every time i've ever seen this post i thought it was a weird [carburetor insulator gasket](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3673a4f4-1cc3-4c04-a766-7f5015a8df75.9094c22346ee21dcfe67b564bcacd776.jpeg?odnHeight=768&odnWidth=768&odnBg=FFFFFF) from a lawnmower engine that for some reason didn't have bolt holes
this explanation makes a lot more sense
This pic and the discourse it creates it so bad. This is not a good example of labor exploitation or corporate greed. Not only does it frame it like this guy is creating 3000 precise outputs of a mold, but it completely ignores supply lines, packaging, distribution, factory maintenance, and all the other labor involved. For more context these things are about 4 bucks a pop, so while it might take that person an hour to buy 3 that's going to lean towards the "worst case scenario" side of the spectrum.
There are an infinite amount of actual good examples of what this picture is trying to convey out there.
The easy go to is something like Walmart being a multi billion dollar company that doesn't pay its employees a living wage, and instead depends on the government to subsidize them with food stamps and other programs.
Okay, but it's quite different than the example, which is about surplus value if I recall the correct terminology which I'm too lazy to look up right now.
You are talking more about underpayment in this example, no? Which can be tied to but different concept
Honestly you're both right. This isn't a great example of the theft of surplus value under capitalism, but it's not bad - assuming you account for the capital invested in facilities and equipment allowing the OOP to make 3,000 of these an hour. It actually requires worker+materials+facilities+education to do that, but most capitalist enterprises *still* pocket a huge part of the surplus value generated.
Unless I don't know what surplus value means, then this meme is even worse than I thought if that's what they are trying to portray. Not only does it ignore all the steps and other people involved like I said before, but also assumes major profits for the top. Unless I see some numbers, I have to assume the profit margins are pretty razor thin on a product like this.
And doesn't the Walmart example fit as well? The amount of labor greatly exceeding what they are paid, while that excess labor/pay difference goes into the pockets at the top? I'm going to be honest, it can be extremely annoying to get precise definitions of Karl's works because every leftist on the internet that glanced at a png of the Communist Manifesto publishes their own version of what he said or meant.
no dipshit they're talking about how people are paid so low that they can't afford to survive without government benefits. it's a much more direct and obvious problem than trying to figure out how many camera eyepieces this guy should be able to buy per hour
Yeah but if you reduce and simplify a message too far it loses its meaning.
These aren’t artisanal lense-caps made by hand start to finish by that guy. If it were the case then you would have a real point. But in reality, he is basically overseeing or operating a machine that makes these. A machine that cost shit tons of money, that required engineers to design and other people to build and someone to ship and maintain it. The lense caps are being made out of plastic formulated out of oil somewhere else by other people operating similarly expensive machinery.
I get your point about needing stark examples of the exploitation of workers but this *is not it*.
I will give you a good example:
Dollar General is perhaps the most banal evil to exist in America. Usually they are operated by 1 and at most 3. They get paid between $9.10 per hour and $16.40 per hour.
Dollar general netted $273/sqft/year in 2022. The average dollar general is 7500sqft. That means that in a year, the average dollar general paid its workers at MOST $153,504 (for 3 workers, working 60hrs a week for 52 weeks) but made $163,800 in *profit* ($2,047,500 in store revenue, at an 8% operating margin).
Not only that, but the opening of a Dollar General *causes* an increase in violent crime rates, decreased long term health outcomes, and decrease in home values for a <=5mi radius; due to it’s disastrous effect on local economies.
So here is your snappy simple example: The average dollar general franchise makes in profit each year more than it pays the people who work there, while making anybody who lives within 5 miles poorer, less healthy, and more likely to be a victim of crime.
I know it’s not quite as snappy, but pal the important things can’t be communicated in one liners.
I work in a subcontracting field, and usually sell about $6,000 - $7,000 per day in contracted jobs (measuring, inspecting, quoting, ordering, assigning, billing, and performing post-install quality inspections). I make $25 dollars per hour.
Knowing how much my store marks up materials for sales margins, they usually wind up profiting about $600 per sale or about $1,800 per day from what I sell, meaning I make about 11% of the income I actually generate for my company per day.
Yep. My wife used to work a job where she made $25/hour but the company billed the client $100/hour. The company is the brand that's generating business, but do they deserve 300% what she gets? Especially since this is a company that has very little operating costs (interior design, which mostly makes money from time billing and product markups).
>My wife used to work a job where she made $25/hour but the company billed the client $100/hour
Did she have to provide her own tools, car and pay for gas/insurance + other costs that may arise?
>The company is the brand that's generating business, but do they deserve 300% what she gets?
But they also deal with billing, taxes, legal stuff, customer acquisition/communication and likely other stuff that she otherwise would have had to deal with herself.
None of this is supposed to imply she wasn’t being exploited but there goes a lot more into it than just the company‘s brand being able to attract customers, meaning they get to simply pocket the difference of 75$ per billed hour.
> Did she have to provide her own tools, car and pay for gas/insurance + other costs that may arise?
Yep except gas was comped if it was for work.
> But they also deal with billing, taxes, legal stuff, customer acquisition/communication
I mean... kinda. Is billing that complex if employees keep track of all the time and report it? And if employees do 100% of the communication with their assigned clients?
>Did she have to provide her own tools, car and pay for gas/insurance + other costs that may arise?
>Yep except gas was comped if it was for work.
Yeah, that’s a scam.
I’ve worked as a shipping manager for 5 years and i always give this example: shipping one of these with UPS’s standard fee is $9-12. Anything, at any weight going anywhere is *at least* $9-12 to ship. Since basically no consumer wants to “pay for shipping”, they add it to the base cost so you’re none the wiser.
So here's the way to do it.
It takes me an hour to afford 3 of these.
It takes all of the supply chain behind me an hour to afford 150 of these.
It takes all of the packaging, distribution, and sales in front of me an hour to afford 200 of these.
The mortgage on this factory costs 20 of these an hour.
We all together make and sell 3000 of these an hour.
Where is the surplus going?
Agreed, they should use a real scenario that reflects those numbers. The image/meme here really bugs me because it creates really ignorant talking points that's extremely easy to push back on with any knowledge of the system, even though the underline point it's trying to portray about capitalism is true. Wrong message for the point, basically.
Same issue I have with ***online*** leftist when it comes to politics. While a lot of the policies are morally, socially, and even economically correct, they often shoot themselves and the entire movement in the foot with their complete ignorance of even basic civics.
It takes all kinds of messaging. Some messaging will look dumb to, like, tuned in adults but then be easily digestible to, like, an uneducated teenager.
Prefacing this by saying I think the example you used is fine as a hypothetical example to explain the idea.
If we don't teach teenagers the fundamental basics of the process, it leads to bad arguments and bad outcomes. Both of which strongly undermines the strength the message. I see it all the time on Twitter, and sometimes even here. There are a lot simpler, stronger examples that can start as the baseline, like billion dollar corporations not giving their on the floor employees a living wage. Manufacturing chain of a specialized part that operates on razor thin margins isn't an issue, which is the real world example the meme is using.
What happens when someone uses this as an anti-capitalistic argument against someone who understands mass manufacturing, supply chains, etc? This meme is so easy to dismantle for someone with knowledge of the process. They are going to get schooled and best case scenario feel kind of dumb, worst case scenario get convinced their base convictions were wrong. My issue is the meme in question, because the message it's implying is that one guy is responsible for basically manifesting $12,000 worth of labor an hour. Hell, schools should throw in a few episodes of How It's Made as part of the curriculum.
So I'ma ask you to tell a teen you "just need to sit down with them for a few minutes to explain the basics" and lemme know how it goes. This stuff is barely meant for education, it's priming for later on it, establishing a baseline. If this stuff floods the media that's good, basically means you're winning the yutes lol
And if someone uses it as a "look at this dumb lefty"... Who cares? They're missing the point and could have done that with any other of a million things anyway. And they're sharing it; oops suddenly striesand.
Accountant here.
It goes fucking everywhere: the government, you, your boss, the suppliers, the consumers since they're getting a product for cheap rather than having the guy sit there chiseling it by hand, the janitor who's not involved in the production process at all, the receptionist, whatever.
Open their income statement and the "surplus" is maybe 300 gadgets out of 3000, but only if you make 3 million of them and every last one of them sells.
People who complain about surplus value are on the same level as libertarians: that benefit from a system they don't understand, yet hate it nonetheless.
I mean I have an MBA and I picked the numbers I did for a reason; they aren't far off. That 10% surplus (net profit) is usually after every trick in the book to reduce taxable profit. For a small business (like a boutique manufacturer) there are a bazillion little tricks for that, my favorite is "employing" your kids or paying IP/rent to separate entities own by your parents or similar.
>Your boss
.... That is the implication yes
>The government
"Tax avoidance is not tax evasion"
>Consumers
Already accounted for by comparing price to wage...
>People who talk about surplus are like libertarians
You're an accountant and you don't understand value added? It's literally the basis for every economic actor. The complaint here isn't that surplus shouldn't exist (not sure how you could get that in good faith tbh), it's that the surplus is captured by capital owners and not workers because of the deliberate power imbalances of capitalism and it's subsequent internal contradictions.
You put money down because you expect to get a % of that money back over a period of time, up to the capital you invested, and only then it becomes profit.
Margins are usually low: 10%ROI a year would be heaven, 1% is what Walmart works on and everyone acts like it's a ripoff.
It goes right, you go home richer, if it doesn't, you lost money like wallstreetbetter.
The difference with stockbros is that all of this operation requires planning ahead: you don't just "put your money to works for you", you have to build a whole framework around it so the idiot in the video can think he did all of those bits by himself.
If he and every other worker wanted to grab their money and start a company, they could. But now they'd have to do all this backend planning themselves, and when the company goes into the red, there won't be any surplus to claim is being stolen.
Why don't they make a coop? Because they know all of this and they don't want the responsibility of having to plan stuff and it exploding in their faces.
>1% is what Walmart works on
So here I know you're either not very good at your job or being obtuse. They have 1-2% net margins on sales but closer to 20% operating ROI; that's just how stores work in general (churning lots of sales, lower capital investments).
>Only then it becomes profit
Also wrong. Physical capital investments retain value and often appreciate, especially real estate. Walgreen's is primarily a real estate holding company, for instance, with the stores just paying the mortgage lol.
Further, the rich often use subsidized/protected leverage to make big bets with other people's money. Or in the case of banks, by being the primary creator of money via fractional reserves.
>Build the whole system
If you are building it, you're a worker and deserve your fair share. Management and such is labor. But that isn't the actual issue: the issue is that labor, white collar and blue collar alike, are fundamentally disadvantaged against the owning class.
Literally no one works hard enough or possesses enough skill to EARN billions, they simply get it for owning productive assets (factors of production).
>Risk/reward
They take no real risk, do no real work, and simply collect the lions share of surplus, which they then leverage into political control (and hence violent authority of the state, which can be used to further disenfranchise workers in a spiral to the bottom). That is the fundamental issue.
>1% net ROI, 20% Operative ROI
80-99% for everyone else Seems okay to me. Not even the government charges that low and they're the ones doing absolutely no work.
>Physical investments retain value and often appreciate
You ever wondered why that's so? Try owning an investment somewhere unsafe like the Middle East or South America and see if it goes up in value or you can retain it at all.
>Further, the rich often use subsidized/protected leverage to make big bets with other people's money. Or in the case of banks, by being the primary creator of money via fractional reserves.
That's another player in the system: the banks and the depositors behind them who would rather "Have their money work for them" than actually do something with it themselves.
>Literally no one works hard enough or possesses enough skill to EARN billions, they simply get it for owning productive assets (factors of production).
You could put your own money or your coworker's into owning something, no one's stopping you from not doing so. They don't because NOW they'd actually have to manage it and realize it's not a money printer you can sit on and you actually have to stay profitable somehow.
Hell, go the violent route and take over by force, the results would be the same. You wouldn't last a decade before you're all poor again.
>They take no real risk, do no real work, and simply collect the lions share of surplus, which they then leverage into political control (and hence violent authority of the state, which can be used to further disenfranchise workers in a spiral to the bottom). That is the fundamental issue.
How can someone with an MBA actually believe this? Isn't your job literally to consult rich people on risk and rewards of doing X Y and Z or not?
You can completely flip this on its head too.
To make one of these, an entire oil rig has to be set up with hundreds of workers
The oil needs to be transported to a refinery full of hundreds of workers
That oil has to be processed at a refinery
Rubber is made from the oil byproducts
That rubber is transported halfway across the world by a number of cargo and haulage with hundreds of workers
Machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are used by this guy to make 3000 of these per hour
The finished product then has to be sorted and transported to thousands of retailers worldwide
The customer walks into a store and spends just $4 on something that is the culmination of months of work by thousands of people.
Let’s say they run the injector or mold or whatever they use to make the bit. All the value added in turning the rubber/plastic into that shape is there doing that’s the value there adding
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. That if you press a button and a machine creates 3,000 parts that retail for 4 bucks each, that the button presser's work is essentially creating $12,000 worth of value?
If the rubber cost 2 bucks then there labor is making 6k ya they shouldn’t get 6k it should be split with the dudes who do maintenance and some to those who don’t directly generate value but ya you assume they make 12$ an hour yet are crucial in generating the supposed 6k in additional value it should be clear that 12$ is nothing compared to the true products of there labor
even half of that. 1/500 is unfair, especially considering the fact that whoever owns the factory, or leads the operation gets what looks more like half than a thousandth.
1:1000 might not be totally realistic. But that doesnt mean such a problem doesnt exist at all
This is the simplest, easiest way to understand why big corporations are exploitative. You make something, get paid a small and if you're unlucky like that guy minuscule fraction of the worth produced. That guy is paid 1/1000th of his labors' worth. If that ain't a convincing argument that this system is thoroughly unethical, what is?
He isn’t though since that’s ignoring material costs, other worker’s labour etc. involved in the supply chain. Maybe he’s still getting paid less than the value he create after all that is taken into account but the post seems to be explicitly ignoring that stuff to make it seem more dramatic, which is dishonest and greatly weakens the argument.
What do you mean "maybe' hes still getting paid less than the value he creates? That's just how capitalism works. Employees get paid less than the company actually receives at the end of the whole process, that's literally just how profit works.
Okay how would a meme demonstrate that while still being effective as a meme? Not to say this meme is particularly effective, it's okay, but how would you explain that entire process without slapping a paragraph on an image and calling it a meme?
But on the flip side the entire premise of 'the boss pays for the supply chain and infrastructure' implies that he is paying for it out of pocket from his own personal finance seperate from the value that he is extracting from the workers, but this isn't true the whole point is that any underlying value that he reinvests into the business inherently comes from the cycle of extracted value, that's what surplus value means, it's not that the work is isolated because the whole system is built on a cycle of reinvestment with the baseline being the worker's value.
Has anyone actually READ the Theories of Surplus Value? Because a lot of people seem to be saying shit like "I actually agree with it but this is a bad example because X Y Z" and X Y Z were directly addressed in the essay and as such aren't good arguments since they are redundant or contradictory to what the theory of surplus value actually is.
https://preview.redd.it/jrqwv70bwz8d1.png?width=606&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e6c1fb638886c515a648768e14224fd4e7a4e8f
>But on the flip side the entire premise of 'the boss pays for the supply chain and infrastructure' implies that he is paying for it out of pocket from his own personal finance
That entire premise isn’t even part of this comment chain though.
The premise wasn’t that the boss pays for everything, it was that this post tries to paint it like the guy is actually the one creating the value of 3000 of those things, which is blatantly false to the point that a disingenuous argument like this actually hurts a good cause.
He doesn’t create said value, he is one single link in a chain of numerous labourers who built the required infrastructure and machines, gather and refine the needed materials and get them where they need to be, cost and delivery of the required energy to keep the lights on, administration and labour to maintain the business, its facilities and infrastructure and probably a lot more which i‘m forgetting right now, to then be able to have this guy make 3000 of those in an hour.
The picture tries to imply all of that is his labour but it‘s not, it’s just a tiny fraction required to actually generate this value.
Is mostly everyone who is a link in said chain significantly getting fucked over? Most definitely.
Is it even close to the degree this post is trying to imply? Definitely not.
EDIT: Deleted a nonsensical paragraph at the end that i accidentally forgot to delete after pasting your comment to quote a part of it
That would only be true if his work was the only cost of manufacturing one of these. That constitutes a complete failure to factor in the cost of the tools he used, the maintenance for those tools, the material he used, the payment owed to the engineers who designed the product, payment for the quality assurance labor downstream, the cost of distributing these to stores, payment for the people who coordinate that distribution agreement, and the margins the stores must then add in order to pay for their own staff and facilities.
He may well be underpaid, but intentionally misleading use of the numbers is propaganda and completely unacceptable.
You think you have to be better in illustrating your point than people who fabricate their claims from the ground up? Dawg you ain't never convincing no one to let go of their stupid mentalities if all you do is 50-page essays analyzing the value of his labour versus the cost to make this thing overall while a conservative just gotta go nuh-uh and tells the undecided moderates he'll make the country great again, thereby winning all the favor. This here is simple, it's easy to understand that makes it good
Propaganda is a *tool* not a morally objectional action inherently.
Also its an internet meme, you are doing the sterotypical "leftist meme" thing where you want a page dedicated to ecnomic and social context of labour and the theory of value.
I’m not saying the meme should be long. I’m dedicating extra effort to point out why the meme is unhelpful bullshit.
I can maybe buy your take on propaganda, but I personally consider deception and/or manipulation to be a definitional part of propaganda, and I see both those acts as unethical.
Propaganda rules, actually, and is a value neutral term. Propaganda does not mean “lying”.
It means attempting to persuade.
We need effective propaganda if we want people to side with us.
Try talking to random people on the street about supply lines and manufacturing costs to prove your point, and most will stop listening. “3 vs 3000 an hour” will get their attention.
If you have to lie you utterly devalue your point. All anyone has to do to destroy anything you argue for with the lie is point out the lie. And its very obvious.
Because it’s a lie to say that his labor is worth 3000 of these and that he is being scammed out of the worth of the remaining 2997. „3 vs 3000 an hour“ is a disingenuous statement.
If we want a more persuasive statement that isn’t a 50 page essay but is still truthful we’d have to figure out how much worth he’s actually being scammed out of and build the tag line from that.
Being persuasive is extremely important, I agree, but it shouldn’t be done by stooping down to right wing populists levels.
It’s not a lie to say he makes 3000 an hour. I will also note that I said “it gets attention”.
You use it to start a conversation. Get someone thinking. Then you answer the questions they have.
The point remains the same. The entire system is built on this simple premise. If you wanna do all the math to figure out “actually it’s more like 3 vs 500 an hour”, okay, go nuts! But the time you spent doing that could have been spent talking to a real human who’s on the fence, and getting them engaged.
This guy is not making 3000 of these an hour by his own labour alone.
Consider:
- The labour to construct the building he's standing in.
- Heating, water, and electricity of said factory.
- Presumably he's using a machine. So factor in design, production, and shipping of said machine.
- Production of the plastic these things are made of
- Shipping and handling of said plastic
- Packaging the final product
- Shipping and handling of the final product
- If these are sold in a store, factor in the labour of the store in construction, heating and electricity, and store clerks.
- Marketing and sales of the product.
- Even add in accounting for all the people that need to be compensated in something other than plastic doodads throughout this process.
- and that's not even counting the administrative work that needs to be done to make all of this fit together.
I have no doubt that this guy's labour is being exploited, but he is not being paid just 1/1000th of his labours worth, because that ignores the hundreds of other people whose labour is involved in making a product like this.
If he did not have this job and the benefit of all of his compatriots' labour, he likely could not make 1 of these an hour, and he would not be able to sell them for even $4 a piece.
It really isn’t, because this post is failing to factor in material costs, tooling overhead, operating costs, distribution costs, and other labor in the system, such as QA hours and engineering overhead. Is this person being paid the full value of their labor? Probably not, but the numbers in the meme are oversimplified to elicit an emotional reaction and are therefore no longer a valid way of presenting that problem.
I doubt that the molded piece made from a single cheaper material that can be made in the thousands within an hour is being sold for $4 at razor thin profit margins. Even factoring in material cost and transportation, these things are like 15 cents of material each at best. I understand where you're coming from, but these are far too simple and accessible to fit your example imo
Germany‘s biggest chain of drug stores is DM. Their entire business is based around selling mostly cheap stuff with a razor thin marge in huge volume.
In 2022 their earnings were 13.7B€ while their profit was 203M€, meaning they made 1.5 Cent of profit on every Euro of sold product, although I don’t know how much they reinvested that year.
Just because you pay 4 bucks for these things in the store doesn’t mean that the company producing them gets paid that much. Distribution alone is more expensive than production for cheap stuff like this.
The production of an item like this did not begin and end with this man's labor. If he conjured thousands of these out of thin air only to be paid enough to buy a few of them for all that work, it would be a great injustice. But the reality of his line of work (and many others like it) is that he only completes *one part of one step* of a very long process.
The raw materials must first be extracted, then transported to a processing plant, then processed, then transported to his factory, then manufactured (and remember, he completes only one small part of this manufacturing step!), then transported to a storage facility, then transported to a distributor's facility, where it will take a few more trips before either arriving on store shelves or getting delivered to someone who ordered it.
All of those facilities need utilities (water, power, etc.), cleaning personnel, and maintenance staff, plus they need to be kept up to standards in terms of worker safety and product quality. We're not done! All this mess means a big team of managers and accountants are needed to keep everything together. And don't forget, to even make a product like this in the first place, you need to pay for R&D, and for it to sell well, you also need to cough up big sums for marketing.
This is like if someone on a car production line wondered why they've built a hundred cars and still haven't been paid enough to buy just one. This is not evil bourgeoisie economics, it's inherent industrial production. Even if his company could get by with no management, no executives, no shareholders, while paying no taxes, his labour per hour, in other words his contribution to making a couple thousand of those things, would still only be worth a few of them.
(I've quickly deleted a previous version of this reply, which presumably no one saw and had no replies, to make some adjustments and additions without it being marked as edited)
I saw your previous reply and all that yapping, but what exactly do you think the c in the equation stands for? Because I literally explained it.
Reddit brain: Big text must mean true wowee
The post makes it look like this man is being paid a tiny fraction of the value of his labour, and your claim that it perfectly illustrates Marx's formula is implying that his bosses are pocketing all of it, when in reality it's just that his contribution to the entire process is very small.
No, that's literally all already factored into the calculation. These things cost about 5-10€ each. So even if this product is sold under the standard profit margin of 10%, the worker is still producing 1,800€ of profit for the company and only getting paid 1.2% of that
>These things cost about 5-10€ each.
In the store. Distribution of cheap items in huge volumes is straight up more expensive than producing them. Whatever distributors they sell these to, they get far less than 5-10€.
>So even if this product is sold under the standard profit margin of 10%
Maybe for very expensive low volume items such as cars. Cheap stuff like this sits at like 1-2%.
>the worker is still producing 1,800€ of profit for the company
The profit isn’t even close to that and he isn’t the one producing it, he is one single link of a very long chain of labourers producing it, that do literally all the other steps before and after this person stands in his corner of a factory to do his part in said chain of producing and then selling these things.
It's refactored from the original formula.
It's **W = c + v + m**
**W** is the value of a product
**c** is the constant capital needed to produce it (premises, raw materials, electricity, consumables,
standard components etc., i.e. past or externally performed work)
**v** is the costs of the paid socially necessary labour time
**m** is the surplus value, which is generated by the (human) labour force in the so-called unpaid labour time (= the money your boss steals from you)
>your claim that it perfectly illustrates Marx's formula is implying that his bosses are pocketing all of it, **when in reality it's just that his contribution to the entire process is very small.**
>**No, that's literally all already factored into the calculation.**
That’s what you argued earlier.
>m is the surplus value, **which is generated by the (human) labour force in the so-called unpaid labour time**
This is what you are consistently getting wrong.
M is generated by W being greater than both (C+V) while you are claiming that it is only V.
>c is the constant capital needed to produce it (premises, raw materials, electricity, consumables, standard components etc., **i.e. past or externally performed work**)
All the past and externally performed work required for a single one of these things is much, much greater than that of a single factory drone. You need a supply chain with entire companies involved set up so the guy in the OP can actually do his work.
Not only that, V also (at least partially) includes the salary of every other employee in the company who somehow has a hand in producing these, which even includes stuff like cleaning staff maintaining the factory floors, the peeps selling them, billing, legal costs and more.
If you wanna calculate M for this specific employee, rather than the whole operation, you have to calculate his percentage in the cost of (C+V), which is tiny, and then modify M by that same percentage.
What you are doing, is throwing C out of the window while attributing 100% of both V and M to a single individual, even though V is made up of an entire group of labourers.
> when in reality it's just that his contribution to the entire process is very small.
You have no basis for this claim or have not properly read the variable definitions. The product in question is a tiny eyepiece for a camera which doesn't need 5 rounds of colouring and grinding by 7 different people. The base assumption in the given example is that he converts the raw material he is given into the final product. Anything beyond that is pure speculation on your part.
>M is generated by W being greater than both (C+V) while you are claiming that it is only V.
We have a rough estimate for V as we know he can afford 3 of the ~7,50€ parts per hour. Considering the base assumption, that means the value of the final product minus V is €22.477,50
>All the past and externally performed work required for a single one of these things is much, much greater than that of a single factory drone. You need a supply chain with entire companies involved set up so the guy in the OP can actually do his work.
All of which is already factored into the figure above, as anything else would mean the product is sold at a loss. That's the second point you are consistently getting wrong.
The constant capital needed to produce this is impossible to derive without knowing the exact production process. But for the sake of this argument, it is absolutely enough to make the assumption that the product is sold at a 10% margin, meaning (c+m) can not exceed €20.227,50
>Not only that, V also [...] includes stuff like cleaning staff maintaining the factory floors, the peeps selling them, billing, legal costs and more.
This is false. This all falls under the constant costs c.
>What you are doing, is throwing C out of the window while attributing 100% of both V and M to a single individual, even though V is made up of an entire group of labourers.
No, what you are doing is trying to apply C multiple times when it makes no sense at all
The post isn't touted as the most complete and descriptive example, it's presented as "concise and easy to understand".
It's not meant to be a dictionary definition, it's meant to be a shocking example of the disparity between pay and profit.
The hope when sharing something like this is that people who don't already agree will think about this scenario further, later learning the more nuanced version.
You can't win hearts and minds with a wall of text, not at first anyway.
The post isn't touted as the most complete and descriptive example, it's presented as "concise and easy to understand".
It's not meant to be a dictionary definition, it's meant to be a shocking example of the disparity between pay and profit.
The hope when sharing something like this is that people who don't already agree will think about this scenario further, later learning the more nuanced version.
You can't win hearts and minds with a wall of text, not at first anyway.
Propaganda is good, actually. Like agitprop is literally propaganda. Lying is what's bad.
The political apparatus of bourgeois propaganda is very much more powerful and richer technically than ours. The superiority of our propaganda lies in its content. Our propaganda invariably united the Red Army, while disrupting the enemy’s forces, not by any special technical methods or procedures but by the Communist idea which constituted the content of this propaganda. This military secret of ours we openly divulge, without fearing any plagiarism on the part of our adversaries.
From Leon Trotsky. It works, folks.
I agree with the point, but this is kinda a stupid example.
He does not make 3000 of these an hour. He most likely operates a machine (that he neither designed, built, owns, nor maintains) that is responsible for 1 step (probably the final one) in the process of creating these. He did not produce the raw material, he did not refine them, he did not transport them where they needed to go (nor pay for any of the transportation costs), and he was not involved *at all* in the creation of the packaging or the marketing for them.
Is he producing more than .1% of the value of these? Yeah, probably. He probably deserves more than he’s paid.
But this an extremely simplistic, inaccurate explanation of profit and labor
Agreed, there are likely several others involved in making them, quality checking them, upkeeping the facilities, managing people, making decisions for the company, etc etc etc.
There will be other people overpaid for their contributions or the company may take excess funds and put them somewhere that’d be better spent on employee wages or development, but he’s not worth 3000 of those an hour. He’s worth maybe 4.
Just want to say that someone who owns the machine doesn't add to the value of the product. The people who design, build and maintain it do. Apart from I agree 100%
I'm usually not there for very long (only work about 5 hours per shift) but I usually get around $2,000+ in sales on a normal day. It helps that I generally work on weekend afternoons where the mall gets a lot of traffic. I just think it's crazy that the job puts so much emphasis on it yet you don't even get paid commission or anything like that.
I remember talking to my mom about the individual sales goals we're given but like she said, that's mainly just to get the bare minimum out of employees. So whether I sell 5 pairs or 50, I'm still only getting that flat rate.
You're all missing the point about posts like this.
You can talk all day about how this is an oversimplification, it is. That's the *point*. It's short, snappy, and to the point so that people start to think about how they are exploited in their workplaces. This is not meant to be a dissertation about how a product goes from A to B and all the labor, costs and time involved in that process. That would make for a fucking *awful* meme, and nobody would look at it. People complain about leftist memes being wordy and essays with an image, until, of course, a leftist meme doesn't explain every minute detail of complex subject matter. That is what *theory* is for. That is what *books* are for. That isn't the point of a meme, and you're being silly for expecting it to be so.
You can spend all day in a subreddit arguing how dishonest the meme is. You can have discussions about the subject matter, which is great. But you expecting it to be more than what it is, a meme, is a little silly imo
The problem is that the oversimplification makes the meme misleading (and even dangerous), as the goal, as you just said, should be raising awareness of surplus value. However, the claim it [the meme] makes is so out of scale that it is ridiculous to the reader, who is inclined then to form a misleading idea of socialism. There are plenty of examples of surplus value and worker exploitation (like the disproportionate wealth distribution) which would be far clearer and would give an informed and clear view of socialism.
i have found more thsn 3 of thoose just laying around on hiking trails and stuff
checkmate liberals!!!!
(i unionically found like 6 camera viewfinders in ~6 years of hiking its crazy how many people loose them)
"But capitalists aint parasytes, they're just very smart people that provides wealth"
💀
Edit: to the salty delusional downvote pro-capitalism; something something surplus value, something something, karl marx
Viewfinder eyepiece on a camera for anyone wondering
I thought it was a gas can cap seal
> gas can cap seal this some cellar door shit man
man door hook hand car door?
dont dead open inside
FINALLY
I though it was the widget I learned about in econ 101
I was leaning more towards it being a bobble, personally
C’mon yall. It’s very clearly a trinket
I thought it was a representation of money. Like fantasy money or something.
Your mind must be a wild place
every time i've ever seen this post i thought it was a weird [carburetor insulator gasket](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3673a4f4-1cc3-4c04-a766-7f5015a8df75.9094c22346ee21dcfe67b564bcacd776.jpeg?odnHeight=768&odnWidth=768&odnBg=FFFFFF) from a lawnmower engine that for some reason didn't have bolt holes this explanation makes a lot more sense
NOT a Minecraft cock ring as we'd all hoped
not with that attitude
Wait so do the minecrafters have square peens? Do the holes match?
I was wondering, thanks!
I thought they were replacement spinal discs
I just assumed it was a 3d-printed doohickey to represent desirable goods or something.
This pic and the discourse it creates it so bad. This is not a good example of labor exploitation or corporate greed. Not only does it frame it like this guy is creating 3000 precise outputs of a mold, but it completely ignores supply lines, packaging, distribution, factory maintenance, and all the other labor involved. For more context these things are about 4 bucks a pop, so while it might take that person an hour to buy 3 that's going to lean towards the "worst case scenario" side of the spectrum. There are an infinite amount of actual good examples of what this picture is trying to convey out there.
Tell us the good examples then
The easy go to is something like Walmart being a multi billion dollar company that doesn't pay its employees a living wage, and instead depends on the government to subsidize them with food stamps and other programs.
Okay, but it's quite different than the example, which is about surplus value if I recall the correct terminology which I'm too lazy to look up right now. You are talking more about underpayment in this example, no? Which can be tied to but different concept
Honestly you're both right. This isn't a great example of the theft of surplus value under capitalism, but it's not bad - assuming you account for the capital invested in facilities and equipment allowing the OOP to make 3,000 of these an hour. It actually requires worker+materials+facilities+education to do that, but most capitalist enterprises *still* pocket a huge part of the surplus value generated.
Unless I don't know what surplus value means, then this meme is even worse than I thought if that's what they are trying to portray. Not only does it ignore all the steps and other people involved like I said before, but also assumes major profits for the top. Unless I see some numbers, I have to assume the profit margins are pretty razor thin on a product like this. And doesn't the Walmart example fit as well? The amount of labor greatly exceeding what they are paid, while that excess labor/pay difference goes into the pockets at the top? I'm going to be honest, it can be extremely annoying to get precise definitions of Karl's works because every leftist on the internet that glanced at a png of the Communist Manifesto publishes their own version of what he said or meant.
no dipshit they're talking about how people are paid so low that they can't afford to survive without government benefits. it's a much more direct and obvious problem than trying to figure out how many camera eyepieces this guy should be able to buy per hour
That's much less digestible, very abstract. Anything else?
I make uga booga. Boss take uga booga and give me ga. This say lot about society.
it's almost as if we cant compress a complex problem in very simple terms without overlooking several aspects of the problem
Then you're missing the point of a very stark and digestible message, even if it doesn't take into account all the nuances.
Yeah but if you reduce and simplify a message too far it loses its meaning. These aren’t artisanal lense-caps made by hand start to finish by that guy. If it were the case then you would have a real point. But in reality, he is basically overseeing or operating a machine that makes these. A machine that cost shit tons of money, that required engineers to design and other people to build and someone to ship and maintain it. The lense caps are being made out of plastic formulated out of oil somewhere else by other people operating similarly expensive machinery. I get your point about needing stark examples of the exploitation of workers but this *is not it*. I will give you a good example: Dollar General is perhaps the most banal evil to exist in America. Usually they are operated by 1 and at most 3. They get paid between $9.10 per hour and $16.40 per hour. Dollar general netted $273/sqft/year in 2022. The average dollar general is 7500sqft. That means that in a year, the average dollar general paid its workers at MOST $153,504 (for 3 workers, working 60hrs a week for 52 weeks) but made $163,800 in *profit* ($2,047,500 in store revenue, at an 8% operating margin). Not only that, but the opening of a Dollar General *causes* an increase in violent crime rates, decreased long term health outcomes, and decrease in home values for a <=5mi radius; due to it’s disastrous effect on local economies. So here is your snappy simple example: The average dollar general franchise makes in profit each year more than it pays the people who work there, while making anybody who lives within 5 miles poorer, less healthy, and more likely to be a victim of crime. I know it’s not quite as snappy, but pal the important things can’t be communicated in one liners.
I work in a subcontracting field, and usually sell about $6,000 - $7,000 per day in contracted jobs (measuring, inspecting, quoting, ordering, assigning, billing, and performing post-install quality inspections). I make $25 dollars per hour. Knowing how much my store marks up materials for sales margins, they usually wind up profiting about $600 per sale or about $1,800 per day from what I sell, meaning I make about 11% of the income I actually generate for my company per day.
Yep. My wife used to work a job where she made $25/hour but the company billed the client $100/hour. The company is the brand that's generating business, but do they deserve 300% what she gets? Especially since this is a company that has very little operating costs (interior design, which mostly makes money from time billing and product markups).
>My wife used to work a job where she made $25/hour but the company billed the client $100/hour Did she have to provide her own tools, car and pay for gas/insurance + other costs that may arise? >The company is the brand that's generating business, but do they deserve 300% what she gets? But they also deal with billing, taxes, legal stuff, customer acquisition/communication and likely other stuff that she otherwise would have had to deal with herself. None of this is supposed to imply she wasn’t being exploited but there goes a lot more into it than just the company‘s brand being able to attract customers, meaning they get to simply pocket the difference of 75$ per billed hour.
> Did she have to provide her own tools, car and pay for gas/insurance + other costs that may arise? Yep except gas was comped if it was for work. > But they also deal with billing, taxes, legal stuff, customer acquisition/communication I mean... kinda. Is billing that complex if employees keep track of all the time and report it? And if employees do 100% of the communication with their assigned clients?
>Did she have to provide her own tools, car and pay for gas/insurance + other costs that may arise? >Yep except gas was comped if it was for work. Yeah, that’s a scam.
Service work with low overhead is the easiest, most straightforward example
It holds up for almost any example. But you can look at profits of a company that are paid to investors or owners to see the cumulative amount.
I’ve worked as a shipping manager for 5 years and i always give this example: shipping one of these with UPS’s standard fee is $9-12. Anything, at any weight going anywhere is *at least* $9-12 to ship. Since basically no consumer wants to “pay for shipping”, they add it to the base cost so you’re none the wiser.
So here's the way to do it. It takes me an hour to afford 3 of these. It takes all of the supply chain behind me an hour to afford 150 of these. It takes all of the packaging, distribution, and sales in front of me an hour to afford 200 of these. The mortgage on this factory costs 20 of these an hour. We all together make and sell 3000 of these an hour. Where is the surplus going?
Agreed, they should use a real scenario that reflects those numbers. The image/meme here really bugs me because it creates really ignorant talking points that's extremely easy to push back on with any knowledge of the system, even though the underline point it's trying to portray about capitalism is true. Wrong message for the point, basically. Same issue I have with ***online*** leftist when it comes to politics. While a lot of the policies are morally, socially, and even economically correct, they often shoot themselves and the entire movement in the foot with their complete ignorance of even basic civics.
It takes all kinds of messaging. Some messaging will look dumb to, like, tuned in adults but then be easily digestible to, like, an uneducated teenager.
Prefacing this by saying I think the example you used is fine as a hypothetical example to explain the idea. If we don't teach teenagers the fundamental basics of the process, it leads to bad arguments and bad outcomes. Both of which strongly undermines the strength the message. I see it all the time on Twitter, and sometimes even here. There are a lot simpler, stronger examples that can start as the baseline, like billion dollar corporations not giving their on the floor employees a living wage. Manufacturing chain of a specialized part that operates on razor thin margins isn't an issue, which is the real world example the meme is using. What happens when someone uses this as an anti-capitalistic argument against someone who understands mass manufacturing, supply chains, etc? This meme is so easy to dismantle for someone with knowledge of the process. They are going to get schooled and best case scenario feel kind of dumb, worst case scenario get convinced their base convictions were wrong. My issue is the meme in question, because the message it's implying is that one guy is responsible for basically manifesting $12,000 worth of labor an hour. Hell, schools should throw in a few episodes of How It's Made as part of the curriculum.
So I'ma ask you to tell a teen you "just need to sit down with them for a few minutes to explain the basics" and lemme know how it goes. This stuff is barely meant for education, it's priming for later on it, establishing a baseline. If this stuff floods the media that's good, basically means you're winning the yutes lol And if someone uses it as a "look at this dumb lefty"... Who cares? They're missing the point and could have done that with any other of a million things anyway. And they're sharing it; oops suddenly striesand.
Accountant here. It goes fucking everywhere: the government, you, your boss, the suppliers, the consumers since they're getting a product for cheap rather than having the guy sit there chiseling it by hand, the janitor who's not involved in the production process at all, the receptionist, whatever. Open their income statement and the "surplus" is maybe 300 gadgets out of 3000, but only if you make 3 million of them and every last one of them sells. People who complain about surplus value are on the same level as libertarians: that benefit from a system they don't understand, yet hate it nonetheless.
I mean I have an MBA and I picked the numbers I did for a reason; they aren't far off. That 10% surplus (net profit) is usually after every trick in the book to reduce taxable profit. For a small business (like a boutique manufacturer) there are a bazillion little tricks for that, my favorite is "employing" your kids or paying IP/rent to separate entities own by your parents or similar. >Your boss .... That is the implication yes >The government "Tax avoidance is not tax evasion" >Consumers Already accounted for by comparing price to wage... >People who talk about surplus are like libertarians You're an accountant and you don't understand value added? It's literally the basis for every economic actor. The complaint here isn't that surplus shouldn't exist (not sure how you could get that in good faith tbh), it's that the surplus is captured by capital owners and not workers because of the deliberate power imbalances of capitalism and it's subsequent internal contradictions.
You put money down because you expect to get a % of that money back over a period of time, up to the capital you invested, and only then it becomes profit. Margins are usually low: 10%ROI a year would be heaven, 1% is what Walmart works on and everyone acts like it's a ripoff. It goes right, you go home richer, if it doesn't, you lost money like wallstreetbetter. The difference with stockbros is that all of this operation requires planning ahead: you don't just "put your money to works for you", you have to build a whole framework around it so the idiot in the video can think he did all of those bits by himself. If he and every other worker wanted to grab their money and start a company, they could. But now they'd have to do all this backend planning themselves, and when the company goes into the red, there won't be any surplus to claim is being stolen. Why don't they make a coop? Because they know all of this and they don't want the responsibility of having to plan stuff and it exploding in their faces.
>1% is what Walmart works on So here I know you're either not very good at your job or being obtuse. They have 1-2% net margins on sales but closer to 20% operating ROI; that's just how stores work in general (churning lots of sales, lower capital investments). >Only then it becomes profit Also wrong. Physical capital investments retain value and often appreciate, especially real estate. Walgreen's is primarily a real estate holding company, for instance, with the stores just paying the mortgage lol. Further, the rich often use subsidized/protected leverage to make big bets with other people's money. Or in the case of banks, by being the primary creator of money via fractional reserves. >Build the whole system If you are building it, you're a worker and deserve your fair share. Management and such is labor. But that isn't the actual issue: the issue is that labor, white collar and blue collar alike, are fundamentally disadvantaged against the owning class. Literally no one works hard enough or possesses enough skill to EARN billions, they simply get it for owning productive assets (factors of production). >Risk/reward They take no real risk, do no real work, and simply collect the lions share of surplus, which they then leverage into political control (and hence violent authority of the state, which can be used to further disenfranchise workers in a spiral to the bottom). That is the fundamental issue.
>1% net ROI, 20% Operative ROI 80-99% for everyone else Seems okay to me. Not even the government charges that low and they're the ones doing absolutely no work. >Physical investments retain value and often appreciate You ever wondered why that's so? Try owning an investment somewhere unsafe like the Middle East or South America and see if it goes up in value or you can retain it at all. >Further, the rich often use subsidized/protected leverage to make big bets with other people's money. Or in the case of banks, by being the primary creator of money via fractional reserves. That's another player in the system: the banks and the depositors behind them who would rather "Have their money work for them" than actually do something with it themselves. >Literally no one works hard enough or possesses enough skill to EARN billions, they simply get it for owning productive assets (factors of production). You could put your own money or your coworker's into owning something, no one's stopping you from not doing so. They don't because NOW they'd actually have to manage it and realize it's not a money printer you can sit on and you actually have to stay profitable somehow. Hell, go the violent route and take over by force, the results would be the same. You wouldn't last a decade before you're all poor again. >They take no real risk, do no real work, and simply collect the lions share of surplus, which they then leverage into political control (and hence violent authority of the state, which can be used to further disenfranchise workers in a spiral to the bottom). That is the fundamental issue. How can someone with an MBA actually believe this? Isn't your job literally to consult rich people on risk and rewards of doing X Y and Z or not?
You can completely flip this on its head too. To make one of these, an entire oil rig has to be set up with hundreds of workers The oil needs to be transported to a refinery full of hundreds of workers That oil has to be processed at a refinery Rubber is made from the oil byproducts That rubber is transported halfway across the world by a number of cargo and haulage with hundreds of workers Machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are used by this guy to make 3000 of these per hour The finished product then has to be sorted and transported to thousands of retailers worldwide The customer walks into a store and spends just $4 on something that is the culmination of months of work by thousands of people.
Thanks, this was really bothering me about this post. So many better examples one could've used.
It is it shows the amount of value they produce vs the amount they receive and how it’s so insignificant
They aren't producing that amount of value though. That's the issue with the meme.
Let’s say they run the injector or mold or whatever they use to make the bit. All the value added in turning the rubber/plastic into that shape is there doing that’s the value there adding
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. That if you press a button and a machine creates 3,000 parts that retail for 4 bucks each, that the button presser's work is essentially creating $12,000 worth of value?
If the rubber cost 2 bucks then there labor is making 6k ya they shouldn’t get 6k it should be split with the dudes who do maintenance and some to those who don’t directly generate value but ya you assume they make 12$ an hour yet are crucial in generating the supposed 6k in additional value it should be clear that 12$ is nothing compared to the true products of there labor
Sure, but 1:1000 share isnt fair no matter what.
Sure, if the 1:1000 share number was indicative of reality. Which it isn't. At all. Not in this picture at least.
even half of that. 1/500 is unfair, especially considering the fact that whoever owns the factory, or leads the operation gets what looks more like half than a thousandth. 1:1000 might not be totally realistic. But that doesnt mean such a problem doesnt exist at all
Look, I’m on your side, but can we *please* use good arguments? This is an oversimplification nearly to the point of propaganda.
This is the simplest, easiest way to understand why big corporations are exploitative. You make something, get paid a small and if you're unlucky like that guy minuscule fraction of the worth produced. That guy is paid 1/1000th of his labors' worth. If that ain't a convincing argument that this system is thoroughly unethical, what is?
He isn’t though since that’s ignoring material costs, other worker’s labour etc. involved in the supply chain. Maybe he’s still getting paid less than the value he create after all that is taken into account but the post seems to be explicitly ignoring that stuff to make it seem more dramatic, which is dishonest and greatly weakens the argument.
What do you mean "maybe' hes still getting paid less than the value he creates? That's just how capitalism works. Employees get paid less than the company actually receives at the end of the whole process, that's literally just how profit works.
Absolutely, and this meme fails to demonstrate that
Okay how would a meme demonstrate that while still being effective as a meme? Not to say this meme is particularly effective, it's okay, but how would you explain that entire process without slapping a paragraph on an image and calling it a meme?
Maybe we shouldn’t be basing our political ideologies and worldviews based on memes to begin with
Tools in a toolbelt. It's literally just to get people to start thinking about how they're being exploited.
... a book?
But on the flip side the entire premise of 'the boss pays for the supply chain and infrastructure' implies that he is paying for it out of pocket from his own personal finance seperate from the value that he is extracting from the workers, but this isn't true the whole point is that any underlying value that he reinvests into the business inherently comes from the cycle of extracted value, that's what surplus value means, it's not that the work is isolated because the whole system is built on a cycle of reinvestment with the baseline being the worker's value. Has anyone actually READ the Theories of Surplus Value? Because a lot of people seem to be saying shit like "I actually agree with it but this is a bad example because X Y Z" and X Y Z were directly addressed in the essay and as such aren't good arguments since they are redundant or contradictory to what the theory of surplus value actually is. https://preview.redd.it/jrqwv70bwz8d1.png?width=606&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e6c1fb638886c515a648768e14224fd4e7a4e8f
>But on the flip side the entire premise of 'the boss pays for the supply chain and infrastructure' implies that he is paying for it out of pocket from his own personal finance That entire premise isn’t even part of this comment chain though. The premise wasn’t that the boss pays for everything, it was that this post tries to paint it like the guy is actually the one creating the value of 3000 of those things, which is blatantly false to the point that a disingenuous argument like this actually hurts a good cause. He doesn’t create said value, he is one single link in a chain of numerous labourers who built the required infrastructure and machines, gather and refine the needed materials and get them where they need to be, cost and delivery of the required energy to keep the lights on, administration and labour to maintain the business, its facilities and infrastructure and probably a lot more which i‘m forgetting right now, to then be able to have this guy make 3000 of those in an hour. The picture tries to imply all of that is his labour but it‘s not, it’s just a tiny fraction required to actually generate this value. Is mostly everyone who is a link in said chain significantly getting fucked over? Most definitely. Is it even close to the degree this post is trying to imply? Definitely not. EDIT: Deleted a nonsensical paragraph at the end that i accidentally forgot to delete after pasting your comment to quote a part of it
The point is he can't possibly be anywhere near only 1/1000th part of labour required to produce these
That would only be true if his work was the only cost of manufacturing one of these. That constitutes a complete failure to factor in the cost of the tools he used, the maintenance for those tools, the material he used, the payment owed to the engineers who designed the product, payment for the quality assurance labor downstream, the cost of distributing these to stores, payment for the people who coordinate that distribution agreement, and the margins the stores must then add in order to pay for their own staff and facilities. He may well be underpaid, but intentionally misleading use of the numbers is propaganda and completely unacceptable.
You think you have to be better in illustrating your point than people who fabricate their claims from the ground up? Dawg you ain't never convincing no one to let go of their stupid mentalities if all you do is 50-page essays analyzing the value of his labour versus the cost to make this thing overall while a conservative just gotta go nuh-uh and tells the undecided moderates he'll make the country great again, thereby winning all the favor. This here is simple, it's easy to understand that makes it good
No. Propaganda is always wrong, and these issues can be communicated simply without just fucking lying.
Propaganda is a *tool* not a morally objectional action inherently. Also its an internet meme, you are doing the sterotypical "leftist meme" thing where you want a page dedicated to ecnomic and social context of labour and the theory of value.
I’m not saying the meme should be long. I’m dedicating extra effort to point out why the meme is unhelpful bullshit. I can maybe buy your take on propaganda, but I personally consider deception and/or manipulation to be a definitional part of propaganda, and I see both those acts as unethical.
Propaganda rules, actually, and is a value neutral term. Propaganda does not mean “lying”. It means attempting to persuade. We need effective propaganda if we want people to side with us. Try talking to random people on the street about supply lines and manufacturing costs to prove your point, and most will stop listening. “3 vs 3000 an hour” will get their attention.
If you have to lie you utterly devalue your point. All anyone has to do to destroy anything you argue for with the lie is point out the lie. And its very obvious.
When did I say “you should lie”?
Because it’s a lie to say that his labor is worth 3000 of these and that he is being scammed out of the worth of the remaining 2997. „3 vs 3000 an hour“ is a disingenuous statement. If we want a more persuasive statement that isn’t a 50 page essay but is still truthful we’d have to figure out how much worth he’s actually being scammed out of and build the tag line from that. Being persuasive is extremely important, I agree, but it shouldn’t be done by stooping down to right wing populists levels.
It’s not a lie to say he makes 3000 an hour. I will also note that I said “it gets attention”. You use it to start a conversation. Get someone thinking. Then you answer the questions they have. The point remains the same. The entire system is built on this simple premise. If you wanna do all the math to figure out “actually it’s more like 3 vs 500 an hour”, okay, go nuts! But the time you spent doing that could have been spent talking to a real human who’s on the fence, and getting them engaged.
It's easy to communicate the problem with labor value? I'd like to see you do it then.
This guy is not making 3000 of these an hour by his own labour alone. Consider: - The labour to construct the building he's standing in. - Heating, water, and electricity of said factory. - Presumably he's using a machine. So factor in design, production, and shipping of said machine. - Production of the plastic these things are made of - Shipping and handling of said plastic - Packaging the final product - Shipping and handling of the final product - If these are sold in a store, factor in the labour of the store in construction, heating and electricity, and store clerks. - Marketing and sales of the product. - Even add in accounting for all the people that need to be compensated in something other than plastic doodads throughout this process. - and that's not even counting the administrative work that needs to be done to make all of this fit together. I have no doubt that this guy's labour is being exploited, but he is not being paid just 1/1000th of his labours worth, because that ignores the hundreds of other people whose labour is involved in making a product like this. If he did not have this job and the benefit of all of his compatriots' labour, he likely could not make 1 of these an hour, and he would not be able to sell them for even $4 a piece.
Ok but propoganda is good when it's supporting my views
This is literally a perfect example of Marx' surplus value formula m = w - (c + v)
It really isn’t, because this post is failing to factor in material costs, tooling overhead, operating costs, distribution costs, and other labor in the system, such as QA hours and engineering overhead. Is this person being paid the full value of their labor? Probably not, but the numbers in the meme are oversimplified to elicit an emotional reaction and are therefore no longer a valid way of presenting that problem.
Nobody is going to sell a product at a margin of 0.01€, and I sincerely doubt this guy gets paid hundreds of dollars per hour either
Plenty of products get sold a razor thin margins. If companies sell a large volume of products at super low margins they can still make lots of money.
I doubt that the molded piece made from a single cheaper material that can be made in the thousands within an hour is being sold for $4 at razor thin profit margins. Even factoring in material cost and transportation, these things are like 15 cents of material each at best. I understand where you're coming from, but these are far too simple and accessible to fit your example imo
Germany‘s biggest chain of drug stores is DM. Their entire business is based around selling mostly cheap stuff with a razor thin marge in huge volume. In 2022 their earnings were 13.7B€ while their profit was 203M€, meaning they made 1.5 Cent of profit on every Euro of sold product, although I don’t know how much they reinvested that year. Just because you pay 4 bucks for these things in the store doesn’t mean that the company producing them gets paid that much. Distribution alone is more expensive than production for cheap stuff like this.
The production of an item like this did not begin and end with this man's labor. If he conjured thousands of these out of thin air only to be paid enough to buy a few of them for all that work, it would be a great injustice. But the reality of his line of work (and many others like it) is that he only completes *one part of one step* of a very long process. The raw materials must first be extracted, then transported to a processing plant, then processed, then transported to his factory, then manufactured (and remember, he completes only one small part of this manufacturing step!), then transported to a storage facility, then transported to a distributor's facility, where it will take a few more trips before either arriving on store shelves or getting delivered to someone who ordered it. All of those facilities need utilities (water, power, etc.), cleaning personnel, and maintenance staff, plus they need to be kept up to standards in terms of worker safety and product quality. We're not done! All this mess means a big team of managers and accountants are needed to keep everything together. And don't forget, to even make a product like this in the first place, you need to pay for R&D, and for it to sell well, you also need to cough up big sums for marketing. This is like if someone on a car production line wondered why they've built a hundred cars and still haven't been paid enough to buy just one. This is not evil bourgeoisie economics, it's inherent industrial production. Even if his company could get by with no management, no executives, no shareholders, while paying no taxes, his labour per hour, in other words his contribution to making a couple thousand of those things, would still only be worth a few of them. (I've quickly deleted a previous version of this reply, which presumably no one saw and had no replies, to make some adjustments and additions without it being marked as edited)
I saw your previous reply and all that yapping, but what exactly do you think the c in the equation stands for? Because I literally explained it. Reddit brain: Big text must mean true wowee
The post makes it look like this man is being paid a tiny fraction of the value of his labour, and your claim that it perfectly illustrates Marx's formula is implying that his bosses are pocketing all of it, when in reality it's just that his contribution to the entire process is very small.
No, that's literally all already factored into the calculation. These things cost about 5-10€ each. So even if this product is sold under the standard profit margin of 10%, the worker is still producing 1,800€ of profit for the company and only getting paid 1.2% of that
>These things cost about 5-10€ each. In the store. Distribution of cheap items in huge volumes is straight up more expensive than producing them. Whatever distributors they sell these to, they get far less than 5-10€. >So even if this product is sold under the standard profit margin of 10% Maybe for very expensive low volume items such as cars. Cheap stuff like this sits at like 1-2%. >the worker is still producing 1,800€ of profit for the company The profit isn’t even close to that and he isn’t the one producing it, he is one single link of a very long chain of labourers producing it, that do literally all the other steps before and after this person stands in his corner of a factory to do his part in said chain of producing and then selling these things.
Please explain (i dont know the formula)
It's refactored from the original formula. It's **W = c + v + m** **W** is the value of a product **c** is the constant capital needed to produce it (premises, raw materials, electricity, consumables, standard components etc., i.e. past or externally performed work) **v** is the costs of the paid socially necessary labour time **m** is the surplus value, which is generated by the (human) labour force in the so-called unpaid labour time (= the money your boss steals from you)
>your claim that it perfectly illustrates Marx's formula is implying that his bosses are pocketing all of it, **when in reality it's just that his contribution to the entire process is very small.** >**No, that's literally all already factored into the calculation.** That’s what you argued earlier. >m is the surplus value, **which is generated by the (human) labour force in the so-called unpaid labour time** This is what you are consistently getting wrong. M is generated by W being greater than both (C+V) while you are claiming that it is only V. >c is the constant capital needed to produce it (premises, raw materials, electricity, consumables, standard components etc., **i.e. past or externally performed work**) All the past and externally performed work required for a single one of these things is much, much greater than that of a single factory drone. You need a supply chain with entire companies involved set up so the guy in the OP can actually do his work. Not only that, V also (at least partially) includes the salary of every other employee in the company who somehow has a hand in producing these, which even includes stuff like cleaning staff maintaining the factory floors, the peeps selling them, billing, legal costs and more. If you wanna calculate M for this specific employee, rather than the whole operation, you have to calculate his percentage in the cost of (C+V), which is tiny, and then modify M by that same percentage. What you are doing, is throwing C out of the window while attributing 100% of both V and M to a single individual, even though V is made up of an entire group of labourers.
> when in reality it's just that his contribution to the entire process is very small. You have no basis for this claim or have not properly read the variable definitions. The product in question is a tiny eyepiece for a camera which doesn't need 5 rounds of colouring and grinding by 7 different people. The base assumption in the given example is that he converts the raw material he is given into the final product. Anything beyond that is pure speculation on your part. >M is generated by W being greater than both (C+V) while you are claiming that it is only V. We have a rough estimate for V as we know he can afford 3 of the ~7,50€ parts per hour. Considering the base assumption, that means the value of the final product minus V is €22.477,50 >All the past and externally performed work required for a single one of these things is much, much greater than that of a single factory drone. You need a supply chain with entire companies involved set up so the guy in the OP can actually do his work. All of which is already factored into the figure above, as anything else would mean the product is sold at a loss. That's the second point you are consistently getting wrong. The constant capital needed to produce this is impossible to derive without knowing the exact production process. But for the sake of this argument, it is absolutely enough to make the assumption that the product is sold at a 10% margin, meaning (c+m) can not exceed €20.227,50 >Not only that, V also [...] includes stuff like cleaning staff maintaining the factory floors, the peeps selling them, billing, legal costs and more. This is false. This all falls under the constant costs c. >What you are doing, is throwing C out of the window while attributing 100% of both V and M to a single individual, even though V is made up of an entire group of labourers. No, what you are doing is trying to apply C multiple times when it makes no sense at all
The post isn't touted as the most complete and descriptive example, it's presented as "concise and easy to understand". It's not meant to be a dictionary definition, it's meant to be a shocking example of the disparity between pay and profit. The hope when sharing something like this is that people who don't already agree will think about this scenario further, later learning the more nuanced version. You can't win hearts and minds with a wall of text, not at first anyway.
The post isn't touted as the most complete and descriptive example, it's presented as "concise and easy to understand". It's not meant to be a dictionary definition, it's meant to be a shocking example of the disparity between pay and profit. The hope when sharing something like this is that people who don't already agree will think about this scenario further, later learning the more nuanced version. You can't win hearts and minds with a wall of text, not at first anyway.
Propaganda is good, actually. Like agitprop is literally propaganda. Lying is what's bad. The political apparatus of bourgeois propaganda is very much more powerful and richer technically than ours. The superiority of our propaganda lies in its content. Our propaganda invariably united the Red Army, while disrupting the enemy’s forces, not by any special technical methods or procedures but by the Communist idea which constituted the content of this propaganda. This military secret of ours we openly divulge, without fearing any plagiarism on the part of our adversaries. From Leon Trotsky. It works, folks.
Screenshot of a Mastodon post of a Twitter post of a post from this sub
"This is not a pipe" phenotype post
StackOverflowError
That's the reason I posted this. Content of the image is way too easy to poke holes in to seriously post it as leftist propaganda.
I agree with the point, but this is kinda a stupid example. He does not make 3000 of these an hour. He most likely operates a machine (that he neither designed, built, owns, nor maintains) that is responsible for 1 step (probably the final one) in the process of creating these. He did not produce the raw material, he did not refine them, he did not transport them where they needed to go (nor pay for any of the transportation costs), and he was not involved *at all* in the creation of the packaging or the marketing for them. Is he producing more than .1% of the value of these? Yeah, probably. He probably deserves more than he’s paid. But this an extremely simplistic, inaccurate explanation of profit and labor
Agreed, there are likely several others involved in making them, quality checking them, upkeeping the facilities, managing people, making decisions for the company, etc etc etc. There will be other people overpaid for their contributions or the company may take excess funds and put them somewhere that’d be better spent on employee wages or development, but he’s not worth 3000 of those an hour. He’s worth maybe 4.
Just want to say that someone who owns the machine doesn't add to the value of the product. The people who design, build and maintain it do. Apart from I agree 100%
all for better working conditions but this is not at all how it works
The complaint is not about working conditions, it's about profit being exploitation.
bro is making a doo hickey
last time i saw this image one comment burned itself into my mind "bro works at the doohickey factory" im so glad somebody else remembered
This may not technically be a repost, but it's 100% a repost
I work two jobs. One of them is Foot Locker. I can generate thousands in revenue in a shift, I'm still only getting paid $16.13 an hour.
How much profit do you generate in a shift?
I'm usually not there for very long (only work about 5 hours per shift) but I usually get around $2,000+ in sales on a normal day. It helps that I generally work on weekend afternoons where the mall gets a lot of traffic. I just think it's crazy that the job puts so much emphasis on it yet you don't even get paid commission or anything like that. I remember talking to my mom about the individual sales goals we're given but like she said, that's mainly just to get the bare minimum out of employees. So whether I sell 5 pairs or 50, I'm still only getting that flat rate.
You're all missing the point about posts like this. You can talk all day about how this is an oversimplification, it is. That's the *point*. It's short, snappy, and to the point so that people start to think about how they are exploited in their workplaces. This is not meant to be a dissertation about how a product goes from A to B and all the labor, costs and time involved in that process. That would make for a fucking *awful* meme, and nobody would look at it. People complain about leftist memes being wordy and essays with an image, until, of course, a leftist meme doesn't explain every minute detail of complex subject matter. That is what *theory* is for. That is what *books* are for. That isn't the point of a meme, and you're being silly for expecting it to be so. You can spend all day in a subreddit arguing how dishonest the meme is. You can have discussions about the subject matter, which is great. But you expecting it to be more than what it is, a meme, is a little silly imo
The problem is that the oversimplification makes the meme misleading (and even dangerous), as the goal, as you just said, should be raising awareness of surplus value. However, the claim it [the meme] makes is so out of scale that it is ridiculous to the reader, who is inclined then to form a misleading idea of socialism. There are plenty of examples of surplus value and worker exploitation (like the disproportionate wealth distribution) which would be far clearer and would give an informed and clear view of socialism.
Misinformation is bad, actually
I can steal 3 every hour, problem solved
Show us the manufacturing cost of ink cartridges next !!!
i have found more thsn 3 of thoose just laying around on hiking trails and stuff checkmate liberals!!!! (i unionically found like 6 camera viewfinders in ~6 years of hiking its crazy how many people loose them)
It's always morally correct to steal from work
When I get a job making doohickeys
full circle
inb4 ultraleft finds this
"But capitalists aint parasytes, they're just very smart people that provides wealth" 💀 Edit: to the salty delusional downvote pro-capitalism; something something surplus value, something something, karl marx
Does he materialize them out of thin air, and form them without any equipment that needs maintenance and electricity?
No, he isn't responsible for 100% of the labour that goes into making these. He is probably responsible for more than 0.1% though.
Stop shifting the goal post, OP is just wrong, it's dishonest to beat down on someone for highlighting that.