you probably can’t reclaim the value for yourself in a way that pays your rent or buys groceries without actual criminal theft, but you may be able waste enough time and resources that your labor isn’t profitable. the hard part is not being shitty to your coworkers while you do it, creating a situation where even more of their surplus value is extracted to make up for your sabotage.

I do. I never shit at home. Always on the job, and always at least half an hour every time.

Sometimes I chug a glass of full cream just to be certain my lactose intolerant ass will annihilate that toilet for at least an hour. It also gives me an excuse to leave early when I’m pale as a ghost and looking like I’m six months pregnant from all the gas in my guts.

I’ve reclaimed so much surplus value, im considering buying a fucking kayak or something, even though I don’t need one.

No because you end up spending even more time just getting paid for the time stolen

Your boss makes a dollar, you make a dime, you’ll be spending 10 hours making that dollar and that’s if you manage to not do any more work during that time. But unless you’re free to do your own thing during that time you’re giving up even more time just to recoup the prior stolen time

Company turnover divided by total employees is basically the amount you and others at the company are collectively producing. Working out what it is at the individual level is not very easy or practical.

Figuring out exactly what the “surplus value” can be complicated. The company is using some of your value to expand and generate growth. That makes it not as simple as calculating profit.

A market approach to the problem would be looking at stock value at the beginning of the fiscal year vs the end of the fiscal year. The amount the stock value went up is the growth of that year and could be considered the surplus value of that year. It’s the amount the shareholders made in value at the very least. Dividing that by total employees could be viewed as the collective surplus value. You would need to include dividends in this figure too. Not totally reliable either because the market is not rational.

Yes! That’s what we call “expropriating the means of production”, but it can’t really be done on an individual basis. This requires collective action and political power.

Basically, you organize politically to be able to pass laws and set policy that, for example, would make housing a human right, significantly reduce the rent, and expropriate large quantities of real estate from large real estate firms. Turning the operation of land to either housing cooperatives or individual home ownership for cases where that makes sense. You can do the same for industry and utilities.

We call this, “building a socialist society”

If I did that I would no longer have a job.

One of the reasons I need to commit to a more disciplined reading of theory is to better express this idea I have about surplus value. It makes me think of how people are all “if you took all of Bezos’ wealth you wouldn’t even be able to pay for healthcare for a year!” I’m not concerned about the dollars that he has, I’m concerned about the societal-social contract we all tacitly endorse where he has infinite buying power. That idea has its basis in the Communist Manifesto.

So in that same vein, you could theoretically go AFK on the clock and eventually get back the same buying power you would have if you worked in the presence of justice, sure. Marx has the simple equation regarding the labor-time spend to create a product. The surplus is the value of the labor minus the wages paid for it. So yes, if you could put a price tag on the goods you produce, you could find that number of hours.

But that doesn’t feel like a path towards liberation. Notably, you’re still likely spending that money on rent and health insurance. Your taxes are going to harassing farmers half the world away. Even all of that aside - it’s not really getting at the idea of surplus value, just providing a backdrop to talk about it with. I think it’s harder to put that price tag on the goods and services today than it was in the 1850s. If you’re making algorithms for day trading or making billboard ads then you’re not making society any better - I’d argue you’re making it worse. So it’s like making a valuation in Bezos bucks for causing harm.

Therefore it seems two dimensional and small to use S = LT - W to get a number for what you’re owed. In its best application such a number might clue you into the idea that you’re being conned out of a good world. But that means that it’s a signpost that might allow you to consider the colossal inputs into the system only to get absolute bullshit in return. It’d scratch the same itch as seeing the beautiful metros and cityscapes in China compared to how America looks. It’s the same way that Bezos’ dollars matter a lot less than the possible social good+utility of a giga datacenter that could stream media seamlessly in a single app alongside the resource organization and distribution of the warehouse system. You wouldn’t need to go AFK for X amount of hours to afford spotify, a bunch of show subscriptions, and plastic toys from China if they were just part of the one app with society’s music+movies+games and a well staffed warehouse that can get to items to you when convenient.

We need to have a conversation like “what the fuck are we doing here?” Healthcare doesn’t need to cost that much. Food doesn’t need to be that insecure and wasted. Housing doesn’t need to be a commodity. Education is easier to come by than the price tag would suggest. Don’t even get me started on transport! Nobody needs your AFK soul to sit in an office staring at an excel sheet or frankly digging in a coal mine for everyone to eat, drink, and sleep. You’d be better served in a better society if you didn’t have to think about how many hours you must spend idly and instead got to think about what needs to get done. Given the opportunity and bandwidth, some people would create shit sometimes instead of regurgitating Toy Story plot lines and IPOs for enshittified SaaS products. If the goals weren’t to make the numbers look good for Q3 and instead designing automation, high speed rail, power plants, and green+human friendly architecture then not only would you likely be getting a bigger share of the pie, you’d be getting a much more delicious pie. So much so that even if you got the same percentage of your surplus labor as today you probably wouldn’t care because life would be good and you’d get a say in how the public decides to spend the surplus together.

So what does this imaginary value help you accomplish? Just do your thing and pretend that you have a target value where you feel okay. It’s not rocket science. Unless you are employed by the esa or something

“Surplus value” sounds like “profit” to me. Take your employer’s annual profits, divide by the number of total employees to get profit per employee. Divide that by your hourly wage and you have your answer.

Surplus value = v Annual profits = p Employer’s total employees = e Your hourly wage = w

v = p / e / w

So, if Amazon made $9.1 billion in profit in 2025 and had 1,578,000 employees, and you worked full time all year in the USA at an entry-level position at the average of $33K/year or $15.87/hour, that’s:

v = 9,100,000,000 / 1,578,000 / 15.87 v = 5776.79 / 15.87 v = 363.37 hours per year

Or roughly 1.4 hours (an hour and 24 minutes) per day at 260 days/year or 5 days x 52 weeks per year.

I did the math for myself and the answer was basically not without getting fired before I had made back enough .

Practical answer: You’re on a fast track to management

Actual answer: no, because of compound interest, the only way to reclaim your surplus value is with worker solidarity

A truly gargantuan effort for most work-spaces. I personally feel like I go as far as possible without getting fired, and it isn’t enough.

Revisiting this to say that if you’re trying to claw your way to a better life, time theft (or as I like to call it, time haggling) alone is an inferior strategy. Sure, you can do it here and there, but if it’s the main thing you do, you won’t get anywhere.

There is a large potential to cut down on spending by a combination of thrift, DIY, discipline, and sharing resources. There are very few laws or ordinances that limit how much you can do on the consumption side of the equation.

On the job you can slack/“touch fish”, you can avail yourself of what the workplace furnishes, you can qpoke around for coworkers that you might share commutes or meal prep or housing with, you can try to unionize (or just try to make an independent bargaining unit with your coworkers), you can aim for a position of seniority or lower management and then not make coworkers’ lives shitty. Or you can do my favorite trick, which is to stay at a job just long enough to learn as much as you can about the company and the industry so that you can start your own personal enterprise or workers’ coop.

TBH these aren’t mutually exclusive propositions, do as many as you have the opportunity and energy to do.

theoretically possible, sure. But you’d (likely) need to commit time theft on the majority if your clocked in hours and there’s zero real chance that any remotely competent manager wouldn’t notice you fucking around and not doing your job for 6 hours a day

Don’t know, but I’m doing it anyway.

Calling it the reverse ADHD tax since it takes me half the time to do stuff so I do nothing half the time.