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
I did the math for myself and the answer was basically not without getting fired before I had made back enough .
Yes! That’s what we call “expropriating the means of production”, but it can’t really be done on an individual basis. This requires collective action and political power.
Basically, you organize politically to be able to pass laws and set policy that, for example, would make housing a human right, significantly reduce the rent, and expropriate large quantities of real estate from large real estate firms. Turning the operation of land to either housing cooperatives or individual home ownership for cases where that makes sense. You can do the same for industry and utilities.
We call this, “building a socialist society”
I commit time theft all the time. I stole 3234550,03h from my boss
“Surplus value” sounds like “profit” to me. Take your employer’s annual profits, divide by the number of total employees to get profit per employee. Divide that by your hourly wage and you have your answer.
Surplus value = v Annual profits = p Employer’s total employees = e Your hourly wage = w
v = p / e / w
So, if Amazon made $9.1 billion in profit in 2025 and had 1,578,000 employees, and you worked full time all year in the USA at an entry-level position at the average of $33K/year or $15.87/hour, that’s:
v = 9,100,000,000 / 1,578,000 / 15.87 v = 5776.79 / 15.87 v = 363.37 hours per year
Or roughly 1.4 hours (an hour and 24 minutes) per day at 260 days/year or 5 days x 52 weeks per year.
“time theft” sounds like a pretty good band name. seriously!
you probably can’t reclaim the value for yourself in a way that pays your rent or buys groceries without actual criminal theft, but you may be able waste enough time and resources that your labor isn’t profitable. the hard part is not being shitty to your coworkers while you do it, creating a situation where even more of their surplus value is extracted to make up for your sabotage.
imperialism simulator
Practical answer: You’re on a fast track to management
Actual answer: no, because of compound interest, the only way to reclaim your surplus value is with worker solidarity
No because you end up spending even more time just getting paid for the time stolen
Your boss makes a dollar, you make a dime, you’ll be spending 10 hours making that dollar and that’s if you manage to not do any more work during that time. But unless you’re free to do your own thing during that time you’re giving up even more time just to recoup the prior stolen time
I hate thinking about this shit now because I’m losing 5 minutes clocked in every single day just because some nerd loser app developers updated the app and my phone (from 2015) is too old to run it so i can’t clock in in my car anymore and my locker is downstairs and the time clock is upstairs
and they force me to take an unpaid break, which I used to support conceptually because otherwise employers would pressure workers to skip breaks, but how I really fucking hate because it’s just 30 more minutes I’m at this place not being paid. Since I cook food I basically actually rest whenever I’m done with my shit. I go sit down whenever it works with the timing of everything. Unless I’m pushing myself to Go Hard and prep up for the next day I have plenty of break time and if I don’t it’s 99% because I’m doing it to myself. So I kinda resent this fucking administrative bureaucratic nerd bullshit of “take your unpaid break, you have to clock out at least 25 minutes and then clock back in for at least 5 for every 7+ hour shift”
On that note I really thought PAID BREAKS were federally mandated, every shitty retail job I’ve ever had involved at least two PAID 15 minute breaks and one unpaid 30 minute break for every 8 hour shift.
I effectively get them anyway since I go sit down for 20-30 minutes to eat on the clock after I get my lunch food out, but like, why the fuck isn’t that shit a guaranteed given
the new phone will pay for itself after ( phone cost / ( hourly rate / 12 ) ) days
EDIT: I forgot about taxes
One of the reasons I need to commit to a more disciplined reading of theory is to better express this idea I have about surplus value. It makes me think of how people are all “if you took all of Bezos’ wealth you wouldn’t even be able to pay for healthcare for a year!” I’m not concerned about the dollars that he has, I’m concerned about the societal-social contract we all tacitly endorse where he has infinite buying power. That idea has its basis in the Communist Manifesto.
So in that same vein, you could theoretically go AFK on the clock and eventually get back the same buying power you would have if you worked in the presence of justice, sure. Marx has the simple equation regarding the labor-time spend to create a product. The surplus is the value of the labor minus the wages paid for it. So yes, if you could put a price tag on the goods you produce, you could find that number of hours.
But that doesn’t feel like a path towards liberation. Notably, you’re still likely spending that money on rent and health insurance. Your taxes are going to harassing farmers half the world away. Even all of that aside - it’s not really getting at the idea of surplus value, just providing a backdrop to talk about it with. I think it’s harder to put that price tag on the goods and services today than it was in the 1850s. If you’re making algorithms for day trading or making billboard ads then you’re not making society any better - I’d argue you’re making it worse. So it’s like making a valuation in Bezos bucks for causing harm.
Therefore it seems two dimensional and small to use S = LT - W to get a number for what you’re owed. In its best application such a number might clue you into the idea that you’re being conned out of a good world. But that means that it’s a signpost that might allow you to consider the colossal inputs into the system only to get absolute bullshit in return. It’d scratch the same itch as seeing the beautiful metros and cityscapes in China compared to how America looks. It’s the same way that Bezos’ dollars matter a lot less than the possible social good+utility of a giga datacenter that could stream media seamlessly in a single app alongside the resource organization and distribution of the warehouse system. You wouldn’t need to go AFK for X amount of hours to afford spotify, a bunch of show subscriptions, and plastic toys from China if they were just part of the one app with society’s music+movies+games and a well staffed warehouse that can get to items to you when convenient.
We need to have a conversation like “what the fuck are we doing here?” Healthcare doesn’t need to cost that much. Food doesn’t need to be that insecure and wasted. Housing doesn’t need to be a commodity. Education is easier to come by than the price tag would suggest. Don’t even get me started on transport! Nobody needs your AFK soul to sit in an office staring at an excel sheet or frankly digging in a coal mine for everyone to eat, drink, and sleep. You’d be better served in a better society if you didn’t have to think about how many hours you must spend idly and instead got to think about what needs to get done. Given the opportunity and bandwidth, some people would create shit sometimes instead of regurgitating Toy Story plot lines and IPOs for enshittified SaaS products. If the goals weren’t to make the numbers look good for Q3 and instead designing automation, high speed rail, power plants, and green+human friendly architecture then not only would you likely be getting a bigger share of the pie, you’d be getting a much more delicious pie. So much so that even if you got the same percentage of your surplus labor as today you probably wouldn’t care because life would be good and you’d get a say in how the public decides to spend the surplus together.
I do. I never shit at home. Always on the job, and always at least half an hour every time.
Sometimes I chug a glass of full cream just to be certain my lactose intolerant ass will annihilate that toilet for at least an hour. It also gives me an excuse to leave early when I’m pale as a ghost and looking like I’m six months pregnant from all the gas in my guts.
I’ve reclaimed so much surplus value, im considering buying a fucking kayak or something, even though I don’t need one.
My plan for if a job forced “return to office” on me was to start drinking a lot of milk, and turn it into a “I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me.”. My friends said this is a terrible idea. I concede the coworkers mostly don’t deserve to suffer the catastrophic ass gas, but management and the bootlickers I say can suffer it.
Your friends are right it’s a terrible idea
Company turnover divided by total employees is basically the amount you and others at the company are collectively producing. Working out what it is at the individual level is not very easy or practical.
Figuring out exactly what the “surplus value” can be complicated. The company is using some of your value to expand and generate growth. That makes it not as simple as calculating profit.
A market approach to the problem would be looking at stock value at the beginning of the fiscal year vs the end of the fiscal year. The amount the stock value went up is the growth of that year and could be considered the surplus value of that year. It’s the amount the shareholders made in value at the very least. Dividing that by total employees could be viewed as the collective surplus value. You would need to include dividends in this figure too. Not totally reliable either because the market is not rational.
this all assumes it’s not an investment bubble or that your boss hasn’t tricked people into buying mud pies
your boss hasn’t tricked people into buying mud pies
This, unfortunately, is my job. I saw some presentation for one of our new products (can’t say which ofc) but the presentation included how we should focus sales on x because high profile influencers like Joe Rogan were promoting it and so it’s in a viral boom phase. I hate it so much, but I do genuinely like the people I work with and have good rapport with my clients, but there is certainly times where I just feel like I am selling snake oil.
I had someone asking for something to help with a certain ailment, to which I broke and had to just tell them “Sounds like your customer actually urgently needs anti-biotics and that is a life threatening affliction, we are not doctors and they need to go to urgent care yesterday”.
Yeah that’s the “not rational” part. Still though, shareholder value increase is the capital accumulation. It’s the strongest value to use for this even though it’s obviously messy and not rational. The capitalist system is not rational. Calculating within 1 year is less reliable than calculating within 10, which is more of a longterm investor timeline. Even if a bubble lasts 10 years it’s still the value that the investors have extracted from the work of the employees. It’s not a rational value, but it’s still the value the employees have produced for the company owners in an entirely irrational system.
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.
Don’t know, but I’m doing it anyway.
Calling it the reverse ADHD tax since it takes me half the time to do stuff so I do nothing half the time.
theoretically possible, sure. But you’d (likely) need to commit time theft on the majority if your clocked in hours and there’s zero real chance that any remotely competent manager wouldn’t notice you fucking around and not doing your job for 6 hours a day
I don’t think you’ll recover surplus value with this strat. To recoup past exploitation you’d need to get value without giving value. In other words you should steal stuff from work.
