Muh Surplus Labor Value

Surplus Labor Value does not exist. It is a phantom born from the complex nature of value due to it being a subjective concept. This is a fun little video that uses Touhou Fumos to demonstrate why profits are a good thing and why without them we would have less incentive to work together. Profit is not theft. Surplus Labor Value is not a thing. This is one of the many reasons why socialism will never work. The rough draft of this video was originally cut from "HasanAbi is Unironically Clueless", as the surplus labor value argument is not unique to Hasan and I felt it deserved slightly more effort.

The subject this video covers is actually quite complex and has been heavily simplified for the sake of telling a story. Check out the Mises Institute for a more in depth read on the subject if you like:

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Music: Bad Apple!! -instrumental- (darksynth/80s remix)
Artist: Astrophysics

[scottgun]

One of my history professors offered a class on Marxism. It being the '70s, a bunch of students signed up. But instead of reading the romantic revolutionary gobbledygook in the _Manifesto_ he made them go through Marx's logic and math in _Das Kapital_ ...most of the students stopped being Marxists after that. My hero.

[CysmaWinheim]

Marisa Stole The Precious Surplus Value.

[AllofJudea]

It boggles the mind that there are people that don't understand that value is subjective. Holy hell my 2 year old gets it.

[ThatOneGuyWithAFork]

Came because of Touhou, liked because I left as a more informed person on economics.

[marcusmoonstein]

If business owners keeping the profits is theft, then workers getting paid when the business makes a loss is also theft. By definition the workers must be producing negative labor value if the business makes a loss, and so they must pay in to compensate. The labor theory of value looks a lot less attractive when negative numbers come into play, and workers have to pay in to cover company losses.

[TheoTungsten]

You should mention that only half of the businesses survive 1 year in, and that only after 2-3 years they've paid their debt. They had to buy that capital, and they had to borrow money to buy it. Employees get paid regardless.

[Treblaine]

I love how their solution to the challenge of "so who pays for all the stuff the workers use" is simply "we'll just steal it all, lol. Call it 'seize the means of production' or whatever, but basically we will just rob literally everything at gunpoint and I presume there will be no consequence of this."

[GeekOverdose]

LTV fails because it assumes that capital is constant. In the sense that if you buy $1000 of capital, it will only add $1000 of value to the end product over it's life time. And that the only variable capital is labour, i.e. you pay $10/hour but it adds $15/hour of value to the end product. This assumption is simply untrue. Both capital and labour can be "variable capital" and hence the whole idea of Surplus Labor Value falls apart

[NoFlu]

An easy way to show how dumb this whole thing would be, is just thinking about what you'd have to do if you mess up.
Work in carpentry and accidently treat that important lumber wrong after somebody else made a custom fitted desk out of it?
Accidently left the ice cream delivery out of the freezer for an hour since another issue came up and you forgot about it?
Did your de-cork go wrong, on that imported french wine from the 80s?

I'd like to see any breadtuber argue about that. Mistakes happen and, unless you are self employed, worst thing your employee can do is fire you (unless they can proof you did it out of spite or sth).
I forgot to send out a bill on time once, and that lost the company I work for ~15k, definetly not sth I'd like to pay out of pocket because I provided negative value to the company lol

[varvarith]

Imagine feeling opressed by ~15% of profit took by your employer while paying 60% to 90% of your worth to the state.

[tedarcher]

Labor theory of value is just circular logic. Value of products and services is based on socially necessary labour. What is socially necessary labour? It's labour that produces products and services that have value. Boom, genius theory.

[ExPwner]

Thank you! This giant non-sequitur is annoying as hell.

[mouwersor]

If starting and owning a company had no costs at all then workers could just collectively start and own their company and it would outperform the regular companies where supposedly greedy capitalists steal a lot of profit. Not really what happens in practice. The free market pays for the starting costs, the risks, etc. (And if starting a company was ez af then the supply of potential owners would far exceed the demand and the pay would be low.)

[landonlawson]

If there's no profit incentive to hire someone, no one will get hired. So you go from believing your being "underpaid" and complaining at a job to making no money at all. Which is worse?

[Tempestelterna]

The one argument that’s so funny to all of this is this: PEOPLE AGREE IN A CONTRACT TO WORK FOR AN EMPLOYER. IF YOU FEEL THAT STRONGLY YOU’RE NOT GETTING WHAT IS YOUR WORTH, GO ELSEWHERE 😂😂😂

You can’t do that in non capitalist countries!

[immortallix]

The Great Lemonade Shortage is my favorite touhou game

[anteeko]

So if a company is turning a loss is it the employees that extract surplus value from the company?

[christophercombs]

So much economic illiteracy in these breadtubers

[DiviTon]

Good video as always, but one point I would like to add is that profits dont all come from labor anyway. Some profits might come from advertizing, or new technology. These are things that come from the owner. For example, if I own a delivery company with 10 employees doing deliveries and all of them deliver on horseback, but then one day I decide to spend like 500K to get them all trucks. Productivity will go way up and new clients will come and profit will go up. None of this increase in profit/productivity came from labor, it came from an investment in technology from the top. If anything, the employees have to work less hard. The idea that profit only comes from labor is so juvenile, its a wonder why people buy into it.

[heffyhoof]

"You will certainly never get paid exactly the amount of value that you bring with your labour." He certainly hasn't been proven wrong in his own life experiences.