[Socialists] Are workers who don't generate profit still exploited ?

Sure. When discussing how capitalists generate returns to capital, Marx employs the diagram M-C-M', where M' represents a value greater than M and C represents a commodity. I assume you’re familiar with this? This is a rudimentary expression of profit profit. The difference in M and M’ is the profit on the sale of the commodity.

Marx (incorrectly in my view) argues or assumes that the only way an exchange can occur is the exchange of equivalence. Thus, he has a mystery of where the additional value that allows for there to be a positive return to capital (why capitalists can consistently change M into M’ despite equivalent exchange). Marx concludes (incorrectly again) the capitalist MUST be doing an unequal exchange. But with who? According to Marx, it’s Labor. For some reason (I don’t think Marx ever adequately explains it), labor is unequally exchanged; the capitalist purchases labor power for less than the value it generates, and by doing so the capitalist extracts the surplus labor value of labor in the form of profit. Thus, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.

I don’t think any of the above is true by the way. But Marx definitely did. Marx thought that the gigantic increase in wealth and population from the 19th century onwards was mainly due to the competitive striving to obtain maximum surplus-value extraction from the labor.

/r/CapitalismVSocialism Thread Parent