 hours) to design a single website. how is this going to be calculated and defined economy-wide? Or even industry wide? Are they going to time how long it takes design a website? What if one guy has a troublesome client that keeps changing his mind and it takes 8 weeks to design a website, and another guy has a great professional client that can give him a precise and accurate design brief? What about things that don't have a SNLT? I make custom coffee accessories out of plaster that gets poured into molds. Where is the SNLT for that in case i have to hire a worker? What about something that isnt about making widgets or things that can be quantified? How about a online marketing person that increases brand awareness? How many brand awareness-es does he product a week? The idea that there is some standard unit of labor sounds absurdly impractical? But at least you addressed my issue headon. > It doesn't matter if Jane owns her own means of production, see this is also a the opposite of what most lefties say in this sub. > it doesn't make those relationships healthy If both employer and employee are happy in a consensual transaction, who has the right to deem something unhealthy and make moves to stop it?
>I disagree, your explanation of SNLT is the first ive heard it (sic) after probing this question forever. It sounds absurd to me, but at least it addresses my question directly. All i've gotten so far is some variation of \*there is no dollar value \*its all dependent on the relationship only \*not exploitation if wages set by the collective or gov committee You are the first to give a definition of how to calculate an objective dollar value of true output. There doesn't need to be a dollar value for SNLT for exploitation to exist. There could be and in the past there was economic exploitation via surplus value extraction in many economic systems without money or where money was scarce. You could, hypothetically, have capitalist exploitation in a barter system. The relative power imbalance(s) between exploiter(s) and exploited aren't, in and of themselves, the **only** important thing in determining whether exploitation exists but it's not unimportant or inconsequential either. Whenever exploitation is happening someone is coming out ahead unfairly, that is to say someone is profiting off of someone else's work and it's a rare case indeed when they're not keenly aware of that fact. When people are partners like in a workers' co-operative it makes exploitation a lot less likely to happen (but not impossible). Now in regards to the whole "not exploitation if wages set by the collective or gov committee" bit, I'm 110% sure you're knowingly misrepresenting the arguments of the people making them. There are cases, in workers co-ops or democratic governments for example, where everyone will need to vote on what to spend revenue on and the minority, being a minority, will lose, but however the vote turns out the remainder of the revenue will be distributed as normal, that is to say commensurate with each workers' productivity. Say you have a workers' co-op with 9 members and one of them, let's call him Bob, works twice as hard as everyone else who works the same as each other so that Bob produces 20% of the weekly revenue and everyone else produces 10% each for 100% in total. Let's say the co-op makes 10k one week so Bob should be entitled to 2k and everyone else to 1k, however before the revenue is given out in "wages" a vote is held on whether to spend 20% of the total revenue on a new widget (what it is or does doesn't matter) and for whatever reason Bob is opposed to the idea and votes against it. Despite Bob's protests the vote passes anyway 8 yays to 1 nay. Now you probably think Bob's been exploited and robbed of the $2,000 in value he produced right? Wrong, because Bob's still paid proportionately to the share of the revenue he produced. He's still paid 20% only now it's 20% of 8k instead of 10k and even though he may not have wanted it, he's still technically a part owner in the new widget as long as he's a member of the co-op so he didn't even lose wealth so much as a fraction of his wealth's liquidity. And this is all assuming the other 8 members didn't decide to leave Bob's 2k alone and buy the widget from their own 8k share of the original 10k, which is also a possibility the other 8 workers could choose or Bob himself could propose. I'll get to your other questions in the second half of your comment later.
>What about things that don't have a SNLT? I make custom coffee accessories out of plaster that gets poured into molds. Where is the SNLT for that in case i have to hire a worker? You don't use the SNLT in a sort of microeconomic business plan. The SNLT of a product can be determined when there's a market for a product and you have extensive data. >What about something that isnt about making widgets or things that can be quantified? How about a online marketing person that increases brand awareness? How many brand awareness-es does he product a week? Brand awareness isn't a thing of value in itself (stay calm). Of course brand awareness might be desirable to you, the seller of a product, as it increases your customer base, but your customers don't purchase your "brand awareness", they buy your product. Imagine a scenario where every producer of chairs is just in a randomly sorted database and ads don't exist, causing every manufacturer to sell the same number of chairs. Now imagine a scenario where there's ads everywhere and the effectiveness of one's ad campaigns plays a major role in cultivating a customer base. There's, in the end, the same number of chairs produced and society is equally rich in chairs in both circumstances. Brand awareness may allow you, the individual, to siphon a larger share of an existing customer base, but nothing *more* has been produced. >If both employer and employee are happy in a consensual transaction, who has the right to deem something unhealthy and make moves to stop it? Anyone whom some sort of legal entity empowers with some right. It doesn't matter. Who has which rights is a codification of preexisting economic realities. >see this is also a the opposite of what most lefties say in this sub. Shouldn't this prompt you to inform yourself on the subject and then argue against your own knowledge on the matter?
> There's, in the end, the same number of chairs produced and society is equally rich in chairs in both circumstances. Brand awareness may allow you, the individual, to siphon a larger share of an existing customer base, but nothing *more* has been produced. But you're missing the point. Society is irrelevant in this scenario. The point is the online marketing person is creating value for the person paying for his services. The customers (or society) aren't involved in this transaction at all Which is worse- the client supposedly exploiting the online marketing guy by paying him an agreed upon wage for the value he creates with both parties happy? Or some bureaucrat that decides brand awareness "isn't a thing" and telling these two consensual adults you cannot do this? Why does a bureaucrat or "some legal entity" with powers (which sounds very sinister by the way) get to inject himself into a win-win trade because "he knows best"? >Shouldn't this prompt you to inform yourself on the subject and then argue against your own knowledge on the matter? I mean thats what Im doing now, I already made at least 3 posts trying to understand the lefty concept of exploitation and I think im getting closer? There must be a few hundred comments by now all with different definitions and concepts.
>The point is the online marketing person is creating value for the person paying for his services. The customers (or society) aren't involved in this transaction at all What I'm saying is that without a market for some product, there is no value. Pepsi will not buy a coca cola ad. The marketing person is creating a market advantage for the business owner, that's what their wage is for. But without a marketplace for Coca Cola ads, we can't deduce the value of one. What isn't bought isn't a product. Edit: what I'm saying is that work that results in no value does not contribute to the rate of exploitation What *is* a market product is the labor power of the marketing person. Labor power means the ability to perform marketing-based work. Many people possess and are willing to rent it out, other people are willing to rent it from them. The value of that labor power is the SNLT that's involved in producing it, just like any other product. So what's the SNLT of someone's ability to make ads comprised of? Tuition costs. Rent. Food. Clothes. All of these are necessary components in order for someone to be able dispense marketing-labor. And assuming that the market is absolutely flooded with marketing people, that's what their wage will be pegged to. Exploitation then happens when you create value in excess of that labor power. This all sounds pretty convoluted but allow me to illuminate this with a very simple example: Say a Bike is worth "5 SNLT" and your food, rent and so on are worth "10 SNLT", if you've created two bikes at work today, all you've done is sustain your own existence. There's no surplus because you've created exactly as much value as you've consumed. If you've created a third bike, thus generating more value than you've consumed, you've created surplus. Now some of your surplus you probably get to keep (I.e, you can cover your rent and then some) and some surplus will go to the capitalist who employs you (I.e. they're making a profit). Say of the 5 surplus you get 2.5 and your employer gets 2.5. Now of course, the "5 SNLT" of the bike will also include the tools and raw materials of the bike that the final assembler did not mine themselves. Instead, other workers have already created "2.5 SNLT" that you're served with to assemble the bike. Conventionally, capitalists will argue, "well yeah, and those initial " 2.5 SNLT" are the value that the capitalist provides, he paid for the tools and raw materials, ergo that part of the surplus is correctly attributed to him. And In a sense, that's correct. The capitalist has already paid for those things so they can hardly be attributed to the bike assembler's effort. And this is where the crux of exploitation lies: the capitalist has the monetary ability to pay for his own survival in addition to his ability to pay for metal and tools. This monetary advantage over the assembler is what is exploited. The bike assembler has only hisblabor power, his work, to sell, whereas the capitalist can offer the tools to make that labor useful. There's no issue with this particular arrangement and keep in mind that historically, "exploitation" simply meant "making use of something". What Marxists will typically argue for is not "ending exploitation" in and of itself, rather the debate that you're observing is one group, for example the capitalists on this board say "this economic arrangement is good and just and it gives the most freedom", where I would just say "That's how things currently work, I don't see any argument for why this particular economic arrangement must be maintained". >Why does a bureaucrat or "some legal entity" with powers (which sounds very sinister by the way) get to inject himself into a win-win trade because "he knows best"? Because that bureaucrat has the power to do so. I don't know if that's good or bad. That's not the point. The point is that rights aren't actually instilled by god, they're some words written on a piece of paper. >I mean thats what Im doing now, I already made at least 3 posts trying to understand the lefty concept of exploitation and I think im getting closer? There must be a few hundred comments by now all with different definitions and concepts. What do you think would happen if you asked "How do quantum mechanics work?" on this subreddit? Would you, in the end, be content to finally know how it all works? What if different people gave conflicting answers? How will you know which one's are correct? You'll have to read some sort of material that has acclaim in the corresponding field.
>And this is where the crux of exploitation lies: the capitalist has the monetary ability to pay for his own survival in addition to his ability to pay for metal and tools. This monetary advantage over the assembler is what is exploited. The bike assembler has only his labor power, his work, to sell, whereas the capitalist can offer the tools to make that labor useful. If the assembler truly feels they are being "exploited" in this scenario and are dissatisfied, they should live below their means, build up their savings and buy their own metal and tools (i.e. become a capitalist).
As I've mentioned, it has less to do with feeling exploited. It's about leveraging some advantages for economic gain. Whether this is good/bad/warranted/just/fair is a different question.
>Whether this is good/bad/warranted/just/fair is a different question. Then "exploitation" is the wrong word to use because it means to treat someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work. If it is not unfair, it is not exploitation.
Careful there, you’re entering the realm of reason and evidence with a communist. Things might get weird 😂
If the fools spending their mental energy and time cooking up notions like SNLT and trying to assign theoretical values, instead spent that time and mental energy producing something useful, that others were willing to pay them for, they would be significantly better off economically.
>What about things that don't have a SNLT? I make custom coffee accessories out of plaster that gets poured into molds. Where is the SNLT for that in case i have to hire a worker? >What about something that isnt about making widgets or things that can be quantified? How about a online marketing person that increases brand awareness? How many brand awareness-es does he product a week? These are fair questions, but any difficulty in answering them would be as damning for capitalist efficiency and managerial competence as for any Labour Theory of Value. SNLT is the reciprocal of labour productivity. How will you know how much to pay your workers, or in what proportions to employ various type os labour, if you've no idea how much they contribute to your revenue? Keep in mind that one of the main defences of capitalism is that owners are competent managers of capital. The Economic Calculation Problem is premised on the notion that markets economise over inputs, such as labour.
In some cases you'll have direct record of their contributions for example sales people. Others are a cost center where wages is generally the lowest that you can pay them and still achieve your desired level of performance or quality. And you'll know you're paying them too little when they leave for another company that pays them more. This is much simpler than SNLT
>In some cases you'll have direct record of their contributions for example sales people. Well, there you go then! I don't deny that the productivity of a given type of labour may *sometimes* be unknown to management, or unknowable to, say, an economist researching productivity. I only say that that undermines two key defences of capitalism. E.g, to the extent that Marginal Revenue Product is unknowable, the neoclassical marginal productivity theory of wage determination is unfalsifiable. But I don't think it's *always* unknown, or unknowable. (Perhaps I, an anti-capitalist, view capitalism as more rational than you, a pro-capitalist, do?!) >...wages is generally the lowest that you can pay them and still achieve your desired level of performance or quality... >...you'll know you're paying them too little when they leave for another company that pays them more. Obviously you'll pay the minimum required *to obtain a given output*. If you're only employing one type of labour, the average productivity of your workforce is obvious. Only when multiple types of labour are employed could it become difficult to determine their relative contributions to output. If you know the *cheapest* way to "achieve your desired level of performance", you know the productivity of the various forms of labour. If you don't know this, then you don't know how to maximise profit; you are superfluous even from the point of view of capital. You'd also need to know labour's contribution to revenue in order to decide whether to invest in labour-saving technology instead of hiring more labour.
I don't think there's a dollar figure to the contribution of an employee to revenue (outside of those examples like sales), that's kind of the point of my post. When I ran my businesses, I didn't have a record of John makes me this much money, Rita makes me this much, Bob makes me this much. That's not how people run businesses. You have fixed and variable costs and if your profit exceeds this you make money.
The thing is, you've simply invented the numbers. Suppose the socialist position is that capitalists are able to exploit workers *because* they own means of production while workers do not. Of course, you can confect a scenario in which workers own their own means of production yet are still exploited, but that's a work of fiction, not a counter-example. In fact, Jane is significantly worse off in the latter scenario (assuming you are her sole customer), since she now has to cover all her costs yet receives the same revenue. Hence she would prefer to remain as your employee if this was the only alternative.
It's a hypothetical. But this happens all the time in the real world, employees leave and contract for their old companies all the time. Are you pointing out that I fabricated the numbers because you think it's unrealistic she would bill him the same amount as a freelancer? Is it more realistic that she say, hey I used to work for you $30/hr, now that I'm my own boss, I'm going to charge you $50/hr for the same work, can you sign here? So anyways how about you address the question- 1) Was she exploited as an employee? 2) Does she own 100% of the value of her labor as her own boss?
Yes and yes.
How about someone who works for themselves, but contracts for piece work? For example, say I own a factory, and I give you a contract to do some work and pay you by how much you get done.
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wage-labour-capital.pdf](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wage-labour-capital.pdf) Pages 5 and 6.
Keep digging. Maybe if you were to actually study into it you would not have to ask. I mean, it is a very elementary question. But I believe you're searching for a "gotchya".
I see. So let's say she charges the same amount as an employee and as a freelancer $30/hr. In the former she is exploited, in the latter she isn't. So where did the surplus value go that was stolen?
No. You don't see. Exploitation is more than surplus value.
So where did the surplus value go? You didn't answer. I agree exploitation can come in different forms. I didn't say it was the only way. I'm just saying the idea of surplus value is subjective
Lefties do not believe adult people can consent to whatever arrangements that do not harm third parties. They call it specific exception for example. And business is that exception. Sort this one out first with them before trying to understand their delusional minds
Righties do not tell the truth because they cannot afford to be honest or they lose **everything.**
Don't worry I already lose half my shit every year
good point!!! America is a free country in which there are a 30 million businesses. Many of them formed because workers wanted to own the means of production themselves. Funny that no one ever noticed but they are not making a fortune merely by owning the means of production and keeping all the profits for themselves. In fact most of them are on the verge of bankruptcy because profits are so tiny. Competition it turns out drives profits down until there is little to no profit left.
(WOW. This website and thread is all screwed up! I posted this to the OP!!) >Let's say I run a one man business designing websites. I hire a graphic designer Jane to help me with my workload, for $30/hr. According to lefties, I'm stealing Jane's excess value and making a profit from her. Yes, because she is your "subject", your employee, and as such she lacks an equal say in running the business and sharing in the gains. >Let's say Jane quits, starts a company and starts doing freelance work. >I like Jane's work, so I hire her through her company and pay the same rate as before, $30/hr >Since she owns her own company and works for herself, in theory she gets 100% of the value of her labor. >Is Jane no longer exploited? Yet she makes the same money as money as before. Where did the excess value go? First of all she probably wouldn't work for $30/hour because she probably couldn't afford it with all her overhead. But let's say to get started she accepted $30/hour initially. She is no longer exploited. (*I know you're trying very hard to trap socialists into being unable to explain with your contrived fantasy. But let's go on*.) She now has control. She has no need to submit to anyone else, so she can charge what she wants to charge and she must manage the consequences. She has that freedom. (That's the capitalist concept of "freedom".)
>First of all she probably wouldn't work for $30/hour because she probably couldn't afford it with all her overhead. But let's say to get started she accepted $30/hour initially. She is no longer exploited. So she was "exploited" when she earned **more** money working for wages?
Yup, you're searching for a "gotchya". SHE DIDN'T WORK FOR LESS . . . . .-OR MORE. SHE'S A FANTASY.
So you're saying my numbers aren't realistic? What would be more realistic?
So are you a market socialist? Employees shouldn't be free in terms of dictating what to do inside job obligations. If a job is telling you to clean, you clean, not slack off.
The Marxian concept of surplus value appropriation through wage labor is incoherent. All exchanges involve surplus value. If I buy a chair from you for $50, I do so because the chair has a value to me GREATER than $50. Therefore, surplus value was created in that exchange. Did I “exploit” you because I gained surplus value by paying you less than the chair was worth? No, that’s nonsense. Ultimately, surplus value “comes from” the fact that we all have differences in our subjective valuations of things. A worker values her time less than $30/h and is therefore willing to trade it to you. You value at more than $30/h (because it helps you conduct business) and are therefore willing to pay that wage. Surplus value is created during exchange, not production. Marx was wrong.
if there was surplus value business owners would be getting rich but instead most of them are on the verge of bankruptcy.
>All exchanges involve surplus value. If I buy a chair from you for $50, I do so because the chair has a value to me GREATER than $50. Therefore, surplus value was created in that exchange. The above is nonsense. That is not what surplus value means. This has been explained again and again. Here is Karl Marx: >So far as regards use-values, it is clear that both parties may gain some advantage. Both part with goods that, as use-values, are of no service to them, and receive others that they can make use of. And there may also be a further gain. A, who sells wine and buys corn, possibly produces more wine, with given labour-time, than farmer B could, and B on the other hand, more corn than wine-grower A could. A, therefore, may get, for the same exchange-value, more corn, and B more wine, than each would respectively get without any exchange by producing his own corn and wine. With reference, therefore, to use-value, there is good ground for saying that “exchange is a transaction by which both sides gain.” -- Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, [chap. 5](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch05.htm).
Why are use and exchange value fundamentally different things? Wouldn’t a good’s use value simply be expressed in its exchange value? A good that has no use value will certainly have no exchange value, right?
> Wouldn’t a good’s use value simply be expressed in its exchange value? A good that has no use value will certainly have no exchange value, right? The observation you make implies, at the least, that use value acts as a sort of logical gate. For something to have exchange value, it must have use value. It's not clear that it implies that the exchange value must be an *expression* of use value, which seems to mean something stronger: namely, the two covary in some sense. When something has greater use value, it has greater exchange value, and vice-versa. Setting aside the somewhat tenuous notion of "greater use value", is there a reason to expect that this is true? I can think of several commodities that are comparably useful, but have wildly different exchange-values in the market.
So there can be a mutual gaining of use values, while still having exchange value exploitation?
I don't think that Marxists tend to see exploitation as a fact about exchange, but rather a fact about production mediated by exchange. I recently had a similar conversation with someone else here. People such as the OP want to obfuscate the material gains that both parties in an exchange receive with profit or surplus value. But when I purchase and consume an apple, the gains that I get are subjective and temporary. My hunger is quenched, for today. But I'll need to buy some food again tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. These "use values" don't accumulate. After 10 years of buying apples, I've no more "surplus" than I had 10 years ago. If I were a producer, however, my goal would be to reliably produce apples in such a way that the revenue I get from each sale exceeds the cost of producing the apples. Over the same 10 years, this allows me to gradually accumulate wealth in the form of profits. The factors that allow me to do so involve aspects of both exchange and production. On the exchange side, it is indeed true that I need to be able to find people for whom selling my apples would be a mutually beneficial exchange. On the production side, I need to *somehow* make my production process efficient to the point where I'm producing more "value" in apples than the "value" I expend during production. This is where Marxists believe exploitation of labour occurs.
Use value sounds an awful lot like utility in contemporary economics. If this is the case, you are correct that the you cannot accumulate the utility of an apple, and that you need a new one everyday for it to fulfil its purpose. But this is not the case for every good we consume. I do not need to buy the same book everyday for its utility, for example, and books are definitely something that I can accumulate. There are essentially two markets at the play here, the goods market and the labour market. The two markets and their subsequent supply and demand graphs are fundamentally the same, except for who exactly fills the role of the producers and consumers. The goods market is the one in which the traditional firms supply the goods, and the people act as the consumers of said production. The labour market is flipped, where the the people are now the suppliers, and they supply the labour that the firms consume/buy. You are saying that in the labour market, the consumers would never offer the suppliers the full value of what they produce, such that the value of what the suppliers receive in a wage is less than the value of their production. But anything that can be said about the labour market, can be said about the goods market. Then, it would have to be the case that in the goods market, the consumers would never offer the suppliers the full value of what they are buying, and exploitation would be occurring in both markets. This zero-sum thinking is mediated by the fact that a producer surplus and consumer surplus occurs [simultaneously](https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/microeconomics/consumer-producer-surplus/consumer-producer-surplus-tut/a/lesson-overview-consumer-and-producer-surplus). Where the consumer surplus is the difference between the willingness to pay for an additional unit and the marginal benefit received from it, while the producer surplus is the difference is between the price a seller receives for each additional unit and their willingness to sell, expressed by the marginal cost. Note that this applies in both the goods and labour market.
The theory you outline happens to be wrong and incoherent. A comment is not enough to even get started on demonstrating that. I will say this. In cross-paradigm discussion, one should avoid unknowingly imposing concepts for one on terms in another. Marx’s use value is not the marginalist utility. It does not help that Ricardo uses the term ‘utility’ for Marx’s concept. Producer and consumer surplus are not Marx’s surplus value. Supply and demand are problems. I hold that Ricardo and Smith had different concepts for the same terms. Marx sometimes has what sounds like a function for demand, for example, somewhere in the volume 3 chapters on rent. J. S. Mill was much more explicit in talking about functions. It is quite impressive how quickly after Ricardo, British economists lost the ability to understand his theory.
Do you recognize that exchange value, when measured in money-prices, is a number along a continuum?
Yes, the exchange value is just the use value of the good, quantified in money prices?
No. Use values are not quantified, for Ricardo, Marx, and many others. How is the use values of a brick and an apple commensurable? They are not.
Isn’t that the whole point of the exchange value? To make them comensurable?
value decided between free buyers and sellers is the only relevant value unless you have a Nazi socialist fascist government determining the value of everything.
> With reference, therefore, to use-value, there is good ground for saying that “exchange is a transaction by which both sides gain.” -- Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, You must now explain how surplus value qualitatively differs form use value.
I am under no such obligation.
What motivation would anyone have to hire anyone if you must pay all the money they make for you? Pass a law that says that and you simply end employment. Entrepreneurs take all the risks, invest all the capital, pay all the marketing just to create jobs for employees while they get zero return … Incentive people— the economy runs on incentive — get it through your brainwashed minds ….
YES!
Wage theft and other negative things about work can happen because becoming a freelancer is very difficult. There are a lot of people that have jobs that they don’t like and they would rather make their own company if it weren’t for the fact that making a company is very difficult. One cost with making a company is that you must buy workers compensation insurance. If a boss makes fun of an employee just because the boss knows that the employee feels like they have no choice but to work for them then there is no good argument that that is a good thing. There is no reason for the boss making fun of them, it doesn’t make the company more productive. If the employee can’t just quit when a boss starts making fun of them then bosses will start to make fun of their employees. In that situation it would be incorrect to say that the market is perfectly efficient or that the employee subjectively enjoyed being in that situation.
Its seems like your scenario has nothing to do with the question in your question. Wage theft is a form of theft of services, whereby the employer "steals" the employee's contracted services by either not paying for services performed or underpayment w-r-t what's in that employee's contract
I used the wrong term. Should be appropriation of surplus value
I used the wrong term. Should be appropriation of surplus value
Great point. You would think once self-employed people got all that surplus value for themselves they would be getting rich and yet the majority of them are on the verge of bankruptcy. How on earth does a lefty explain that and how in earth does he explain that half of the Fortune 500 in the year 2000 is gone today?
The only relevant value is value established by free buyers and free sellers unless you have a Nazi socialist governor deciding the value of everything.
Jane is still being "exploited". In my experience dealing with socialists, they don't allow contracting either.
But that would be nonsense. Any socialist producer would have to contract with suppliers to do any production of anything.
Others have explained to the OP some of his confusions. But, I want to emphasize that, for Marx, [exploitation](https://www.reddit.com/r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/18dl4ij/marx_and_engels_exploitation_of_labor_no_injustice/) is not an ethical or moral judgement. Here is [Engels](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/pre-1885.htm): > >According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does *not* belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree; he says only that surplus value consists of unpaid labour, which is a simple fact. But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness. This is not the place to deal more closely with the significance and history of the theory of surplus value. Comrades do not always agree.
You wouldn't think that from hearing socialists complain about exploitation. If it weren't a moral judgment, why should we care about it or think that it's bad?
It is an intellectually dishonest attempt by Marx to introduce ambiguity so that he can promote socialism with bad arguments. Exploitation Surplus labour consists of unpaid labour Embodied labour. etc As a scholar one ought to choose wording carefully to avoid confusion, instead he introduces as much ambiguity as possible.
I'm not even talking about morality. I'm trying to highlight the contradictions and absurdity of trying to quantify value in terms of anything other than what someone will pay for it.
What would it look like if you weren’t trying? Plenty of empirical studies measure labor values or the rate of exploitation.