Lets ask what percentage of productivity is fair to exploit.

So long as there is open competition for labor there is limited exploitation. And we have mostly competitive labor markets.

You are arguing to semantics. The value of unskilled labor is just not that high.

The value of unskilled labor is pretty damn high. The issue is the number of people who are able and willing to do it, not the value of the labor.

Exploitation, in the Marxist sense which I think Plaguefear is referencing, is inherent to the capitalism system since if you paid your workers 100% of the value they produce you would by definition have no profit left over after.

There is absolutely no argument that can be made that we couldn't afford even a $20 minimum wage. It is a fact that if we just kept minimum wage tagged to productivity they would be even higher than that. But a company being able to afford it isn't the metric alone for if we should do something.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 7 2021 07:27pm

The value of labor is what the labourer sells it for in a competitive market. If you were the only professional in your field, you might earn a great deal more, but that's not a stand-in for value.

The manager at McDonald's provides a service. The shareholders provide a service. These things don't come for free. The manager adds value, or at least there's an understanding that he/she does, or they wouldn't be employed.

Then you are just using the terms differently than I am and I think Plague is.

The sense I'm using is that the value of the labor is the amount of value, usually measured in terms of money, that you add by doing the labor. This value doesn't change based on the number of people willing to do it. Similarly, the value they add cannot all be reflected on their pay for the work or the business would never have a profit.

Shareholders and owners in this sense don't add anything to the business outside of their own work for the company.


If you look at it this way, you really see how arbitrary the use of money is. A business could, theoretically, run and break even or even make more without owners at all, since the material circumstances wouldn't change. The "owner" could do nothing and fuck off to an island and he would still get money for being "the owner". Jeff Bezos could disappear from this Earth and Amazon would still exist and would run as though nothing had changed.

american corporations are greedy enemies when you want them to be, and capable of overnight rapid change to be European when you want them to be. the same countries that have a meta of fair taxation, fair wages, etc also have abundant social programs, restorative criminal justice programs, and likely far nicer people. you cant pick and choose how we are like them, we're not them, we're their cast offs. the people crazy and desperate enough to leave their countries and immigrate to a harsh land on the promise we just might get out of the mud they gave us to live on back there. america is a fucking wild place, from the corporations to the government to the people themselves. expecting a 15$ min wage will change american corporate profit expectations is silly as shit. ive been saying the fire of automation is coming to burn everything, this is just gas.

This isn't a particularly useful definition. Shareholders and owners clearly add value insofar as they provide capital and bear the vast majority of all financial risk. And at the same time, the "value" added by the employee is not the sum of what was produced, as there is overhead, logistics, HR, and a million other expenses that need to be resourced which the employee plays no part in.

Businesses can't run without owners, someone still needs to allocate capital. If you appropriate the value of the owner and redistribute it to the workers (as new shareholders) you are simply changing ownership. There is nothing which prevents companies from being run as worker collectives today, and I'm sure many family businesses are run in some version of it.

None of what you posted shows a contradiction in my position. The same multi-national companies that operate in America are operating in those other countries with the same profit motive and no government action stopping them from automating.



Lots of companies in America operate as cooperatives, and they are a counter example to the idea that we need a class of owners. Businesses can and do run without owners. I worked for a Papa John's franchise that had like 30 stores where the owner had basically fucked off and didn't interact with the business anymore except to tell his district managers they weren't making enough money. The need to allocate capital is an arbitrary one that is only necessary because of how our current system operates and incentivizes business. It's not the only way to set it up and there's a lot of shortcomings to prioritizing profit and ownership. Sometimes the owner adds value, and in that case the owner can be paid for the value they add, but if a business is making a profit then the value added by somebody is not being paid, by definition. It's not a simple calculation to say "This person added exactly this much after everything is taken into account", but if it were done you would end up with a zero sum.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 8 2021 08:40am

Cooperatives simply operate under a different ownership structure. There must be someone or some group which owns the capital and decides upon allocation. It is unwieldy, generally, when it applies to large enterprises because they require vast sums to start up and run effectively.

The business owner is investing capital, there is a cost for capital commensurate with the risk that is being taken. If you buy a franchise, there is a specific ROI% that you can expect to make. That is the "value" or the price of the owner's work.

A lot of small businesses owners found at, to their peril, how risky business ventures can be. The pandemic wiped out small businesses to the owner's detriment and expense. Laid off employees can find additional employment, the owners are out of luck.

im not gonna argue with you man, im just a guy set to make a shit load of money if the awful mistake that you advocate for gets pushed through. ive been doing it too long to waste time trying to convince people anymore. pass whatever you want, i get paid a lot if you dont and a shit load if you do. just dont cry to me in 20 years when shit goes sideways. you wont be out of work anyways, its the little guys that will be taking UBI in a shitty 1 bedroom apartment just to subsist.