How can I respond to this?

I.e. same as now, except the company is a cooperative. There are many different conceivable options of course.

Don't be so naive, he used bank's money. Small entrepreneurs have great trouble getting enough capital to expand without loans. Also, if sulpurs value would not be exploited, anyone could just work in a factory for a few years and get enough capital to start his own business coop.

What if, as would be the case for most rightwingers, they don't consider it exploitation? Even if we use the dictionary definition, someone who earns a good wage and has good living standards wouldn't be exploited in the common definition. Obviously, in the marxist definition, it is exploitation, but that probably wouldn't matter to rightwingers.
Also should note the person I was arguing with isn't a wage slave and has a good wage, so arguing with him was probably pointless.

But where would they the money required to buy all materials? From the state? How would this change once communism is achieved?

They may try to find a loan. Maybe the state would have funds. Which is, again, precisely how it is now.

If a person doesn't consider slavery and serfdom exploitation, it isn't worth much, since it's an extremely fringe position.

My argument relies on slavery and serfdom being exploitation, to show that the case is the same with the hired labour. And it doesn't matter if he doesn't think anything wrong is with the latter.

no dude. From democratically controlled company - a coop. Even fukken bolsheviks used this model in agriculture.

So a coop would get money to build the things they need to build from another coop?

How do you respond to this?

The capitalist takes a risk of at worst becoming a prole while his workers take a risk of starving to death if the business fails.

What about economy of scale? Do porkies deserve all the money they get for balancing the dozens of businesses they have?

You have to consider that the actual porkies most of the time don't even manage their own business, they hire people to do that for them. We are talkig huge, fat porky millionaires of course.
Goes to show they don't even give a fuck about their own business, only the profit it makes them.

Money ain't got no owner, only spenders

No you fukken idiot. You can get money from selling stuff to other people.

No. You can probably say that their job is important and so on, so they might deserve some compensation. That however doesn't mean they deserve wealth created by someone else than them.

Pfft, so what do you want then, kid? You want to overthrow the government or something?!

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Oh my god, how dense are you? What I'm asking is where the coop that makes tables get the money they need to make the table, the materials they need (wood, screws,steel, etc.) Is that so fucking difficult to understand?

They get money either from worker's investment or, if this carpentry is crucial for your country, from state.

Jfc guys have any of you read marx?

Resources and equipment, on average, are bought at their full value by capitalists. Labor in capitalism is almost always (barring extraordinary states of affairs like full employment) paid LESS than it's full value. Profit is labor time put into construction minus the workers share. The fundamental injustice of this is that a worker who spends 4 hours constructing a table is effectively paid 3 hours worth of money.

Their is substantially more potential profit to be made if the materials are also gathered and refined by the capitalist's employees: every step of the way, he takes a substantial fraction of their person-hours and eventually reaps profit equivalent to those hours in money.

Under post-monetary socialism, a worker is paid 8 hours for 8 hours work. The surplus necessary to develop society and facilitate vital services is extracted in the form of "tax" (really just an accounting operation which allocates future labor and nullifies the equivalent in labor vouchers destined for consumer spending) organized by a legitimized body or democratic process.

In monetary socialist states (all thus far), the wage is meant to be equivalent to labor time less the budgetary needs of the state/democratic council/whatever which decides how to use this surplus value for the good of the workers.

Thanks for the input, also that last bit made me wonder about something, in former socialist states, was the surplus value of workers extracted? And if so, by whom?

What's an argument against small business ownership? E.g. "Yea well why can't we just organize the economy through small businesses instead of communism?"

What if the table doesn't sell? Should the worker pay to cover expenses such as rent, etc?

Maintain that there would be absolutely nothing in this world if it weren't for labor. The materials are also derived from labor, not from management. The movement of said materials are also derived from labor, not from management. Workers can easily self-manage but management has to exist separate from the workers so that the workers aren't empowered to demand a better deal.

This is something I've always wondered as well, like even if a fuckton of time and effort went into something, if no one wants it then how does that help whoever made it? Now, under capitalism this person would probably go bankrupt and that would be that, but how does this problem go into socialism?

In the case of the Soviet Union, I believe factories operated without regard for "profit" since they were owned by the state. Their only obligation was to fulfill quotas and keep accounts balanced. Theoretically, then, no surplus should have been extracted at that level.

Surplus still needs to be collected to reinvest in the economy and provide services, however. This was done largely through the turnover tax, which was something like a VAT or sales/consumption tax. Some critics accuse this of being a rather non-transparent means of extracting surplus, but keep in mind despite being a one-party state the USSR did have electoral processes which, besides those elections and votes which were vital to legitimize the socialist government (like the plebiscites in formerly German-occupied states post-WW2), have little to no evidence of being "rigged" as western critics often spuriously claim. The soviet people did have a substantial say in the making of their economy (or at least a say in *who* got a say).

Small businesses extract value from their workers the same way capitalist ones do. And, as many people who have worked in small businesses can tell you, they have the potential to be much more exploitative. It's a lot easier to get away with wage theft if you run a pizza parlor with 3 employees, for example. Enforcing regulation and protecting civil and economic rights if all employment was in firms of that size would require a massively inflated administrative bureaucracy.

So in reality, a "small business economy" would almost certainly be a worse state of affairs than the average healthy capitalist economy.

assuming a logical worker who values getting the most money for his time and labor more then anything else, he would obviously choose the boss that gives him the most efficient labor/pay ratio right? can we agree thats true?
if it is true, then that means anytime they work for someone other then themself, it would logically follow that they are making creating value (and not just total value I mean value that they get after the boss gets a cut) MORE efficiently then they could on their own otherwise they wouldnt do it
they are being provided with value, while at the same time providing value

What about the small businesses that don't exploit their workers? Should they have their economic rights to create businesses taken away just because of a few bad apples? And how would small businesses require more administrative bureaucracy? Aren't there the same amount of workers to be checked and all?

….so, a co-op?

Surplus value is only relevant in describing the laws of motion of the market system, and of capitalism. It isn't some rubric to decide how much the worker is supposed to get, nor can you argue a "should" based on feels. The point is to say "fuck the market" and ask ourselves why the hell we're making tables in the first place, not to ensure that some guy somewhere gets so much value out of his tables regardless. Supply and demand alone would fuck with any scheme to institute a kind of "labor-money", in addition to the difficulty of ascertaining the rate of exchange between different types of labor. Labor vouchers (at least in Marxism) were not the end goal, they were seen as a necessary expedient until a better system of incentives to work and better system of accounting for resources could be implemented.

In a big multi-national these days, in-house lawyers and HR can do grunt administrative work sufficiently efficiently for them to be worth having on the payroll - they will create and administer employment contracts, disputes within the staff population, so on so on. At a certain point the cost/profit of getting these things done by external parties is too large, so they take them in house. No small business is going to be able to afford have these people on the payroll. When these people are on the payroll, an employee who is being harassed at work can go to them and lodge a grievance and have it dealt with in-house, and it won't cost the company or the worker extra. If a worker in a small business does not have a HR grievance protocol, they would have to seek external remediation. This imposes costs on the worker, and as it costs the boss, who is also their employer, they could lose their job. The worker in a big MN corp is employed by the company, and will probably not be fired for being harassed by the person above them. In this instance, it is better for the company and the worker to have in-house HR and lawyers. In a small business economy, this would all have to be done out-of-house, and would be a significant inefficiency

As you said, under capitalism bankruptcy is the destiny of any capitalist who fails to sell his product. This effectively dummies out those capitalists who are too incompetent to respond to demand. The table will still retain it's value in terms of labor time, but exchange value *is* subject to supply/demand fluctuations, so a table-capitalist headed to a market filled to the brim with surplus tables will find no buyers. Exchange value is only *based* on socially average labor time, they aren't directly equivalent.

The problem of responding to demand in a planned economy is really the central issue of socialist theory, I believe. Paul Cockshott is pretty hot around here right now, and his scheme I believe is quite elegant. To put it simply, a "market" (operated by the state and supplied by publicly owned factories) exists in consumer goods. If an item is in high demand, the staff of the local consumer goods market have the authority to raise the labor-time price accordingly. These changes in price are relayed to the appropriate regional planning agency, which analyzes them in comparison to actual socially average labor time values like this:

Current market value/real labor time value

If the resulting numerical value is above one, they know to manufacture more of that good. If it is below, they manufacture less. The ultimate goal is to reach a flat "1".

Of course, this is not the only method. The Soviet Union is somewhat notorious for breadlines (which is what Cockshott tries to avoid in his theory) but in reality the planning authorities did an absolutely admirable job projecting demand, especially considering calculation often had to be done by hand or with archaic mechanical computers and limited data. The difficulties in supplying staple food products were almost invariably a result of uncontrollable phenomena like bad harvests or politicians arbitrarily adjusting prices in an appeal to populism, disregarding planning authorities or advisors (this latter reason is very often the case whenever you hear about socialist or *supposedly* socialist states like Venezuela suffering from shortages: prices MUST correspond to real labor value and the supply, even if the cost is supposedly subsidized by the state).

Businesses having or not having "rights" is largely arbitrary. They are abstract entities, their rights can be taken or given at will. As for individuals, I would hardly call the extraction of surplus value a "right" in the same way that I believe ownership of another person to not be a right: the right to infringe on another's rights, even in a supposedly voluntary agreement, should be viewed as unethical by the left.

As for administrative bureaucracy, a very small firm of 2 employees would still require, at minimum, one official/HR employee to (effectively) oversee day-to-day operations. A large firm employing a hundred at a single location might only need one official/employee per twenty. This is why small firms in real life usually simply don't have any formal oversight: it would be a massive headache.

1. materials are worth less than labor and labor is what invests commodities with value in a market
2. the bulk of equilibrium price of a commodity will be resultant of labor put into it
3. cost in the market of a commodity over this threshold of labor plus materials is what the capitalist extorts from the buyer
4. The laborer himself never sees even half of the value he generates, even materials accounted for, in his wages

Why do small firms not hire oversight when large ones do? Can't they get into trouble for that?

One thing I'm always confused about is how if every worker gets the full value of their labor returned, what value does the organizer or manager generate that they get the full value of? Will that have to be extracted from the worker since he did not organize everything? Is there any reliable way of calculating how much value the manager generates from which he gets the full value of?

Only an individual dealing with an individual can get "full value", otherwise it's "full value" belongs to the collective, and each individual has an equal share of this "full value".

In modern industry, goods get produced only through coordinated work of varying number of people, and this level of complexity also requires additional information processing to facilitate and regulate this process.

In Cockshott's TANS, the value is the hour worked. A manager also goes to work and processes the information required to coordinate the production. Only at the goods market the products get valued depending on the calculation, with an adjustment of market clearing prices. Also taxation required to allocate to those unable to work, and to account for social security and services.

Cockshott, TANS, Chapter 2, Page 27

Regarding managers, they would be workers just like everybody else. Their work would be in processing the information from the planning organization and for the planning organization.

As with citation, the full value is not a straightforward concept.

Nicely and concisely put.

Yes, they *could*. But they often don't. In fact many countries have extremely lax laws on the treatment of labor (see: much of the United States).

I was mostly talking about what *would* be necessary to assure the rights and guarantees of workers (that is, preventing wage-theft in terms of unpaid overtime etc., in the capitalist rather than Marxian sense of "wage theft"), but the reality is that many capitalist states have a vested interest in actually eroding those rights (see image). For a look at how this plays out in a real life robust liberal capitalist state like the US, see

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Risk (or anything else Capitalists do that people call "work") itself is not labor, even if it facilitates labor (i.e. by organizing workers). It produces no value of its own.
Workers recieve less than they contribute, while Capitalists contribute less than they recieve. This is the core of the issue with Capitalism, in my view, even though it is very simplified.

Something a lot of people have trouble understanding is that capitalist profit through exploitation in Marxist theory is manifested entirely as *unearned* income, as rent and profit: money gained through no actual labor.

Managers are in fact also labor (however fucking annoying they are), they are employed just like other proles, work like proles, and have value extracted like proles.

This is not to suggest that the capitalist does not do work: he is still required to contribute his own hours organizing his properties, and those person-hours do contribute to the total labor value of a commodity. A portion (only a portion) of his profit is in fact fair compensation for his own labor. The total profits extracted by the capitalist for that work are, however, grossly exaggerated when compared to actual labor time contributed to the economy.

In a socialist economy, organizing the means of production and the flow of goods (the former work of the capitalist) is still understood as valuable work and compensated fairly (an hour for an hour, like other labor).

Doesn't accepting and managing risk count as labor, though? For managing people and businesses and all?

see the post above you in regards to the idea of managing the operations as labour, not a form of parasitism/rent in itself.

When risk is discussed under capitalism, that risk is the allocation of capital - if the business goes wrong, the investor/s lose their capital. This is a risk, the risk incentivises them to drive the company to succeed. This is a principal rationale for business efficiency, along with the profit motive. Both the profit motive and the risk/capital allocation are factors affecting the head/s of the company. Neither have a direct basis in the goods provided by the company.

Arguably, the risk incentivises them to drive the company to succeed even beyond the point where there is market demand as the capital is sunk into the company, and they cannot extract it without the company being successful. The company must remain successful beyond the point where it is useful for the society or wider marketplace.

This is just as much of a distortion as profit for the 'rational market-price for goods' accurately determining the value of goods, at least in the earlier stages of a company, though it is perpetuated throughout the shareholder base if a company goes public. That is to say, there is never a good time for a public company to go bust, and yet if the company is no longer producing valuable goods (like, say, Toys R Us), clearly it is economically dead weight, and so it will eventually go bust. When this happens, the emergent rationality of the wider marketplace is found and is substituted for the rational market-price for goods. The investor/s capital is reduced or destroyed with the company.

So on the one hand, clearly yes, managing the operations and risk is a form of labour, and should be rewarded fairly. Ironically though, in capitalism, this results in counter-efficiency, at least on an individual level, where there is too much on the line. This particular counter-efficiency would be removed under a socialist or co-operative model

Marx covered this in TCOTGP, the cost of materials should be reimbursed to whoever purchased them but anything beyond that is the surplus value produced by the laborer

The effort expended on these materials and every action taken on these materials is actualizing the final product, and without this labour, the product wouldnt come to fruition, the materials would just sit on the ground being useless.

simply, materis are not calculated in the surplus value. Even if you take away the cost of the wood, the worker still is paid less. If they're not convinced by empirical evidence you can ask them from where the capitalist takes his profit without that.

anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secC2.html#secc29

You can explain Marx’s exploitation theory in terms of basic neoclassical microeconomics. In a capitalist society, the number of people without private property is always much larger than the number of people with private property, and the number of employees is always much larger than the number of employers. This means that the labour market in a capitalist society is, by definition, oligopsonistic. In an oligopsonized labour market, the wages workers receive are lower than the marginal product of their labour. This means that workers are being exploited.