Appropriating the surplus value of labor

Damn has there ever been a time where a working class American was paid a fair wage? Other than the brief period after WWII up until Reagan, that is.

surely not when you factor in in real estate 🙈

That they are often reasonable and quick to adjust to market conditions to maintain the quality of life of employees because they care deeply!?!?! Is it that?!

Narrator: it was not that

The first therapeutic insulin was developed by University of Toronto. However, they did not have the money or means to mass produce it and thus the patent was sold to pharmaceuticals. Cuba and USSR are also pretty impressive with their biotechnology but unable to scale up their ideas.

I always see this narrative of "ceasefire with socialists" but the end of the day, you still need money. Even China abandoned pure socialism/communism and instead went to state capitalism. But at least China tax and rein their billionaires unlike the rest of the spineless world.

I think the problem is that with the rise of the middle class in the mid-20th to 21st century, everyone had become NIMBYs and complacent, after having been spoiled by the post-war economic boom and globalisation. Much of the world have gotten private property and benefitted from deregulation and thus unwilling to give a helping hand. Instead, the ladder is kicked down. The 19th and early 20th century still had a large amount of working class who are brave to mobilise against wealth inequality. However, that demographic shrunk and both the left and centre-left had to cater to the now larger and wealthier, but admittedly, pretty selfish professional, managerial middle class. In other words, uplifting the society has, paradoxically, created an unequal society because many have now gotten a piece of the pie but unwilling to give even a small piece to the remaining few left behind.

Edit: clarity

I think the thing I find deeply unfair about the situation is let’s say this arrangement of work is 100% accurate.

The owner did the analysis, took out the loan, set up the machine that the worker works.

At some point that work ends for the owner, the analysis is complete, the loan is paid back. There capitalists work effectively ends and the workers goes on forever and the split stays the same.

There is no point where the owner goes, “well if I had billed the company for my analysis and the initial loan I’d have been paid back 10 times over, time to give more to the worker.”

They get to set up the machine because of the wealth and privilege that is indicated here and then extract forever.

When they die, they can hand that enterprise to their heir, who did nothing. Not one ounce of analysis, not one drop of risk in taking out a loan, and that heir can extract value forever.

And they will get to take $6 of every $10 forever because they had the good fortune of being able to afford the machine and take advantage of a system set up by people that own machines which unsurprisingly has a simple rule, the people that own machines get the money.

I can't tell if this is pro or anti capitalist tbh

A relatively fair assessment, overall I approve of the framing. But, you're describing the petit bourgeoisie.

"Yeah, he makes what I tell him to make, but I figure out how much to charge, where to sell it, where to buy the raw materials, basically everything about the business other than operating the machine."

If, as a business owner, you're doing all that, then yeah you're doing real labor and deserve recompense. But the broader critique is of the owners who don't do any of those things. In larger businesses, those tasks tend to be handled by other wage workers.

I really enjoyed this. I hope AI didnt write it haha.

It would be better if the person in charge of determining the runnings of the factory and the allocation of all that wealth could be an elected position that could be unelected if the business was not going well.

Similarly, it's a crazy concept to say that all of that purchasing of machines, property, and resources could be a waste because we predicate the whole thing on "risk" like it's a game designed explicitly to put one person into a higher class over the other and not a matter of wasted resources that should be meant to increase the well-being of both individuals equally.

I got a solution: we stop rewarding this by all taking a risk and making our own stuff, instead of bending over backwards to get exploited.

Thank you for the nice, pedagogical explanation!

Some people like doing those other tasks and the owner/boss doesn’t do them but pays others to (while still taking the biggest chunk of the proceeds).

There are other forms of organization than capitalistic corporations with a parasite at the top. Cooperatives, collectives, and other organizations like that even exist today and are successfully functioning. The parasite serves no vital function and can be cut out to the benefit of everybody else.

The specific numbers are hardly the important part of the story.

As 10 dollars would be revenue, not profit

It does not specify what the $10 is a measure of.

Talk about missing the forest for the trees. I notice that Econ101 people never want to include profit, or advertising to the cost of production. Both are inefficiencies due to adding cost without value, but it's invisible to the system. Always left out when it comes to factoring costs. Weird.

The numbers are certainly off. This person would probably only be paid $2 a day, the costs and materials would only likely account for another $2 per day and they sell $10 in revenue and make the owner $6 of profit. But even then thats company profit and the boss takes a salary too. Then there's taxes and other stuff and it gets complicated.

1. This was originally published in 1937, so

2. It applies to more than just manufacturing by using manufacturing as a generic exmaple. If a person works at a restaurant and makes $X worth of meals every day, if a person works at a software company and makes $X worth of software every quarter, etc.