Where does profit come from?
MarineBoat
Regular
To answer this question, we must first establish where value comes from.
An obvious answer to this question would be work. No commodity, commodities being considered to have value in the open market as represented by their price, can exist without the power of work. This is not an even process for everyone; I'm sure you can think of quite a few commodities that took a lot of work to produce and yet are quite affordable to you personally. On the other hand there are things that are used to represent value in the open market. For instance, the value that platinum represents as a precious metal is much higher than its useful value as a raw material. This is because of a difference in useful value and exchange value on the market.
Now that we have established and can distinguish between these two forms of value – useful value, which comes from productive utility, and exchange value, which is established independently in the framework of a market economy, it's quite easy to explain where profit comes from. Wage labor is when a worker sells his ability for productive work on the market in return for a wage. The employer, who owns the implements that the worker works with, profits by the worker producing more useful value as a result of work than the worker receives in the form of exchange (money) value with his paycheck. Granted, it's possible for a worker to slack off and truly receive more than he produces such that profit is not made from the worker, but where profit is made the worker is exploited, giving more than he receives and the employer getting the surplus.
I'll leave it up to you to decide if this is an indictment or endorsement of capitalism, if it's anything at all, and to draw your own political conclusions.
An obvious answer to this question would be work. No commodity, commodities being considered to have value in the open market as represented by their price, can exist without the power of work. This is not an even process for everyone; I'm sure you can think of quite a few commodities that took a lot of work to produce and yet are quite affordable to you personally. On the other hand there are things that are used to represent value in the open market. For instance, the value that platinum represents as a precious metal is much higher than its useful value as a raw material. This is because of a difference in useful value and exchange value on the market.
Now that we have established and can distinguish between these two forms of value – useful value, which comes from productive utility, and exchange value, which is established independently in the framework of a market economy, it's quite easy to explain where profit comes from. Wage labor is when a worker sells his ability for productive work on the market in return for a wage. The employer, who owns the implements that the worker works with, profits by the worker producing more useful value as a result of work than the worker receives in the form of exchange (money) value with his paycheck. Granted, it's possible for a worker to slack off and truly receive more than he produces such that profit is not made from the worker, but where profit is made the worker is exploited, giving more than he receives and the employer getting the surplus.
I'll leave it up to you to decide if this is an indictment or endorsement of capitalism, if it's anything at all, and to draw your own political conclusions.
Comments
You see Earth's gold and platinum arrived in a meteor shower that lasted 200 million years. They are only formed when a star goes supernova. The liserds sat and watched for 200 million years as these metals showered our planet waiting to collect them. Now they know the real value of gold and platinum is not in it's exchange value but in it's use for advanced circuitry. Now after 200 million years of falling from the sky this gold and platinum was not exactly just laying about in the valleys and plains just waiting to be scooped up. No my friends it was buried deep within the Earth from eons of erosion, volcanic events, seismic activity, and other forces of nature.
Now if you have ever been to the desert and sat and watched the little dumb liserds on hot sunny day you know they are lazy fucks. They just sit there all day baking in the hot sun while daydreaming on flat rock. The big liserds are no different in respect to motivation when it comes to physical labor like moving all that dirt and rock of the gold and platinum. So they modified the DNA of primates, made Neanderthal and later Cro-Magnons for use as slave labor in the mines. When the majority of those minerals were stripped from our planet the liserds left with their ill gotten booty and abandoned their little Frankenstein project to the forces of nature and evolution.
After couple of hundred thousand years of serving the liserds our predecessors revered them as gods. They knew not what the gods did with the fruit of their toil only that if it was worth all this effort on the part of the gods it must indeed have exchange value for reasons beyond understanding. Now we fast forward to about 10,000 years ago when agriculture first starts to hit the scene. I have all this land and grew all this food. More than me and my family can eat. So I trade some of my food for some of your animals or whatever the fuck you do with yourself that is of value to me. Barter system right? All is great but then greed kicks in and deals get broken and scammers pull shit. So now some trade standards are created to ensure that you get the same number off beets for a bushel of potatoes in upper fuckton as you do in lower fuckton or west sucket. So they thik about the metals of the gods and assign exchange value to it based on ancient superstitious liserd induced ancestral memories. So until we figure out the real uses for gold and platinum we are nothing more that a bunch of superstitious little knuckle dragging fuck monkeys imitating our interpretation of the actions some long forgotten liserd god kings for whom our distant ancestors once toiled.
*I wouldn't tell you guys any of this shit unless I had not seen it all with my own eyes.
Yeah, the post was meant to be short-ish. I'm not going to cover all my bases in an thorough academic analysis when a dead bearded dude did it already.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch02.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm Well, I guess that's one way to think about it.
If you don't have anything nice to say, please don't say anything at all.
http://vimeo.com/29505740
Let's try to debate theory without devolving into insults. Pick something from the bearded dead guy that you disagree with and let's go from there. To debate was my intent with this thread after all. I'm sure you can agree it's better to not fling shit at all than to waste time cleaning it up.