It is time stolen from you as well. You only need to work a fraction of the time you do in order to cover your wages, the rest of the day is free profit for the Capitalist.
You’re ignoring that what you output from your work needs to be… Outputted? So the issue is that you make less than you deserve for the amount of work that you do… If you make 25$/h and it wealth got redistributed so you would make 100$/h it doesn’t mean you could work 10h instead of 40h, your employer would still need you to 40h (or close to it, maybe you would be motivated by the increase in salary and work faster but that’s speculations) to achieve the same result.
If unemployment was at 75% and wealth redistribution happened to quadruple salaries then we could say “Instead of having 25% of the population working 40h/week at 25$/h, we’ll have 100% of the population working 10h/week at 100$/h so in the end the people that are working already will be making the same annual salary” but that’s not the case.
Except a lot of people’s work output is kinda fucking pointless.
If we managed the way we worked better and didn’t have the mindset of work for works sake/for the sake of the rich, we could be working a lot less.
I think Lemmy’s vision of productivity is skewed by the fact that there’s a lot of office workers on here…
You’re talking about something else entirely.
Rich people disappear, wealth is redistributed, somehow you guys think that building a house will suddenly take less work hours than it does at the moment? No it won’t, construction workers will be paid more to work just as many hours building that house, they won’t suddenly work 20h/week.
A lot of the work we do is effectively to satisfy the (constantly changing and growing) desires or the wealthy (or let’s say, the desires of the people who employ wage workers).
Simple example: labour productivity has grown with 70% since the 70s while real wages have stayed more or less the same. So that growth in output hasnt been going to workers. (The time that productivity increase could have freed up, is now used to produce stuff that the workers do not get to consume themselves).
I’m not ignoring anything. Commodities trend towards being sold at their Value, and since Value comes from Labor and Natural Resources, Capitalists necessarily pay Workers less than the Value they create. Ie, if a Worker creates $500 in Value per day yet is paid 15 dollars an hour for their 10 hours, this means they have made $350 in Value purely for the Capitalist. With their 50 dollars in Value per Hour created, they cover their wages in a mere 3 hours, rather than 10. The excess 7 is “hidden” from the Worker, via calling the 15 dollars per hour a wage, despite it being purely for the Capitalist.
A similar process can be seen in Feudalism, though it was more distinct. In Feudalism, serfs covered rent, then produced for themselves. They were able to clearly see what has been taken. Capitalism advanced on this concept to obscure exploitation through the idea of wages, yet still they take profit via paying Workers less than the Value they create.
I recommend reading Wage Labor and Capital and following it up with Value, Price and Profit if you want further elaboration and proof of said concepts, and have a couple hours to spare.
I’m talking about a separate issue! Even if rich people don’t exist anymore, something that takes 500h work hours to accomplish will still take 500h to accomplish, you won’t suddenly have to work less.
