Your taxes are individualized. Your economic output is collectivized and socialized. It feels too abstract and impersonal. Class consciousness, I think, would change something important about that.
What a stupid post. Obviously the type of right-leaning people that complain about taxes don’t believe in exploitation of labor in the Marxist sense. It’s when you hear those Christians ask “why do atheists hate god?” because they’re so caught in their ideology they can’t conceive in people thinking differently than them.
Pretty sure the goal of the graphic is to agitate and spark conversation around the premise it fronts, not simply convey the entirety of the Law of Value in a 2 second meme.
You can’t prove god exists with a pen and paper
Because the first two are quantifiable and the other is not. I don’t have issue with my labor outweighing my compensation just like I don’t expect retailers to sell at cost.
Marx dedicated his life to showing that surplus value extraction can be relatively quantified. Emprically, prices and Marx’s Value show strong correlation:
“…the results of the studies we cited above, in combination with the results on the structure of prices in the Greek economy, provide substantial evidence for the empirical strength of the labour theory of value. The latter appears to be a very useful analytical tool for the study of the behavior of a typical capitalist economy.”
The graphic asks “me” why. Maybe I’m uninformed or misunderstanding but those are my reasons why.
You can simply look up the average labour-productivity per hour in a country and the average hourly wage in that country.
That’s fair, the graphic is intentionally being accusatory. Its purpose is to agitate, of course, and asking the viewer to question is the method. If you want to get into Marxist economics, I recommend Wage Labor and Capital as well as Wages, Price and Profit. These two combined are far shorter and less complex than Capital, so they are great for beginners if you decide to learn more.
I also have an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can check out if you want to get a more thorough understanding of Marxism-Leninism in general.
Rate of exploitation is quantifiable.
read gramsci. it’s a pain in the ass but it explains a lot.
I think Marx is a faster path to understanding surplus value extraction (or perhaps economics textbooks from the USSR/PRC), but people should read Gramsci as well because he has a lot to add to Marxism.
