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Yes, labor needs to increase its productivity compared to capital investments if it wants raises. Make no mistake, these productivity increases come almost ent
by djbebs 4y ago
Yes, labor needs to increase its productivity compared to capital investments if it wants raises.
Make no mistake, these productivity increases come almost entirely from capital spent, not from labor becoming better at what it does.
If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase in productivity was thanks to them.
- janef0421 4y agoCapital is itself a product of labor.
- djbebs 4y agoGreat, then surely labor will be able to pay for it.
- janef0421 4y agoLabour won't be able to pay for it, because money is a representation of social power, not value, and in our current society labourers do not hold social power. See "Debt: The first 5,000 years", or the video by second thought on the subject.
- ericd 4y agoIt’s a product of well coordinated labor. It’s much, much easier to make the wrong thing than the right thing. And the wrong thing can eat a huge amount of labor and be worth much less than nothing.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoCapital is often a product of labor plus input capital. Most startups understand this well. It's basically impossible to bootstrap something with labor alone
- janef0421 4y agoBy capital, I am referring to things that improve the efficiency of labour, such as a combine harvester.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoMe too. You can't build a combine harvester with labor alone. There's a hell of a lot of capital that went into producing one. Land, mining equipment, metal smelters, machine shops, trains and ships, and assembly facilities. It takes skilled labor too, but you can't make most things purely out of skilled labor.
- janef0421 4y agoIn that case, that capital was also created by labour.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoSure, capital can't exist without humans. My main point is not where capital first originated, but one on how more capital is generated in practice. Even a maxist analysis admits that goods are generated with labor plus the means of production. This is a very important point.
- andrekandre 4y ago> If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase in productivity was thanks to them. do you have real-life example of how labor can justify a higher wage?
- aperson_hello 4y agoWhen there's a shortage and all the companies suddenly go from paying $8/hour to 15+/hour? Like right now?
- andrekandre 4y agoi see, so basically supply/demand?
- s1artibartfast 4y agoLabor scarcity is the only real driver of labor value. Someone with a laptop might be able to route a million times more packages than someone with a notebook and pen. Take away the laptop representing capital can you get a sense of the labor contribution