Thank you professor for presenting hursh reality that i live in my workplace for over 30 years! that competition as a worker has really made my life a living hell!.
From the physical perspective, the surplus is possible because Earth, as a thermodynamic system, is not closed. There is an external energy source, which can be harnessed in a natural way and used to produce more than producers consume. That energy source is called Sun. Btw, it powers (directly or indirectly) all processes on Earth, including life.
Mr. Wolff. With all due respect The surplus will always go for the top dogs. Greed triumphs everything in most countries. I wish the 1960's could come back, but they are gone for good. :(
They only get what we give. When Class consciousness spreads, the “guillotines” will be built. Heads don’t have to literally roll, i am open to ideas… but flattening the hierarchies and expanding participation can and will prevent the rise of a new ruling class. It wont be efficient, it wont be quick, the plumber will take a month to fix your pipes… but anything is better than a king. When your plumber is fixing your pipes on time, but at gun point and threat of eviction… was it worth it?? Some times you just have to fix it your damn self if it matters so much - and luckily you will have the free time when having a roof over your head does not require you to do as your boss says 70 hours a week.
Stop longing for time in memoriam. Start building mutual aid networks in your community, join a local org, get involved with local politics. If there isn't something start something.
@Duressed Dan I live in Alabama, but many around the world and in America are trying. Listen to the Real News Network, Chris Hedges, and the others there. Ralph Nader on Saturday, Democracy Now. Many are trying to with great independent journalists, around the world, and here in America. Global Justice is another one. Amid Sengupta from India, Realifelore, also. Whitney Webb is an American journalist that lives in Argentina and has written a book about Jeffrey Epstein and all those connections with the powers of our elites. Glenn Greenwald is also an American who lives in Brazi that broke the Snowden story. I get all these on UA-cam, I will not use Facebook, Instagram, Tic Toc, or anything that the technocrats come out with. These sights will take one too many others fighting for justice and human rights.❤️ One more, Lee Camp, a comedian with great intelligence and many independent journalists, and writers also.
There is a fairly straightforward way to determine how much surplus is available to pay for desired public goods and circumstances and perhaps distribution as a universal basic income. The solution is to require all who wish to control any part of nature (i.e., any land or other natural asset) to compete against others by a bidding process for annual control. The amount that would be captured for public purposes is what the political economists called "rent," and rent is essentially a surplus that comes to the lessee based on the potential output from the same quantity and quality of labor and capital goods applied to nature. The lessee is essentially compensating society for whatever natural advantage is enjoyed.
That's a pretty miserable view of life: spending your life working and then you die. Most Americans seem to subscribe to this, though I don't know whatever happened to the old "stop and smell the roses," or "work to live, not live to work."
Very cogent and understandable explanation. A tragic example of "surplus" is Amazon's return policies. They have a practice of disposing of their "surplus" by taking it to waste management facilities to destroy. Besides the effect on the environment, the goods could better be given to the WORKERS, or donating to people in need.
@@robertasirgutz8800 Was it big on twitter? Because I know a guy, that knows a guy, that said it was all russian disinformation. But thanks for sharing all that detail...I'll be sure to give all the attention it deserves.
@@jgalt308 I see you've been busy replying with objections to Professor Wolff's explanation of what "Surplus"is and does. By nature, corporations are extremely opaque regarding their balance sheets. He's calling out for a more just, and less desperate society. This can be a way to repair an increasingly fractious and polarized America.
I would like him to go live in a country that matches his belief and see if he thinks it’s better after a few years of experiencing it. Let’s sponsor his 2 year trip to Cuba!
I don't know if he could handle that mentally, as he would have to confront all that "planned obsolescence"...that still seems to be working there. You would think that the people who deliberately designed things to stop working would have been better at their job.
There are no other countries. US is the boss, in all of the West. They might not like it, but it's policies always get implemented. It's going to stink wherever you go. All top down economic policy, rewards politicians and the corporations that support them.
The struggle for the surplus began with the first farm. Every civilization has created a surplus and then fought about who gets what. This conflict is inherent to property. And you can go back through all those dead civilizations and what you'll find is a small group of people controlling who gets what, and "abusing" the surplus, by giving most of it those themselves. Has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism... It's a problem inherent to property itself.
X-Files Humans vs. Alien Vampires Economic growth measures the rapid rate at which the hostile alien vampires (greed) are sucking the joy out of life and devouring the planet. Not progress. Profits measure the amount of darkness (greed) that a vampires giant a**hole in space called "ego" posseses. Not brilliance. Lots of expensive yachts, rockets and things measure the pride and imagination of a vampires ego. Not intelligence. Unlike earthling poets, artists, musicians, mystics, human beings and creators of joy...the capitalist counting corpses that rule US can't create harmony (real intelligence) because vampires (greed) are ignorant (dead). Vampires (greed) who suck the joy out of life have joined the zombies who eat the futures of their children. Zombie Apocalypse is here and happening now.
The taxex (all taxes, not just income tax) are designed to relocate the surplus out of the rich and to give to all members of the community. This can have any form from police, firefighters, building roads, etc. etc...In that sense taxes do not become surplus, they distribute it to whole community. - Master of Finance
It seems it almost doesn’t matter whom or what it is as capitalism will always find a way to exploit it, unless you’re at the top of the class food chain
THE CAPITALIST'S PROFIT (SURPLUS) FULLY DEPENDS ON THE PRICE AT WHICH A COMMODITY IS SOLD. IT IS UNDISPUTED THAT CONSUMER DEMAND PUTS THE PRICE TAG ON THE PRODUCTS. SUCH DEMAND IS INDEPENDENT FROM THE AMOUNT OF LABOR PUT INTO THE PRODUCT SO THAT, IF CONSUMERS DO NOT LIKE THE PRODUCT AND BUY IT, IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MUCH LABOR WENT INTO IT. THUS, PROFIT IS DUE TO CONSUMER DEMAND, NOT LABOR. LABOR JUST MAKES PROFIT POSSIBLE BUT SO DO CAPITAL, BUSINESS ACUMEN OF THE CAPITALIST AND RAW MATERIALS. WHY SHOULD THE CAPITALIST DECIDE HOW TO DISTRIBUTES THE PROFIT IS THE REAL QUESTION. PEOPLE ASSUME THAT SUCH A DECISION BELONGS THE CAPITALIST. PERHAPS SUCH CONCLUSION SHOULD NOT BE ASSUMED BT DEBATED. THAT IS WHY WORKER COOPS ARE CONSIDERED MORE EQUITABLE THAN THE TRADITIONAL CAPITALIST ENTERPRISE.
Your explanation of Capitalism is completely flawed. It is based on the premise that an 18 year old, who just started doing a job, should get payed the same as someone who had been doing that work for 20 years. Or that if field hands are picking fruit by hand, and you come along with the idea that using a stick will double their productivity, you should get nothing for your insights because you did non of the "work". These are perfect examples of why Marxism not only failed but will always fail. Being someone who works harder, smarter, and saves more are not rewarded in your nirvana. What you see in American, and the rest of the West for instance is NOT capitalism. It is simple fascism at best.
A life where you are both time poor and money poor is a terrible one. It's America, you're a wage slave or debt slave or both. I'm tired to surplus being eaten up by greed! A businesses that creates jobs can not function without workers. Perhaps a small business can but most businesses wouldn't be able to make the $ they make without cogs running the wheel. Why deny people the ability to thrive and live!
That's not hard to figure out. All it takes is a group of people that think they know what's best for everyone and have the authority to act on it. This is called government...and it decided in 1933 to give you "fiat" money... Now you can promise all kinds of things, because all you have to do is print the money...and the rest is history.
The most charitable assessment of capitalism is as another system that achieves the surplus society requires; meanwhile, simultaneously, the distribution and utilization of capitalist surplus remains its most devastating condemnation, including is clearly not an acceptable system. The sustainability protocols of eco-socialism identifies vastly different calculus and metrics.
That only works with state socialism. Under cooperative capitalism, each cooperative firm gets to keep their profits and decide what to do with them. They may just as well hoard them just like the capitalists do now. Coops are private property, would a coop agree to a state tax on profits of 95%? A few might, but most wont. So, a Wolf system is no different than capitalism.
In Capitalism we are not talking about the surplus of real real resources, they are talking about Capitalism’s arbitrage by the operation of the mathematician’s exponential function rather than real growth of our ecological base. They are talking about inflating numbers based on mathematical operations. This is something that NO one explains. The mathematicians are making up numbers out of thin air and then applying mathematical operations to them, namely the exponential function. This is not reality. This is a delusion. We are delusional. Humans are on the way out there’s no doubt about it. I do not see a way out of this madness.
So why don''t you tell us, what percentage of any company's gross income is net profit? You can search this by industry for averages, or by company if it is public. While it is common to hear that a company made this much profit...or this much more profit...why is it never presented as a percentage of the total operating expenses it took to produce that profit?
@@jgalt308 I wish all externalities could be included in any balance sheet. Corporate accountants ignore all kinds of obvious knock on effects because the laws they bought don't force them to.
@@jgalt308 Impacts to public health (i.e. tobacco) and the dismantling of public transportation by auto manufacturers to name two. Your username indicates a mighty effort needed to remove the weight of your preconceived notions.
@@areed2000 And your contribution to those externalities is what? Your 20/20 hindsight morality is touching, but here you are...consuming all those things while you preach that everyone should not. Anyway getting back to the original question, what percentage of the gross operating expenses is the net profit that you think represents a lion's share of the surplus?...as the labor has been paid, already. What part of those externalities should we deduct from their wages? Do you have any idea what percentage of a stock price is returned in dividends on a yearly basis? Or how many stocks actually pay dividends? It would be nice if you had some facts to accompany your claims...but you don't. What is available to you is all the evidence of the consequences of the idea that it is the government's job to fix things...which they have been engaged in, in earnest since 1929...which is how you got here...and you still have no clue how or what happened or when. To give you an example of reality, total health care expenditures for 2018 were 3.5 Trillion. The Private healthcare portion of this was 750 billion, and the net profit was 24 billion which represents 3.2 % of the total. In that year "medical error" was officially the third leading cause of death...although the real number is way higher. Now I don't know what kind of externalities you want to assign to that, but the private part only accounts for 21% of the total market...and you can verify the numbers easily enough all you have to do is look. ( and the consequences of medical error are not confined to just death as far more are injured and we won't even get into what the pandemic did to those numbers. ) So, what does your 20/20 crystal ball hindsight have to offer on this subject. Our Professor has declared that capitalism wasn't prepared for it...but that would only be again 21% of the market. What should they have done? Had more masks that didn't work available? More respirators, that if needed resulted ended in death anyway? Had a vaccine ready for a virus created in a lab that escaped? More lockdowns of people not at risk which disrupted the economy? None of this was "capitalism"...and what did happen was all government and a population that was driven mad with fear...and some still are...and this stuff is still going on with more to come. What does your crystal ball have to say?
I find it hard to believe that a man with a PhD in economics from an Ivy League college cannot understand the simple principle of risk vs reward. Capitalists have their own problems: Overbearing regulations, taxes, insurance premiums, theft by employees, unproductive employees whom they cannot terminate, workers compensation abuses, lawsuits by employees, lawsuits from public interest groups and competition from other capitalists. Capitalists risk capital that they have invested, and many of them actually lose that capital. After 10 years, only 30% of entrepreneurs are still in business. This is why they are entitled to the surplus value of their employees’ labor provided that they paid the legal minimum wage, do not endanger their employees, protect their employees from illegal behavior of other employees and do not engage in anti-competitive behavior. What is so difficult to understand that risk vs reward is relevant to how much skin you have in the game.
Why do you think that the business owner is the only one taking a risk? And why should they get special treatment just because they are taking a risk? Gamblers take risks all the time. When they lose they lose. When big boy capitalists lose, the government steps in a bails them out. Where's the risk in that?
@@blogintonblakley2708 I know you don't like data and facts but here you go. Data from the BLS shows that approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. NO ONE bails out small business owners.
Always nice to hear from a non-producer explaining how those that make the production of everything possible, telling us that the employees are the ones responsible for the production employers make possible. Those that can't do...preach! And someday, and that day may NEVER come,, he will actually understand what capitalism is, who the actual capitalists are, what the word profit means, and a lot of other words, he still doesn't understand. WARNING!!!!!! we shall now hear from the "willfully ignorant, functionally illiterates" so described, who will insist on confirming the description, while having no relevant response or argument to what has been written.
Always nice to hear your idiotic nonsense and get a good yuck out of it. Teaching is one of the most valuable and important jobs of the working class producers. Of course, you know nothing about that, since you are nothing but a poorly programmed Ayn Rand AI bot that consistently posts illogical, off topic rants that flunk the Turing Test every time.
WARNING!!!!!! we have heard from the "willfully ignorant, functionally illiterates" so described, who insisted on confirming the description, while having no relevant response or argument to what has been written. Still proving he can't read and he doesn't know what the words mean. So what did one "willfully ignorant, functionally illiterate," say to the other "willfully ignorant, functionally illiterate"? Kevin Schmidt 1/31/23 12 hours ago @YTCensors Speaking of being quiet, bringing up AI trolls and complaining about them is off-topic. Better to respond directly to the trolls' comments with rational replies and discredit them that way. and the juvenile, repetitive, unimaginative babble will continue...wait for it...wait for it...
@@jgalt308 Like a broken record, the poorly programmed Ayn Rand AI bot continues to cut and paste childishly formed comments that never, ever are rational or on topic.
@@jgalt308 Ayn Rand was a terrible writer. She desperately needed an editor and for someone to tell her to lay off the soft-core adult content. I thought it was pretty cool when I was 14, but then I grew up.
I do not agree at all with what is said in this video, and I belong to the working class. The presenter maintains that employers keep the surplus produced by their employees, and speaks as if employers had played no role in the production of that surplus, and that is false and nonsense. I am a good worker, but not an entrepreneur, and without the ideas, planning, and investment of entrepreneurs, I simply would not have a good paying job. Free competition is the engine of development and without it societies become impoverished. It is true that industrial and technological development, result of free competition, has a negative side (pollution, global warming, etc.), but the day that a huge asteroid threatens the existence of our planet, it will be precisely the technological development promoted by capitalism and free competition, the one that will offer us the possibility of surviving as a species. Planet Earth will one day inexorably disappear.
I'm sure RW knows the owner does a little for that business, if they're the founder. If they're not the founder, I'm not sure what they do. But sure, let's give founders credit where credit is due. I want to be fair. As for later owners, ehh, in many cases they don't contribute a whole heck of a lot. Most if not all of the thinking and planning and labor is carried out by the employees. And this is true of any business no matter where you go. Therefore it's wrong to allow owners to take home most of the profits. Even if they were the founder, they didn't earn them all. Workers at all levels deserve both a decent wage AND A PROFIT SHARE. After all, without the workers THERE IS NO BUSINESS. So yes owners deserve credit for something, and the employees deserve credit for what they do. One example of of a profit split would be: owner/founder- 35% Workers - 65% (remember that this has to be divided among all of them- so the owner is still going to have the majority split by far) Workers are getting cheated of their profit share every day. It's a sweet deal for owners, not so much for workers. Owners do deserve their share, just not all of it. If you want to put down your role as an employee that's your choice. But wherever I work I'm always considering better ways of doing things. Most jobs have some built-in level of micro-decisionmaking in them. To imply employees don't need to use their heads along with their hands when they work is just ignorant. Most jobs take a mixture of both. Workers of all levels are the ones interacting with the public or patients, making moment by moment decisions, who have the necessary skills that make the business/school/hospital/office work. Most managers (and forget about overpaid empty suit execs) would be lost without their mid-level and first level workers. So not only are you giving yourself short shrift, you're giving the rest of us short shrift as well. Don't do that. It's easy to be a manager, and even easier to waste space as an executive. It's much harder to actually do the work/teach the class/ care for the patient. Get it???
Just to add, I don't feel competition in the private market is necessary and I deny it leads to a higher quality overall. Sometimes it leads to cheaper products that fail sooner so they'll need to be replaced aka planned obsolescence. I don't mind if there's more than one kind of supplier or producer per industry, that's all well and good, but I don't see economic competition as some great benefit, but often a hindrance. I don't mind a basic private sector, but trying to be too greedy or out-compete one's so-called competition leads to bad business practices and harmful behavior. When it comes to consumer goods a private market works fine, but in a situation such as a space project or a major public works project, or seeking medical advances, being able to share knowledge and ideas freely becomes much more important. I believe humans do their best work when they collaborate and share what they know. This is why I oppose most forms of IP, because I feel it places an unjustifiable restriction on access to knowledge, including the mediums of knowledge or entertainment.
SURPLUS IS DIFFICULT IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE GIVEN THE SUBJECTIVE IMPACT OF MARKETS ON PRICE AND, THUS, THE IMPACTON THE CONCEPT OF VALUE. WHAT IS REALLY UNDENIABLE IS THAT THE CAPITALISTS ARE OUT TO PAY THE LEAST POSSIBLE WAGES POSSIBLE GIVEN THE DEMAND FOR LABOR IN THE LABOR MARKET. THIS IN TURN MAKES IT DIFFICULT IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE WAGE EARNERS TO BUY THE HUGE AMOUNT OF CRAP PRODUCED BY THE CAPITALISTS. THE ONLY WAY TO PURCHASE IS DEBT AND DEBT ACCUMULATES AND DEPRESSES CONSUMPTION. THIS, IN TURN, CREATES ECONOMIC CRISES OR DOWNTURNS. THIS IS THE BASIC INTERNAL INCOHERENCE OF CAPITALISM. THE OTHER BASIC CONTRADICTION IS THAT THE COMPETITORS IN THE MARKET SEEK TO ELIMINATE COMPETITION AND BECOME A MONOPOLY WHICH CAUSES INFLATION. THE THIRD MALFUNCTION OF CAPITALISM IS THAT THE FINANCE BUSINESS IS A RENTIER ACTIVITY THAT CAUSES ASSET BUBBLES THAT BURST AND INITIATE DOWNTURNS. CAPITALISM HAS SO MANY DANGERS THAT IT IS NOT EVEN FUNNY.
Thank you professor for presenting hursh reality that i live in my workplace for over 30 years! that competition as a worker has really made my life a living hell!.
Keep up the amazing job professor, we are with you
Thank you every day, Professor Wolff for teaching all of us with your extensive knowledge of economics.
Great video. Hits THE core issue -- Who controls the surplus?
This is beautifully explained using bread and a penknife in a book called the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
Gracias
The way Prof says “Some people are babies” was so funny. Cmon babies! Pull your weight already
From the physical perspective, the surplus is possible because Earth, as a thermodynamic system, is not closed. There is an external energy source, which can be harnessed in a natural way and used to produce more than producers consume. That energy source is called Sun. Btw, it powers (directly or indirectly) all processes on Earth, including life.
Mr. Wolff. With all due respect The surplus will always go for the top dogs. Greed triumphs everything in most countries. I wish the 1960's could come back, but they are gone for good. :(
They only get what we give. When Class consciousness spreads, the “guillotines” will be built. Heads don’t have to literally roll, i am open to ideas… but flattening the hierarchies and expanding participation can and will prevent the rise of a new ruling class.
It wont be efficient, it wont be quick, the plumber will take a month to fix your pipes… but anything is better than a king.
When your plumber is fixing your pipes on time, but at gun point and threat of eviction… was it worth it?? Some times you just have to fix it your damn self if it matters so much - and luckily you will have the free time when having a roof over your head does not require you to do as your boss says 70 hours a week.
Stop longing for time in memoriam. Start building mutual aid networks in your community, join a local org, get involved with local politics. If there isn't something start something.
@Duressed Dan
I live in Alabama, but many around the world and in America are trying.
Listen to the Real News Network, Chris Hedges, and the others there.
Ralph Nader on Saturday, Democracy Now. Many are trying to with great independent journalists, around the world, and here in America. Global Justice is another one. Amid Sengupta from India, Realifelore, also. Whitney Webb is an American journalist that lives in Argentina and has written a book about Jeffrey Epstein and all those connections with the powers of our elites. Glenn Greenwald is also an American who lives in Brazi that broke the Snowden story.
I get all these on UA-cam, I will not use Facebook, Instagram, Tic Toc, or anything that the technocrats come out with. These sights will take one too many others fighting for justice and human rights.❤️
One more, Lee Camp, a comedian with great intelligence and many independent journalists, and writers also.
There is a fairly straightforward way to determine how much surplus is available to pay for desired public goods and circumstances and perhaps distribution as a universal basic income. The solution is to require all who wish to control any part of nature (i.e., any land or other natural asset) to compete against others by a bidding process for annual control. The amount that would be captured for public purposes is what the political economists called "rent," and rent is essentially a surplus that comes to the lessee based on the potential output from the same quantity and quality of labor and capital goods applied to nature. The lessee is essentially compensating society for whatever natural advantage is enjoyed.
That's a pretty miserable view of life: spending your life working and then you die.
Most Americans seem to subscribe to this, though I don't know whatever happened to the old "stop and smell the roses," or "work to live, not live to work."
Very cogent and understandable explanation. A tragic example of "surplus" is Amazon's return policies. They have a practice of disposing of their "surplus" by taking it to waste management facilities to destroy. Besides the effect on the environment, the goods could better be given to the WORKERS, or donating to people in need.
And you know this how?
@@jgalt308 Unless you've been living under a rock, the practice has been revealed in the media, social media and by actual Amazon workers.
Explore.
@@robertasirgutz8800 Was it big on twitter? Because I know a guy, that knows a guy,
that said it was all russian disinformation.
But thanks for sharing all that detail...I'll be sure to give all the
attention it deserves.
@@jgalt308 I see you've been busy replying with objections to Professor Wolff's explanation of what "Surplus"is and does. By nature, corporations are extremely opaque regarding their balance sheets.
He's calling out for a more just, and less desperate society. This can be a way to repair an increasingly fractious and polarized America.
@@robertasirgutz8800 Well then he needs to wake up to the fact that is not capitalism
that's the problem, nor is socialism the solution.
To me the entrepreneur is the guy who sells you a three legged horse and tells you it’s a racehorse.
I would like him to go live in a country that matches his belief and see if he thinks it’s better after a few years of experiencing it. Let’s sponsor his 2 year trip to Cuba!
US sanctions are Cuba's problem.
I don't know if he could handle that mentally, as he would have to confront
all that "planned obsolescence"...that still seems to be working there.
You would think that the people who deliberately designed things to stop working
would have been better at their job.
There are no other countries. US is the boss, in all of the West. They might not like it, but it's policies always get implemented. It's going to stink wherever you go. All top down economic policy, rewards politicians and the corporations that support them.
The struggle for the surplus began with the first farm. Every civilization has created a surplus and then fought about who gets what. This conflict is inherent to property. And you can go back through all those dead civilizations and what you'll find is a small group of people controlling who gets what, and "abusing" the surplus, by giving most of it those themselves.
Has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism... It's a problem inherent to property itself.
Is there a mathematical model for the Surplus Value?
X-Files
Humans vs. Alien Vampires
Economic growth measures the rapid rate at which the hostile alien vampires (greed) are sucking the joy out of life and devouring the planet. Not progress.
Profits measure the amount of darkness (greed) that a vampires giant a**hole in space called "ego" posseses. Not brilliance.
Lots of expensive yachts, rockets and things measure the pride and imagination of a vampires ego. Not intelligence.
Unlike earthling poets, artists, musicians, mystics, human beings and creators of joy...the capitalist counting corpses that rule US can't create harmony (real intelligence) because vampires (greed) are ignorant (dead).
Vampires (greed) who suck the joy out of life have joined the zombies who eat the futures of their children.
Zombie Apocalypse is here and happening now.
Vampire capitalism.
Do state income tax become surplus?
The taxex (all taxes, not just income tax) are designed to relocate the surplus out of the rich and to give to all members of the community. This can have any form from police, firefighters, building roads, etc. etc...In that sense taxes do not become surplus, they distribute it to whole community.
- Master of Finance
It seems it almost doesn’t matter whom or what it is as capitalism will always find a way to exploit it, unless you’re at the top of the class food chain
THE CAPITALIST'S PROFIT (SURPLUS) FULLY DEPENDS ON THE PRICE AT WHICH A COMMODITY IS SOLD. IT IS UNDISPUTED THAT CONSUMER DEMAND PUTS THE PRICE TAG ON THE PRODUCTS. SUCH DEMAND IS INDEPENDENT FROM THE AMOUNT OF LABOR PUT INTO THE PRODUCT SO THAT, IF CONSUMERS DO NOT LIKE THE PRODUCT AND BUY IT, IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MUCH LABOR WENT INTO IT. THUS, PROFIT IS DUE TO CONSUMER DEMAND, NOT LABOR. LABOR JUST MAKES PROFIT POSSIBLE BUT SO DO CAPITAL, BUSINESS ACUMEN OF THE CAPITALIST AND RAW MATERIALS. WHY SHOULD THE CAPITALIST DECIDE HOW TO DISTRIBUTES THE PROFIT IS THE REAL QUESTION. PEOPLE ASSUME THAT SUCH A DECISION BELONGS THE CAPITALIST. PERHAPS SUCH CONCLUSION SHOULD NOT BE ASSUMED BT DEBATED. THAT IS WHY WORKER COOPS ARE CONSIDERED MORE EQUITABLE THAN THE TRADITIONAL CAPITALIST ENTERPRISE.
the abratrage is the bases for profit
Thanks as always Prof Wolff!
#LearnMMT everyone!
Your explanation of Capitalism is completely flawed. It is based on the premise that an 18 year old, who just started doing a job, should get payed the same as someone who had been doing that work for 20 years. Or that if field hands are picking fruit by hand, and you come along with the idea that using a stick will double their productivity, you should get nothing for your insights because you did non of the "work". These are perfect examples of why Marxism not only failed but will always fail. Being someone who works harder, smarter, and saves more are not rewarded in your nirvana. What you see in American, and the rest of the West for instance is NOT capitalism. It is simple fascism at best.
A life where you are both time poor and money poor is a terrible one. It's America, you're a wage slave or debt slave or both. I'm tired to surplus being eaten up by greed! A businesses that creates jobs can not function without workers. Perhaps a small business can but most businesses wouldn't be able to make the $ they make without cogs running the wheel. Why deny people the ability to thrive and live!
That's not hard to figure out. All it takes is a group of people that think they
know what's best for everyone and have the authority to act on it.
This is called government...and it decided in 1933 to give you "fiat" money...
Now you can promise all kinds of things, because all you have to do is
print the money...and the rest is history.
WILL SURPLUS DISSAPEAR WHEN ROBOTS TAKE OVER T FROM WORKERS?
Quite the contrary, there will be more surplus, since robots cost less than workers
money is just man made poop
The most charitable assessment of capitalism is as another system that achieves the surplus society requires; meanwhile, simultaneously, the distribution and utilization of capitalist surplus remains its most devastating condemnation, including is clearly not an acceptable system. The sustainability protocols of eco-socialism identifies vastly different calculus and metrics.
arbitrage
Communism is a perfect example of people being talked in to things that are not in their best interest.
Communiism is only as good as the people running it....kinda like CAPITALISM!
That only works with state socialism. Under cooperative capitalism, each cooperative firm gets to keep their profits and decide what to do with them. They may just as well hoard them just like the capitalists do now. Coops are private property, would a coop agree to a state tax on profits of 95%? A few might, but most wont. So, a Wolf system is no different than capitalism.
Maybe Wolff makes a few good points. But he is such a downer that i just ca’t listen to him.
In Capitalism we are not talking about the surplus of real real resources, they are talking about Capitalism’s
arbitrage by the operation of the mathematician’s exponential function rather than real growth of our
ecological base. They are talking about inflating numbers based on mathematical operations.
This is something that NO one explains. The mathematicians are making up numbers out of thin air and then
applying mathematical operations to them, namely the exponential function. This is not reality. This is a
delusion. We are delusional. Humans are on the way out there’s no doubt about it. I do not see a way out of
this madness.
RISK VS REWARD ...Go back to school professor..
RISK vs cemetery too.
Even if you believe that Capitalists deserve some portion of the surplus, there is no way they are owed the lion's share.
So why don''t you tell us, what percentage of any company's gross income is net profit?
You can search this by industry for averages, or by company if it is public.
While it is common to hear that a company made this much profit...or this much
more profit...why is it never presented as a percentage of the total operating
expenses it took to produce that profit?
@@jgalt308 I wish all externalities could be included in any balance sheet. Corporate accountants ignore all kinds of obvious knock on effects because the laws they bought don't force them to.
@@areed2000 And what would they be????
@@jgalt308 Impacts to public health (i.e. tobacco) and the dismantling of public transportation by auto manufacturers to name two. Your username indicates a mighty effort needed to remove the weight of your preconceived notions.
@@areed2000 And your contribution to those externalities is what?
Your 20/20 hindsight morality is touching, but here you are...consuming all
those things while you preach that everyone should not.
Anyway getting back to the original question, what percentage of the
gross operating expenses is the net profit that you think represents a lion's
share of the surplus?...as the labor has been paid, already. What part of those
externalities should we deduct from their wages?
Do you have any idea what percentage of a stock price is returned in dividends
on a yearly basis? Or how many stocks actually pay dividends?
It would be nice if you had some facts to accompany your claims...but you don't.
What is available to you is all the evidence of the consequences of the idea
that it is the government's job to fix things...which they have been engaged in, in earnest
since 1929...which is how you got here...and you still have no clue how or what happened
or when.
To give you an example of reality, total health care expenditures for 2018 were 3.5 Trillion.
The Private healthcare portion of this was 750 billion, and the net profit was 24 billion which
represents 3.2 % of the total. In that year "medical error" was officially the third leading
cause of death...although the real number is way higher.
Now I don't know what kind of externalities you want to assign to that, but the private
part only accounts for 21% of the total market...and you can verify the numbers easily enough
all you have to do is look. ( and the consequences of medical error are not confined
to just death as far more are injured and we won't even get into what the pandemic did
to those numbers. )
So, what does your 20/20 crystal ball hindsight have to offer on this subject.
Our Professor has declared that capitalism wasn't prepared for it...but that would
only be again 21% of the market.
What should they have done?
Had more masks that didn't work available?
More respirators, that if needed resulted ended in death anyway?
Had a vaccine ready for a virus created in a lab that escaped?
More lockdowns of people not at risk which disrupted the economy?
None of this was "capitalism"...and what did happen was all government
and a population that was driven mad with fear...and some still are...and
this stuff is still going on with more to come.
What does your crystal ball have to say?
I find it hard to believe that a man with a PhD in economics from an Ivy League college cannot understand the simple principle of risk vs reward. Capitalists have their own problems: Overbearing regulations, taxes, insurance premiums, theft by employees, unproductive employees whom they cannot terminate, workers compensation abuses, lawsuits by employees, lawsuits from public interest groups and competition from other capitalists. Capitalists risk capital that they have invested, and many of them actually lose that capital. After 10 years, only 30% of entrepreneurs are still in business. This is why they are entitled to the surplus value of their employees’ labor provided that they paid the legal minimum wage, do not endanger their employees, protect their employees from illegal behavior of other employees and do not engage in anti-competitive behavior. What is so difficult to understand that risk vs reward is relevant to how much skin you have in the game.
Sounds like nobody's happy, maybe we should just abandon this system.
And whoosh, you missed the point, went right past you while you were looking up your own backside and typing out the contents.
Why do you think that the business owner is the only one taking a risk? And why should they get special treatment just because they are taking a risk? Gamblers take risks all the time. When they lose they lose. When big boy capitalists lose, the government steps in a bails them out. Where's the risk in that?
Workers die on the job quite often in CAPITALIST AMERICA.
@@blogintonblakley2708 I know you don't like data and facts but here you go. Data from the BLS shows that approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. NO ONE bails out small business owners.
Always nice to hear from a non-producer explaining how those that
make the production of everything possible, telling us that the employees
are the ones responsible for the production employers make possible.
Those that can't do...preach!
And someday, and that day may NEVER come,, he will actually understand what
capitalism is, who the actual capitalists are, what the word profit means,
and a lot of other words, he still doesn't understand.
WARNING!!!!!! we shall now hear from the "willfully ignorant, functionally illiterates"
so described, who will insist on confirming the description, while having
no relevant response or argument to what has been written.
Always nice to hear your idiotic nonsense and get a good yuck out of it.
Teaching is one of the most valuable and important jobs of the working class producers. Of course, you know nothing about that, since you are nothing but a poorly programmed Ayn Rand AI bot that consistently posts illogical, off topic rants that flunk the Turing Test every time.
AYN RAND DIED ON WELFARE.
Objectivism is a religion, just like capitalism.
WARNING!!!!!! we have heard from the "willfully ignorant, functionally illiterates" so described,
who insisted on confirming the description, while having no relevant response
or argument to what has been written.
Still proving he can't read and he doesn't know what the words mean.
So what did one "willfully ignorant, functionally illiterate," say to the other
"willfully ignorant, functionally illiterate"?
Kevin Schmidt 1/31/23
12 hours ago
@YTCensors Speaking of being quiet, bringing up AI trolls and complaining about them is off-topic.
Better to respond directly to the trolls' comments with rational replies and discredit them that way.
and the juvenile, repetitive, unimaginative babble will continue...wait for it...wait for it...
@@jgalt308 Like a broken record, the poorly programmed Ayn Rand AI bot continues to cut and paste childishly formed comments that never, ever are rational or on topic.
@@jgalt308 Ayn Rand was a terrible writer. She desperately needed an editor and for someone to tell her to lay off the soft-core adult content. I thought it was pretty cool when I was 14, but then I grew up.
I do not agree at all with what is said in this video, and I belong to the working class. The presenter maintains that employers keep the surplus produced by their employees, and speaks as if employers had played no role in the production of that surplus, and that is false and nonsense.
I am a good worker, but not an entrepreneur, and without the ideas, planning, and investment of entrepreneurs, I simply would not have a good paying job. Free competition is the engine of development and without it societies become impoverished. It is true that industrial and technological development, result of free competition, has a negative side (pollution, global warming, etc.), but the day that a huge asteroid threatens the existence of our planet, it will be precisely the technological development promoted by capitalism and free competition, the one that will offer us the possibility of surviving as a species. Planet Earth will one day inexorably disappear.
I'm sure RW knows the owner does a little for that business, if they're the founder. If they're not the founder, I'm not sure what they do. But sure, let's give founders credit where credit is due. I want to be fair. As for later owners, ehh, in many cases they don't contribute a whole heck of a lot. Most if not all of the thinking and planning and labor is carried out by the employees. And this is true of any business no matter where you go. Therefore it's wrong to allow owners to take home most of the profits. Even if they were the founder, they didn't earn them all. Workers at all levels deserve both a decent wage AND A PROFIT SHARE. After all, without the workers THERE IS NO BUSINESS.
So yes owners deserve credit for something, and the employees deserve credit for what they do.
One example of of a profit split would be:
owner/founder- 35%
Workers - 65% (remember that this has to be divided among all of them- so the owner is still going to have the majority split by far)
Workers are getting cheated of their profit share every day. It's a sweet deal for owners, not so much for workers.
Owners do deserve their share, just not all of it.
If you want to put down your role as an employee that's your choice. But wherever I work I'm always considering better ways of doing things. Most jobs have some built-in level of micro-decisionmaking in them. To imply employees don't need to use their heads along with their hands when they work is just ignorant. Most jobs take a mixture of both. Workers of all levels are the ones interacting with the public or patients, making moment by moment decisions, who have the necessary skills that make the business/school/hospital/office work. Most managers (and forget about overpaid empty suit execs) would be lost without their mid-level and first level workers.
So not only are you giving yourself short shrift, you're giving the rest of us short shrift as well. Don't do that. It's easy to be a manager, and even easier to waste space as an executive. It's much harder to actually do the work/teach the class/ care for the patient. Get it???
Just to add, I don't feel competition in the private market is necessary and I deny it leads to a higher quality overall. Sometimes it leads to cheaper products that fail sooner so they'll need to be replaced aka planned obsolescence.
I don't mind if there's more than one kind of supplier or producer per industry, that's all well and good, but I don't see economic competition as some great benefit, but often a hindrance. I don't mind a basic private sector, but trying to be too greedy or out-compete one's so-called competition leads to bad business practices and harmful behavior.
When it comes to consumer goods a private market works fine, but in a situation such as a space project or a major public works project, or seeking medical advances, being able to share knowledge and ideas freely becomes much more important. I believe humans do their best work when they collaborate and share what they know.
This is why I oppose most forms of IP, because I feel it places an unjustifiable restriction on access to knowledge, including the mediums of knowledge or entertainment.
SURPLUS IS DIFFICULT IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE GIVEN THE SUBJECTIVE IMPACT OF MARKETS ON PRICE AND, THUS, THE IMPACTON THE CONCEPT OF VALUE. WHAT IS REALLY UNDENIABLE IS THAT THE CAPITALISTS ARE OUT TO PAY THE LEAST POSSIBLE WAGES POSSIBLE GIVEN THE DEMAND FOR LABOR IN THE LABOR MARKET. THIS IN TURN MAKES IT DIFFICULT IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE WAGE EARNERS TO BUY THE HUGE AMOUNT OF CRAP PRODUCED BY THE CAPITALISTS. THE ONLY WAY TO PURCHASE IS DEBT AND DEBT ACCUMULATES AND DEPRESSES CONSUMPTION. THIS, IN TURN, CREATES ECONOMIC CRISES OR DOWNTURNS. THIS IS THE BASIC INTERNAL INCOHERENCE OF CAPITALISM. THE OTHER BASIC CONTRADICTION IS THAT THE COMPETITORS IN THE MARKET SEEK TO ELIMINATE COMPETITION AND BECOME A MONOPOLY WHICH CAUSES INFLATION. THE THIRD MALFUNCTION OF CAPITALISM IS THAT THE FINANCE BUSINESS IS A RENTIER ACTIVITY THAT CAUSES ASSET BUBBLES THAT BURST AND INITIATE DOWNTURNS. CAPITALISM HAS SO MANY DANGERS THAT IT IS NOT EVEN FUNNY.