#labor theory

[cedarnommer]

We've been playing a farming sim type game in the same genre as Harvest Moon. We've just been idly having a video in the background and a thought occurred to us. We'll convey it here.

Marxism tends to talk about how we derive our purpose in life through the labor we create. Alienated labor is as a result something that we don't extract direct value from, because all the work we do is for the sake of people we'll never meet. We work for a corporation and our labor is thusly alienated.

Now we could be enjoying this lovely time with a gross corporation and praise them for their oh so generous progress in the world. But that progress is a load of crap to get their profit margins to increase. And that's a pretty obvious point for us from every company we've worked for so far.

And well, for little old us, we find that video games and even house work and errands or doing something for a friend tends to be a lot more rewarding than whatever is offered from some stinky employer. I'd go as far as to say that the labor we put into intimacy is heck of a lot more fun and engaging than getting the socks off of some profit chart or whatever.

Now of course, we're aware that these processes are like babies first Marxism. Yet it's something that has continued to strike us as fascinating every time. We gain no monetary gain from playing these cozy games. We are, for all intents and purposes, doing something that could be considered a job task in itself. But because we're seeking to accomplish it by our own, it ends up holding value to us and being important. In regards to the, let's use the economist's "great" wording here, more productive tasks we can do, those still give us more satisfaction, even if we'll never be directly paid for any of this. The alienating nature of money and how that money will always be in favor of the house, means that for us, the players, the workers, we'll never gain much. And what we can see as people that fit into all sorts of labels for fun minority groups, but we're considered even more potentially exploitable by the few willing to hire us. And that's just not okay.

The world should be collective. The world should be communal. The world should be communist and it should be anarchist. And it certainly shouldn't force people into labor, whether caused by MLM styled state policies or by liberal, neoliberal, conservative or authoritarian styled ideas of capitalism.

This has been our first post where we've collectively written this. This has involved 3 of our headmates. We're still a very recent system, so we're adjusting to things. Apologies if you find this strange, but if you do, deal with it. Because we're certainly not going to bend to you.

[notnowkitten]

can i say something kinda "unfeminist" real quick. hottest most controversial take that might get me death threats but it's an argument i actually see a lot (most often by people who don't grasp the nuances of it) and i disagree with. anyway opinion under the cut.

so disclaimer, this can apply to any relationship. heterosexual, gay, lesbian, married or domestic partnership, or adults living with their family for free. even between roommates, if relevant.

ultimately, the claim that "domestic labor needs to be financially compensated" is a fair concept theoretically, but i disagree with it in practice. and yes i am familiar with labor theory of value and the interpretation thereof in several schools of thought.

in my perspective as a housewife - if someone else is paying your way, providing for your needs, and in exchange you do housework; being fed and sheltered is equivalent to a wage.

does anyone else see what i mean? like, if my husband is employed and i'm not, and he is paying for my basic needs, it's only natural that the other tasks fall on me automatically + without assumption that i'm otherwise compensated. because i'm not going out of my way. the labor is already evenly divided!!

yes i am definitely still doing "work", i'm not saying it's not work! but i just don't receive liquid currency and this is okay because my "pay" is room and board and food. why should i need or be entitled to an additional paycheck on top of that?

(also, when you're formally employed, you don't get paid for both your job plus cleaning you might do at home. because that's irrelevant.)

he receives tangible funds for doing his job and pays for us to live here; in return, my work is to upkeep it. he buys the groceries so i cook them. i dont need to be paid for these things. they've already been paid for. simple as.

if you disagree, i respect that opinion! if you are in a similar situation too and you receive/want to receive extra compensation, i respect that and believe you deserve it. but if you literally cant understand what im saying and decide to take me in bad faith then you might be fucking stupid.

also no we are not "trad" or conservitards and i am not unemployed by choice. i'm probably not going to engage arguments on this either.

[quotesfromall]

Southern whites feared the migration would deprive them of black labor.

Richard Wormser, The Great Migration

[unhappy-sometimes]

i don't think twilight is buff. like, i bet he's fit. toned, perhaps. but like, super chiseled? no. working out to have a ton of definition is a lot different than working out to maximize strength and agility, which is what i think he does.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Dungeon Meshi: The RPG

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lies, damned lies, and Uber

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 10-11), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.

Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.

Here's how they did it.

For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.

These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.

Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.

Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.

It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:

https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."

Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:

https://ricochet.media/en/4039/uber-is-lying-again-the-company-has-no-intention-of-paying-drivers-a-living-wage

Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):

https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf

Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.

Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings-how-uber-wasted-2-5-billion-on-self-driving-cars

After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:

https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division

The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/

The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.

How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-nine-despite-massive-price-increases-uber-losses-top-31-billion.html

But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.

In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Image: Rob Sinclair (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_skyline_of_Toronto_May_2009.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[bayesic-bitch]

It's deeply unfortunate but I'm 99% sure we're going to go straight from "why are people making AI to writing and art? They should make one that does laundry" to "AI is automating physical labor because techbros hate the working class and think they should starve" as soon as robotics/embodied AI actually takes off

[2acetaminophen]

Not to be really annoying and go ‘well actually’ to the joke about how silcos a twink who probably didn’t do shit in the mines and that miners all look like vander and are these big buff burly dudes is very much some propaganda in ur brain and not the reality of what conditions are like for miners from impoverished communities. You know they use children in mines bc they’re small right. If you’ve consumed any footage showing messed up mining communities that exists irl, like people who work in cobalt mines in Congo, they’re muscular, but at a glance, they’re not jacked and look pretty average. I think a lot of people are surprised seeing that they tend to be small and lanky for people doing hard manual labor all day, but that comes from not being able to afford enough quality food. You have to eat a ton of calories to get built, and that isn’t something many people who work in mines have.

[philosophybits]

Slavery may change its form or its name – its essence remains the same. Its essence may be expressed in these words: to be a slave is to be forced to work for someone else, just as to be a master is to live on someone else's work.

Mikhail Bakunin, "Rousseau's Theory of the State"

[alicornze7]

I have a very ridiculous speculation

what if the reason she still talks back to jax after all his torment a habit she adapted from working in service jobs-?

she could be on the verge of tears but still has to put up with people’s crap and be on the receiving end of their frustrations/tantrums

She’s usually depicted as a pushover (that’s most likely true from what we’ve seen so far) but I think there are more complex layers of trauma and personality beneath that simply “shy” exterior

One can only take so much bs from people before they snap

that’s it that’s the post

[whereserpentswalk]

If the brutality of gilded age capitalism came in physical stress upon the body, the brutality of 21st century capitalism can be defined by the extent that the company is able to claim ownership over a worker's life.

[gett-merkedd]

If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened. Finally to say that “ the most favourable condition of wage-labour is the fastest possible growth of productive capital ” is the same as to say: the quicker the working class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it-the wealth of another which lords it over that class-the more favourable will be the conditions under which it will be permitted to toil anew at the multiplication of bourgeois wealth, at the enlargement of the power of capital, content thus to forge for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train.

— Karl Marx

[sunder-the-gold]

Communist Labor Theory of Value makes Communist Utopia impossible

The Communist Utopia is a world in which humanity does not need a central government, because everyone will be equal to each other and everyone will be provided what they need.

Let us skip over the question of who has to do the hard work of providing, and what those laborers get in exchange for providing everything that everyone else needs.

Let us skip ahead to the notion that "everyone" has enough of what they need, and so the only exchange of value happens in regards to luxuries.

Subjective Value Theory

The free-market theory of Subjective Value declares that two individuals will never truly agree on the value of what each wants and what the other demands in exchange. They must either reach a compromise with each other, or else make no voluntary exchange. If necessary, one or both must leave each other to seek someone else willing to make a more subjectively acceptable compromise.

From beginning to end, such an exchange is completely voluntary. Coercion may occur at any point, but no point mandates coercion.

Labor Theory of Value; Objective Value Theory

Under Marxism, that which is not mandatory is forbidden.

Marxists demand that a central managerial authority exist to act as God, laying down verdicts about the objective value of everything.

No one is allowed to voluntarily make a subjective decision about what their time or property is worth to them. The state tells them what their time and property is worth.

No one is allowed to voluntarily decide who they give their time or property away to. The state tells them who they must trade with.

No one is allowed to voluntarily decide what they must trade for. The state tells them what they must purchase and who they must employ.

From beginning to end, all exchanges in a Marxist system are coerced.

Such a system CANNOT abolish the state. This practice MUST perpetuate the state, forever.

Therefore, Marxism or Communism does not work even in theory. That which cannot work even in theory certainly can never work in practice, no matter how many times you try.

But Marxists never want to achieve true communism. Marxism works just fine in theory and in practice for achieving a Marxist's true desires: Ruling over the working class as a professional freeloader.

[telltaletypist]

I feel like some of the anons you're getting are more objecting to saying pirating the $10 indie game you want is good rather than the idea of getting rid of copywrite laws. I agree copywrite laws are stupid and don't help anyone but massive corporations, but I also don't think you're inherently entitled to someone else's labor for free in a world where you need money or you die. If we were in a place where everyone's needs were met no matter what it'd be a different story.

i think this is born out of a misinterpreting a transaction as compensation for labor instead of the moment labor power becomes profit. the idea that we have a moral obligation to participate in the exchange of commodities, and that this obligation supersedes your right to access art and information, is bourgeois morality. the proletariat by definition, does not profit from the exchange of commodities and has no obligation to spend any more than is necessary to keep themselves alive.

[gypbitch]

I’m on Pinterest looking for recipes and low and behold

Oh look a knight in shining armor

[your-worst-boy]

We are not enemies.

Aim your focus upwards, not beside you.