Reread
http://www.thecoli.com/posts/18248593/.
Exploitation is an objective fact. That doesn't inherently mean it can be positively moved beyond (I accept that, perhaps, systemic collapse is more likely than moving beyond capitalism. If so, so be it.). Just like slaves didn't auto-revolt after realizing they were enslaved.
I peeped the article, just didn't feel like it was worth addressing but since you asked fukk it.
Whole thing hinges on this dubious distinction between labor and "labor-power". Labor being "the actual process of work itself", and labor power being a chimera that enriches capitalists in ways labor somehow doesn't. What exactly is the difference? If one goes through "the actual process of work itself", they HAVE give up the "capacity to work & create value", which I am interpeting as a worker's time. Right? You can't work without giving up some of your time, can you? How is requiring people to give up time to work exploitative
There is a litany of questionable other assertions as well. He simultaneously acknowledges labor as a commodity, which has a price Marx defines as determined by the cost to produce said commodity, but then complains about the disconnect between the actual price of labor and what Marx has defined that it should be. Let me ask you this. When you buy something from a retailer, do you ask the workers if they are being paid enough? If they say no, do you pay more for the product to cover that spread, or do you complete the transaction at the price(s) set by the retailer and go along your merry way? With your clothing operation, have you set prices and redistributed proceeds back down the chain to be at what you feel is a fair level for the workers who make it? Maybe you print the shirts yourself. OK, unless you grow, mill, weave, dye, cut and sew the cotton, someone else is working on your shirts. What's their cut of your profit? So unless Marxists exist completely outside of the capitalist system they feel is a failure, they too are complicit in the exploitation they claim to rail against. So I'm not buying that point.
Not to mention the role of automation and the existence of workerless factories
There's also this very fundamental lack of understanding of business:
In our example, the capitalist is paying them $100 for the workday, and the worker produced $100 worth of new value in the form of products that belong to the capitalist, which they can sell on the market to recoup what they spent on wages and other costs of production.
Again, let's come back to your shirts. If it cost you $20 to make a shirt, what would you gain from selling the shirt at $20? Would you bother selling the shirt at all? In the case of the worker/capitalist, that $100 in wages doesn't at all factor in the costs for all the infrastructure for the worker to work. The building the worker is in, the lights the worker works under, the tools the worker uses, the support staff for the worker like human resources..... who is going to pay for that, if 100% of the money from the sales of products goes back to nothing but worker's wages? So no, for an operation to function
even without profit the wages paid to the worker
have to be a fraction of the proceeds from the product, unless the worker is creating products with zero raw materials, or facilities, or tools paid for and provided by the owner(s) of the company
I would keep going but it is exhausting and IMO pointless to give such a poorly thought out article much thought. Why should we consider the economic ideas of someone who doesn't even know what the components of the operating costs of a business are?
How could barely literate Russians in the early 1900s come to realize that they were getting royally fukked and tried to fight to establish a different society, yet we have the world's information at our fingertips and a multitude of ways to see all the ways we're getting screwed, but still perpetuate the system?
