This is only partially true. I would say excessive profits are unpaid wages. Some of it is rightly deserved profit for say starting a business. My wife owns a consulting company and has to go months some times without payment… her employees get regular pay and benefits etc, while wife does marketing etc all in the hopes she gets works. I do think large multinationals keep too much profit
So if I make a program by myself, sell it for profit, I am stealing the wages of the working class?
What if I run a company that does the same, I pay my employees well above market value, yet still manage to make profit for the company, is that also stealing from the working class?
What if I reduce the price to stop making profit, yet won’t reduce the pay for my employees, how has that benefitted them?
All great and smart questions. Marxism has the answers:
So if I make a program by myself, sell it for profit, I am stealing the wages of the working class?
You could get lucky, but on average and long-term, self-employed people don’t get any profit. Some lose, some win, but in total, they only make enough to reproduce themselves or everyone would be self-employed. In fact, they make less, because as a solo operation, they are at a disadvantage amongst market forces and fluctuations. So they are bought up by oligopolies. In the specific case of a very successful program, you might be able to exploit copy-right rules and the oppressive state apparatus to seek monopoly rents well above development costs and punish anyone threatening your monopoly with open source software. Then, yes, you’d be like a landlord.
What if I run a company that does the same, I pay my employees well above market value, yet still manage to make profit for the company, is that also stealing from the working class?
Setting aside rents and violently enforced monopolies, let’s assume you operate on a free market. Then you could pay fair wages for a short time, but you’d lose out eventually against inevitably arising competition who dosn’t care about their employees and undercuts your prices making you irrelevant. You’ll have to fire your employees or get bought out or both. Capitalists don’t start out evil, the good ones just cease to be capitalists after a while.
What if I reduce the price to stop making profit, yet won’t reduce the pay for my employees, how has that benefitted them?
Individual capitalists can freely set prices, but on average, market forces make prices tend towards the value. The value is determined by the socially necessary labor time to produce the commodity and all the inputs. (At least within a society with a fixed level of automation, in reality different sectors complicate things somewhat, but let’s leave that aside for now). Exploitation happens, because employees aren’t paid the true value of what they produce, but only enough to reproduce themselves (to come to work next day). Basically, after they have produced enough to cover their reproduction, they have to keep working for a few more hours. Clearing out your stocks by selling products below their market value doesn’t change the fact that the workers aren’t being paid the full value of their product. It just makes the company unable to stay afloat long term. If you lower the price just enough to not make a profit, you’ll see competitors use their profits to buy more efficient machines and innovate. You won’t be able to keep up and go under. Either that or you won’t have any backups in case of a crisis. If you lower the price even more, you won’t be able to afford inputs and pay your workers. The result is the same.
Being a capitalist is a social role that comes with certain rules enforced by market forces. Capitalists who don’t behave like capitalists cease to be capitalists and become irrelevant. The only way for society to get out of this “game” is to stop playing.
The employees working at the company, collectively, have produced, maintained, and distributed the product. When the product sells, any profit (the money left after operational costs and reinvestment) was generated by that labor. It isn’t all that complicated. That money, under capitalism, is siphoned off by a class that only exists to steal this surplus. I’m sure you’d counter with something about mutual funds and retirement accounts. However, this same class also steals from those dividends as well via fees and set percentages.
- No because you made it yourself.
- If a product is so wildly successful that your company makes massive profits, then the employees that made that product are entitled to that success as well. Why do executives, who usually don’t have a hand in actually making the product, get so much more than the people who made it? Pay exists because there is no guarantee of profit on a product. Nobody will work for the promise of getting paid someday when promises don’t put food on the table. Yes, a company should pocket a certain percentage to fund future projects and as a safety net, but everything left over needs to be divvied up across the entire company, not just the c-suite.
- Reducing the price to stop making profit is fine since more people can afford to use the product. Assuming you hit a user cap, the price savings allow customers to spend that money elsewhere thereby increasing purchasing power. If you are selling to other companies, the other company now spends less meaning an increase in profit. This goes back to your customer’s company spreading the savings back to its own employees.
- Now you set a specific condition that the profits need to be massive to be counted as theft, where is the line drawn?
Operating costs plus a certain percentage as savings.
You seem to be trying really hard to invalidate the point with whataboutisms as if a single gotcha will invalidate the entire argument.
Nah, I just enjoy pushing arguments further.
Yes but this sort of blanket statement is going to trigger the deep lefty urge to meticiulously correct any potential misinterpretation/misleading information


