[harrumph]

>Value is the compensation others are willing to give you in exchange for your goods/services.

Value includes far more than that. It includes all kinds of tangibles and intangibles, including compensation in exchange for absolutely nothing, such as in the case of nonworking shareholders being paid dividends, such dividends arising from the expropriation by owners of surplus value created by workers.

[tzahola]

Nonworking shareholders are being paid for their investment risk. The company pays them for taking said risk instead of investing their capital somewhere else.

Workers are paid wages for creating said surplus value using the company’s capital. If the shareholders’ capital were indeed not necessary for producing said surplus value, then why wouldn’t the workers create it by themselves, thus avoiding the expropriation?

[harrumph]

>Workers are paid wages for creating said surplus value using the company’s capital.

Workers are paid wages to produce. Wages, stagnant for the last forty-plus years, have proven unlinked to productivity, which has risen very sharply over the same time. Wages are also unlinked from investment risk, which compels no rise in wages when it retires.

> then why wouldn’t the workers create it by themselves, thus avoiding the expropriation?

They do - you have described cooperative ownership of an enterprise. To tie back to value: given the fundamental conflict of interest under capitalism in the apportioning of value between creators and expropriators, I think we should expect cooperative ownership to grow in popularity.

It's important to allow that value reasonably includes the satisfaction of workers, customers, neighbors, and the taxpayers who subsidize the enterprise. It's understandable that these things would escape the category of "value" under a system that enshrines the satisfaction of shareholders as the prime motive of the enterprise.