The market is not a sentient being that needs to be appeased, rather than as an unconscious, turbulent sea of patterns driven by individuals and policies.
Capitalists have a degree of agency over the exploitation they engage in. It isn’t handed down as an order, it’s an opportunity that is actively taken, like speeding on a road.
The starting point for bourgeois economics is individual intentions, and even they recognize that a worker must sell their labor to an owner of capital and that capital must outcompete others on a market. Marxism, on the other hand, looks for objective necessities and tendencies in this very society. It’s objectively true that it is in a worker’s interest to be payed well and worked little. It’s also the case that the capitalist’s interest is to pay as little as possible for wages and for workers to labor as hard as possible under them. Capital only maintains and expands itself by feeding off living labor. We call this exploitation. If a capitalist pays too much or sells to high, they are at a competitive disadvantage and reap less value.
You express that exploitation is a moral evil, but insodoing, you imply a command to the capitalist to deny their own interest: make less money and be less competitive.
The point of Marxism is not to build a society with “fair” wages, but to abolish the wage labor system that pits people’s immediate material interests in such direct conflict. In capitalism, wealth needs poverty. The latter is not an immoral mistake.
If a capitalist pays too much or sells to high, they are at a competitive disadvantage and reap less value.
Right, but to be at a competitive disadvantage from paying their labor more, they’d have to be paying their labor a LOT more. That’s really the only contention I had.
When we repeat the assertion that “we are paid so little because the market forces the employer to do so”, we are adopting a fatalist acceptance that we will always be stuck at subsistence-level wages, instead of imagining and striving for the proportional share of the fruits of production that our labor generates.
They don’t pay less because they absolutely have to, they pay less because they choose to (and sure, this choice is a structural pattern that needs to be targeted and abolished).
Competition is only one (major) element. Every second someone works longer is an increase in labor time; every cent someone is payed less is an increase in relative surplus value extraction; every bit harder someone works is an increase in relative value of goods.
Exploitation is in capitalist’s direct interests and where I demand an end to the wage labor system, you call people to economistically struggle for a “better deal” which is of course at the expense of the capitalist. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it’s not changing without uprooting the source which is capitalism.
Value that goes into the reproduction and expansion of capital (not merely the fractional luxuries of the capitalists) is categorically surplus value, taken from workers in exchange for a much smaller wage by virtue of the capitalist owning the private property and the worker owning only their own ability to work. What needs to be abolished is private property, not mean property owners.
Nowhere did I suggest that unfair treatment by property owners was a sui generis thing. Nowhere did I suggest that the institution of private property didn’t need to be abolished.
I will, however, claim that there are ethical dimensions to the present world, and that abolition of capitalism and private property is absolutely an ethical stance.
And my original claim was that actors are not in a state of being maximally forced to squeeze themselves. I would argue that as long as the profit rate is substantially above zero, that there is generally room to breathe in the system.
Oh, I’m fully aware it’s a liberal moralist perspective you’re presenting. My post is Marxist and I’ve tried explaining the Marxist understanding but apparently you’d rather counterpose it to an individualist economism than listen.
Surplus value extraction is universal. Arbitrary cruelty is not. Surplus value extraction is fed into by the market but not a result of being maximally forced. It’s ironic mentioning profit rate given the decline of profit rate is one of the tendencies that objectively compel increased exploitation.
I am merely taking issue with “compelled”, and the implication that the compulsion is total: that the poor struggling business owners just can’t catch a break because the system they’re in takes away all their agency and forces them to do everything they do.
There is a large fraction of firms that may have a contingency plan for competitive pressure, and do lip service to the competitive model, but in practice are not even close to facing any real threat from competitors.
Surplus value extraction is fed into by the market but not a result of being maximally forced.
That’s tantamount to the point I was trying to make. It’s pointless to argue further.
It’s not “either or.” The market demands exploitation and capitalists themselves have an interest in exploitation.
The market is not a sentient being that needs to be appeased, rather than as an unconscious, turbulent sea of patterns driven by individuals and policies.
Capitalists have a degree of agency over the exploitation they engage in. It isn’t handed down as an order, it’s an opportunity that is actively taken, like speeding on a road.
The starting point for bourgeois economics is individual intentions, and even they recognize that a worker must sell their labor to an owner of capital and that capital must outcompete others on a market. Marxism, on the other hand, looks for objective necessities and tendencies in this very society. It’s objectively true that it is in a worker’s interest to be payed well and worked little. It’s also the case that the capitalist’s interest is to pay as little as possible for wages and for workers to labor as hard as possible under them. Capital only maintains and expands itself by feeding off living labor. We call this exploitation. If a capitalist pays too much or sells to high, they are at a competitive disadvantage and reap less value.
You express that exploitation is a moral evil, but insodoing, you imply a command to the capitalist to deny their own interest: make less money and be less competitive.
The point of Marxism is not to build a society with “fair” wages, but to abolish the wage labor system that pits people’s immediate material interests in such direct conflict. In capitalism, wealth needs poverty. The latter is not an immoral mistake.
Right, but to be at a competitive disadvantage from paying their labor more, they’d have to be paying their labor a LOT more. That’s really the only contention I had.
When we repeat the assertion that “we are paid so little because the market forces the employer to do so”, we are adopting a fatalist acceptance that we will always be stuck at subsistence-level wages, instead of imagining and striving for the proportional share of the fruits of production that our labor generates.
They don’t pay less because they absolutely have to, they pay less because they choose to (and sure, this choice is a structural pattern that needs to be targeted and abolished).
Competition is only one (major) element. Every second someone works longer is an increase in labor time; every cent someone is payed less is an increase in relative surplus value extraction; every bit harder someone works is an increase in relative value of goods.
Exploitation is in capitalist’s direct interests and where I demand an end to the wage labor system, you call people to economistically struggle for a “better deal” which is of course at the expense of the capitalist. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it’s not changing without uprooting the source which is capitalism.
Value that goes into the reproduction and expansion of capital (not merely the fractional luxuries of the capitalists) is categorically surplus value, taken from workers in exchange for a much smaller wage by virtue of the capitalist owning the private property and the worker owning only their own ability to work. What needs to be abolished is private property, not mean property owners.
Nowhere did I suggest that unfair treatment by property owners was a sui generis thing. Nowhere did I suggest that the institution of private property didn’t need to be abolished.
I will, however, claim that there are ethical dimensions to the present world, and that abolition of capitalism and private property is absolutely an ethical stance.
And my original claim was that actors are not in a state of being maximally forced to squeeze themselves. I would argue that as long as the profit rate is substantially above zero, that there is generally room to breathe in the system.
Oh, I’m fully aware it’s a liberal moralist perspective you’re presenting. My post is Marxist and I’ve tried explaining the Marxist understanding but apparently you’d rather counterpose it to an individualist economism than listen.
Surplus value extraction is universal. Arbitrary cruelty is not. Surplus value extraction is fed into by the market but not a result of being maximally forced. It’s ironic mentioning profit rate given the decline of profit rate is one of the tendencies that objectively compel increased exploitation.
I am merely taking issue with “compelled”, and the implication that the compulsion is total: that the poor struggling business owners just can’t catch a break because the system they’re in takes away all their agency and forces them to do everything they do.
There is a large fraction of firms that may have a contingency plan for competitive pressure, and do lip service to the competitive model, but in practice are not even close to facing any real threat from competitors.
That’s tantamount to the point I was trying to make. It’s pointless to argue further.