title, im paid by the hour so im wondering if its calculable the amount of time id need to be clocked in n not work to match the surplus value extracted from me
or am i stupid n misunderstanding surplus value
title, im paid by the hour so im wondering if its calculable the amount of time id need to be clocked in n not work to match the surplus value extracted from me
or am i stupid n misunderstanding surplus value
If you somehow managed to steal the entirety of your surplus value without getting caught for any meaningful amount of time, the company would either go under shortly, or exploit your coworkers even harder to make up for the lost surplus they no longer get from you.
Not saying that time theft is wrong or anti-worker, whatever, get paid. But remember that you should stand in and build solidarity with your comrades. Stiffing them to get paid more is a shitty way to do that that reeks of individualism and lumpen behavior.
Some leftists have this weird imaginary understanding of economics where every minimum wage worker generates millions of dollars in profit and everyone with degrees is just a bullshit worker sucking away money.
The skilled union laborers on my projects cost the company in excess of $200 per hour, and that is me hiding the real number which is much higher for opsec. Companies are, in fact, keenly interested in knowing exactly how much an employee costs them. For projects, net margin is added on top of the costs as a percentage.
Every second those guys dick around instead of solving problems, money burns. Enough money burns, and union guys get laid off. Office people lose their jobs. The public and the disabled suffer from lack of services.
Yes, that also means the fucks at the top get richer. But we have to play the game. Get and hold a job. Advance your skills, personal development, and career. Use that superior leftist state of being to get promotions to gather capital to be used to at least help other people, if not directly fund a revolution.
This is not an insult to the OP at all, they asked a great question. But there is a prevailing attitude especially on the online left that needs some serious self crit if they are to be anything except “posting is praxis” performative leftists.
Maybe this isn’t the place for it, but I have some uncertainties or perhaps misunderstandings with how people talk about Lumpen/Lumpenproletariat. Is my understanding of these terms wrong? Wouldn’t I, as a disabled unemployed adult, be classified as lumpen? Wouldn’t homeless people be? Wouldn’t prisoners be (including all the many people wrongly or unjustly imprisoned)? People pushed into sex work? As modern socialists, these are all groups that we support, and many of our comrades fall into these groups, so why do so many people still use lumpen in exclusively a negative sense? It’s one thing to read books written in the 1800s or turn of the century referring to lumpen exclusively as unthinking, uneducated thieves and bandits and criminals, ‘vagabonds’ and prostitutes that serve no value to the socialist movement, but seeing it used exclusively in a negative sense or carrying those same sentiments in the modern day makes me wonder if these people are actually my comrades, or if I just seriously misunderstood the term.
Socialist movements in the past century have made a point of including the lumpens as continuous with the rest of the proletariat. The line between the two is very blurry and not very instructive.
Any worker could easily and suddenly become unemployed, or homeless, or disabled, or imprisoned; even being removed from the surplus army of labor wouldn’t change their position in capitalist reality. Also, the informal and domestic economies are not fully covered by the prole/lumpen dichotomy.
Especially in the present era of neocolonialism and lower-than-ever transparency, I find it useful to categorize by credit and debt, passive income and passive expenses. There are lifetime net creditors, and lifetime net debtors. Because of the compounding structure of the economy, there will always be many times more net debtors than net creditors.