Surplus value is not stolen, it's payment for the boss' work

Slavery was legal and moral according to the logic of the slave-holding systems.

Proles in capacity as technical labor, capitalist in capacity as sharers in the benefits of surplus labor.

People with investments, including 401Ks, are getting shares in surplus value, so there's a modest sense in which they are capitalists. Liberals in the 1960s argued this sort of thing would eventually make socialism irrelevant.

The critique of capitalism isn't about capitalists though. It's a critique of inherent exploitation in a class-based social structure. Capitalist and proletarian are both trapped by this structure. Obviously one is more sympathetic than the other, but the issue is really the logic and coercion of capitalist socio-economic forces.

How stupid are you, anarkid?

The critique isn't fucking exploitation. It's alienation and irrationality, of which exploitation is but one aspect of.

Christ, do you people even read Marx?

He sure does a lot of work if he takes everyone's surplus.

It's not about work, Marx himself says this. The surplus skimming is the capitalist's reward for his risk. That's how the system works, that's how it incentivizes the generation of new desires and products to meet new desires, create new markets, etc.

The risk isn't some fake thing, it's real, and the only reason anyone takes it is precisely because it can have such a huge reward.

Alienation is only an aspect of the valorization of capital. It's barely even a mechanism in Marx.

Marx criticizes the logic of the system, which he calls anarchic in the non-philosophical sense.

Irrationality? The entire critique is based on the internal logic of the system. He did consider it an irrational way to order society, but that was secondary to his critique of the economic bases of capitalism, which were rooted in exploitation, which was itself rooted in the labor theory of value, which is the abstraction that capitalism primarily runs on.

Pls stop turning Marx into an idealist.

...

The idealist here is you.

Please go read up on what the theory of alienation is, seriously. Alienation isn't a mechanism, you dumb fuck; it's a state of being and relating.

Gee, what is that called? Oh, irrational.

No, the economic root of capitalism isn't rooted in exploitation. Exploitation is one form of capital valorization, yet capital can accumulate even in a completely horizontal structure, hence why coops are capable of profitability. Can you learn some basic theory, son?

Kapitalism 101 is right that way->

A.W.: rude (and drunk?)

He is right though.

Morals and Laws are in accordans to the socioeconomic system.
This is the very reason we cannot discuss socialism, anarchism or communism under capitalist terms and morals.

You are right too, and one does not exclude the other.
BUT!

Not without regulations and so on. Capitalism needs its contradictions. In order for one shark to get bigger, it has to not only eat other fish but also other sharks.

Capitalism is based on endless profit. This is not realistic.

And unless everything is coops, coops are doomed to be absorbed by conglomerates or be too small to be important.

Exploitation is not the only, but the most effective way of profit.

If the boss was doing productive work they would be generating at least as much profit as their salary consumes. The fact that they need to take a top-up from the value created by the employees only proves that the boss is over-paid.
If any other employee was creating less value than they got paid they'd be fired immediately.

Pretty sure he argues against this in volume one fam.

If anything workers take the big risks by 1. effectively giving the capitalist a loan in the form of labor which is performed prior to pay day 2. agreeing to tolerate health and safety risks, delaying demands for pay rises until the "entrepreneur" becomes established 3. being the subject of various forms of unpaid labor 4. bringing their own creativity, tools, personally bearing certain costs to the work process on the off-chance that they will be recognized and receive higher pay.

I'm sure there's more, you need to deepen your proletarian worldview, bucko. As Marx pointed out in the 1870s the father management is away from the actual process the higher their salaries tend to be. And likewise, the corporation is a form of collective property on the part of the bourgeois class, and in that case very rarely does some hardy individual take a huge personal risk.

Even in a case where some rugged individual gets a bank loan, its workers that do the bulk of saving by depositing what little of their earnings they have in the bank. So workers do the saving, borrowing capitalists take the risk and banks take a profit just by being there.

Even if a worker decides to become a capitalist by risking his own personal income: 1. he probably has a more fortunate position then the rest of the class that he is able to do this while being able to core his essentials 2. the profit rate of the business he enters needs to be high for him (since his endeavored capital is so small) in order to keep gainfully expanding the capital reproduction process.

Ever wonder why working class/lumpen "entrepreneurs" tend to choose drug-dealing or fencing stolen goods? High profits, low cost of entry. But even these enterprises are highly concentrated with your local street gang head, cartel, or chop shop making far more than the street hustlers.

Modern multi-national corporations and economies tend to be heavily "planned" precisely in order to keep the bourgeois class to avoid real risks.

The concept of" risk" is pretty subjective too, if I lose 95% of my income stream and I'm a billionaire? Well, it sucks but I'm still really rich.
If I'm on the minimum wage and invest 10% of my annual income in a project and it fails? That is an immense personal disaster with real deprivation involved.

No, it's objective. Look, one guy is sinking $30k, and you're sinking $60/day. If the business fails, the worker is out of work, but the business guy has a whopping debt and a bank ready to rip his ass open if he doesn't pay it back. Marx says the surplus the industrial capitalist makes is the necessary reward considering the way the system works. Is it a law that a single individual has to take this risk? No. You could have a much more sane system of spread costs, but that's what stocks were invented for anyway, hence why director's boards get a cut of the prize if there is any.

You're trying to maintain a moral spin to Marx that isn't there. Marx critiques the failure of bourgeois society to live up to bourgeois morality, but that's not the communist critique itself. If capitalism at least delivered on its promise of rising wealth for everyone, of being rational, and of not fucking crashing the material economy every two decades like a rock, even if the logical moral critique is in concept true almost no one would give a fuck.

Alienation only appears in the mature Marx's work in a sense whose reference is to the logic of commodity exchange. The worker alienates his ability to labour in selling it as the pseudo-commodity labour power. It is not a subjective state of being, or a sense of not appropriating one's activity. Marx is not saying that alienation is to be met by appropriating one's activity or rightfully taking ownership of the will–alienation is abolished when the conditions of production are no longer owned in opposition to labourers.

And you quite obviously haven't read Volume 3, which is tasked with necessarily connecting the rational logic of capital as expounded in Vol 1/2 to the irrational surface forms of Vol 3.

but that's besides the point

the marxist thinking goes

Volume 3 is Marx at his most idealist, it should be disregarded entirely.

If he was actually doing work, he could still do it alongside the rest of the workers without extracting surplus labour.
Dumb argument tbh.

The concept of alienation you describe is at no contradiction with the general alienation I mentioned. It is not a mechanism, even as you describe it. It's a state of being and relating. An self employed artisan does not have that alienation, yet is under other forms of alienation such as compulsion to compete, reduce labor time, produce what others want and not what they want, etc. That does not in any way make it subjective.

That a worker does not get to control the products of their labor isn't really important. In the current system the worker also has no hand in acquiring any of the means of production, only using them in their portion of the production process. This form of alienation is the least of alienation's problems, and is a form that cannot be gotten rid of until star trek communism.

Your account of alienation, if it was all there was to it, basically makes it a pointless point. Alienation is only meaningful because of its being a corruption, lack, and stunting of the developing of human essence and powers. If it's just that Joe and Maria don't get to decide what to do with their rubber ducky produced in the hundreds of thousands at their factory, well, I couldn't give a fuck and basically no one else either.

False premise.

Surplus value is extracted from the fact that wages are set according to the living standards necessary to "reproduce" the type of worker
(the more capital that went into qualifying the worker for his position the higher the wage)
and not according to the value produced or even to the market value of the commodity.

What work? The boss only really works out the competition between one workplace and another, and organises where shit goes.

Workers can do this themselves tbh. Bosses aren't necessary.

If the "boss" of a company is actually doing work, then he is also a worker. He can continue to have involvement with the organization, doing the work he does, like any other worker.

If the boss is not also a worker, then he does not work. Goodbye bosses.

Do capitalists stop receiving rent on their land, dividends on their stocks, interest on their loans or payouts from their trust funds if they stop working? Obviously not. The capitalist receives the surplus regardless of if he does an ounce of work ever. What you have is clearly a property relation, not a work relation.

Prove it

youtube.com/watch?v=2Fg2akSUvFM

There are too many examples to give you.

The boss is over payed.

I'm not against the idea that there is a figure that overlooks and organizes the workplace, but he should have a salary like anyone else.

The profit goes to the capitalist because he has the "right" of private property over the company, not because of his work. In advanced capitalist societies, most of the work of management, accounting, selling, etc. is made by wage laborers.

Profit is used to buy property. Property generates profit. This vicious circle must be broken by destroying the idea that people have a "right" to own a piece of the productive system. We live in a modern, interlinked economic system, and this system should be managed democratically.

the boss does nothing that cannot be done by the workers themselves, they are over paid in proportion of workload and steal most of the value produced by the workers.