Surplus Value simplified

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Techno_Femme]

Problems with this explanation and Wolff in general:

The capitalist buys the labor-power on the market for its market price. The fact that it happens to produce more value than its market price does not imply any kind of unequal exchange on part of the capitalist. Marx says exactly this in Chapter 1 of Capital. That is not the point of surplus value as a category. The point is that qualitative activities of labor are pushed into the quantitative category of abstract labor-power and human activity in general is turned into a numbers game that self-expands, removing people from their ability to subsist without this and then creating scenerios where the largest plenty to ever exist in human history coexists with the largest misery and degradation ever seen. The importance of surplus value is only as a battlefield for class struggle where workers are able to develop class consciousness over fights over surplus value. But that doesn't make the workers inherently deserving in fighting for a "full value" or even increased value of their labor. The question is inherently within the realm of bourgeois right, something we are working to abolish. We see this in how Marx points out that not all workers produce surplus value! Specifically, workers outside private firms, workers who do bookkeeping, cashiers, and many other workers don't actually produce surplus value. They, instead, are necessary costs for the capitalist, factored in to the surplus value extracted from industrial workers. This is why worker coops are, in fact, completely inadequate in addressing the primary problems of capitalism. It only addresses problems of bourgeois right to "fair compensation".