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by drekipus 981 days ago

When in the world will this meme end.

If I am paid to dig holes, then a hole is not worth anything to me except for what someone will pay for it.

I'm not going to stay at home and dig all these holes in my back yard and glimmer with glee at all this surplus value that I've kept to myself.

Code is the exact same. Me writing a python module to process a CSV file is not at all valuable to me, but the wage I'm paid for making it, is.

It's not exploitation. It's a very easy trade.

1 comments

It’s not a meme. You do something that is sold for X and you are paid X-Y. y is your surplus value.

True you possibly couldn’t get that y on your own. But someone got it, and it wasn’t you.

> You do something that is sold for X and you are paid X-Y.

If my neighbor wants a new fence (the Y), offers me $50 to dig a hole (the X-Y) to put a fence pole in.

I dig a hole, i get $50. He gets closer to a fence. we have both profited, who is exploited?

Or if you want to go even more basic:

he wants a fence, he pays me $500 to build a fence, i build the fence and get $500. who is exploited?

Note these are real examples from real life that i deal with.

That’s not wage based labour. You are an owner/operator in that scenario, and you fully realised the value.

The value of the fence is X and you got X.

The value of the fence is different for different people.

For me it's $500, for my neighbour it's $5000 - because it stops rabbits from eating his garden and stray dogs or whatever.

If it's $5000 value to my neighbour, should I have charged more even though I would've accepted $500? Who would have been exploiting who then?

This is directly analogous to my employer as well, except replace "neighbour" with boss, and "fence" with code. It's still a voluntary trade.

No it’s not, because you are being paid for an outcome not time.

So yes, if it’s worth more and someone pays more then you get more. That’s not at all the point.

But if you are paid per hour and you produce many more fences than is required to pay your wage, you are being exploited.