[Joker_vD]

> Instead, it brought 16 hour factory shifts.

To paraphrase Marx, "And so, the equivalent amount of labour required to produce the goods needed to sustain a worker for a day is, say, 4 hours. But that doesn't mean the selfsame worker can work for no longer that 4 hours! He can be forced to work six, or eight, or twelve hours a day, and whatever additional goods he produces — that's the surplus product, which in this case goes straight to line up the factory owner's pockets".

[barrkel]

It only goes into the factory owner's pocket to the degree that the factory has no competitors (has pricing power) and the factory owners don't work for the factory (i.e. RSUs and the like).

Marx is great at building a narrative that generates resentment if you buy his frame. But you don't need to buy his frame, and if you don't, you suffer a lot less resentment. It's no way to live.

[9dev]

That applies to an awful lot of cases though? Especially during Marx' time.

[barrkel]

The trouble is thinking in terms of class.

It encourages one to generalize from instances to the group, and from the group to individuals.

Cherry-pick your examples and you smear the group. Invoke the smeared group, and you target the individual.

It's structurally isomorphic to racism and any other -ism.

[grafmax]

The poor capitalists with all the money and power, making the decisions at the highest levels, guiding society's direction... can you imagine they might be responsible for the shittier and shittier turns our world is taking?

Class is the shape of power and exploitation under capitalism. Some own, others work to enrich those that own. That's all class is. Being frank about the real power differences in our society and our world isn't an ism.

[citadel_melon]

There is a spectrum between an employer’s monopoly/oligopoly over labor that Marx’s narrative presupposes and a perfectly competitive labor market your narrative presupposes.

Reality varies between these two extremes in different labor markets. In some labor markets, the employer has so much leverage they’re essentially a local monopolist; in other markets, employees have enough leverage that the respective labor market is close to perfectly efficient.

Thusly, both yours and Marx’s narratives about the labor markets are typically wrong, but serve good extremes on a spectrum. These extremes help you calibrate the respective spectrum and as you turn the dial between the amount of power the employee vs employer has in a respective market, you can induce how well employees get treated.

Moreover, if there exists a mismatch between employee treatment and their respective leverage, there essentially exists an arbitrage opportunity to exploit. For example, in 2022 Musk (especially when he bought Twitter and laid of 80% of the workforce) and other tech oligarchs conjectured that tech workers were being overcompensated and that employers had enough leverage to start treating them worse. Largely this bet paid off whether or not it was justified during the time. On the other hand, RenTech saw that highly skilled people were being under compensated and was able to get top tier talent without having to compete with others firms that much since they were undervaluing this labor.

I think right now tech labor is being undervalued by the market and that there is an arbitrage opportunity to get highly skilled people since the cut-throat competition for these workers is much less than it was in 2021. That is my conjecture. Regardless if my conjecture is true, I hope I sufficiently illustrated why this spectrum mental model is more useful than presupposing a monopoly labor market or a perfectly efficient labor market: both of these are unlikely to be true and are just meant to be oversimplified mental models with strong assumptions that can be loosened later. From these strong assumptions, we can loosen them to build more robust mental models as I describe above.

[Joker_vD]

> a perfectly efficient labor market

But in a perfectly efficient market, the good would be traded at its marginal price. And the marginal price of labour is the sustenance wage, not the marginal product of labor as neoclassical economists seem to believe.

[citadel_melon]

A perfectly efficient market doesn’t necessarily mean that a good is traded at its marginal price. You’re instead describing a perfectly competitive market. An economy is Pareto efficient (aka perfectly efficient) when resources are allocated such that no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Even if I give into your premise — which I don’t — marginal price would differ for different careers, such as doctors who had to take on more education costs and opportunity cost and thus have a higher marginal price above bare sustenance.

[Joker_vD]

> It only goes into the factory owner's pocket to the degree that the factory has no competitors

Nope! Marx explicitly presupposes fully free market, where everything (including labour) is bought and sold at the marginal cost. But the marginal cost of labour is less than what that labour produces — workers produce more than they get to consume, you know, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to feed the children, the elderly, the politicians, the priests, etc.