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Employees pay Bezos the surplus value of their labor. Their wages are what Bezos allows them to keep, not what Bezos pays them.

• nickff 5y ago
  This seems to be predicated on the labor theory of value, which is wrong. Put differently, if a company loses money, is it always because the employees aren’t working hard enough?
  • boomboomsubban 5y ago
    >if a company loses money, is it always because the employees aren’t working hard enough? Or a company could be ordering their employees to work in an unprofitable way, or the company could be spending the money on unnecessary non-labor expenditures...
    • nickff 5y ago
      So pre-Facebook WhatsApp was the only well-run company, and the rest of them are ordering employees to work in unprofitable ways, and waste money?
      • boomboomsubban 5y ago
        A lot of the reason those companies aren't making profits is that they're buying other companies and making other investments, also known as unnecessary non-labor expenditures. And those were just two examples of ways a company could not turn a profit besides the workers not working hard enough.
  • woodruffw 5y ago
    > This seems to be predicated on the labor theory of value, which is wrong. After all, Amazon famously doesn't need the labor of their employees to sell the products and services that support their value :-) The LTV doesn't guarantee a direct relationship between real labor and realized value (which is a combination of market and economic value): it describes a relationship between socially necessary labor and economic value.
  • vaidhy 5y ago
    Isn't this the reason people put in enormous amount of hours in their startup? The idea that more labor equals more success seems to be built into our culture. The same idea is reflected in the argument that poor people stay poor because they are lazy/not willing to work. I personally think that idea is incorrect (and labor theory of value has limited application), but I have been seeing arguments where everyone picks and chooses the idea when it is applied personally vs applied to someone else.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• frockington1 5y ago
  If this were true wouldn't every employee take their labor somewhere more profitable?
  • ruined 5y ago
    > If this were true wouldn't every employee take their labor somewhere more profitable? Yes, this is what happens when the labor is something that can effectively be independent, operate without massive capital investment, or be relocated easily. E.g. doctors, programmers, lawyers, plumbers. But many kinds of labor are only useful in a coordinated context, requiring capital support and infrastructure, perhaps due to economies of scale, natural monopolies, regulatory restrictions, and the like. So that kind of worker must be embedded in a firm to be effective. Currently, policy is written to support corporate firms, and suppress cooperative organization and independent labor, so there's not really an option for most workers to depart. There's no such thing as an independent one-man freelance car manufacturer, for instance. This is the distinction between the marxist concepts of petit-bourgeoisie and proletariat.
    • missedthecue 5y ago
      What you've basically said is that labor isnt the only input to production; there are other inputs required as well. So if labor is just one of many inputs, it seems wrong to attribute all profit to labor as if it played the only part.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • ruined 5y ago
        well, within the theory, all of those other inputs are also labor. "fixed" capital like skills, software, machines, and facilities are all produced with labor input. liquid capital like funds, raw/processed materials, and commodities are produced, extracted, refined, processed and/or transported by labor. executive decisions, management and organization are labor. land itself is just about the only thing that is arguably not ultimately labor, but it seems that through the capitalist lens, land is only valuable due to location (proximity to labor?) or resources gained by application of labor to the land. you could make some arguments about conservation, but those tend to be either moral arguments about externalities which by definition are not systematically considered by capitalism, or arguments about natural environments as a resource, in which maintenance and access management become the value-creating labor.
• CheezeIt 5y ago
  Ahem… Amazon customer here. I capture the surplus value of their labor.