Airo☭

Every anti-communist fails at their criticism. Marx explains precisely why this understanding of exploitation is wrong in the very first volume of Capital. First and foremost, Marx does NOT argue that the capitalist has "underpaid" the worker by $150. His explanation of surplus value begins with the assumption that commodities, INCLUDING labor-power, are exchanged at their values. You're attempting to refute Marx by attributing to him an argument he explicitly rejected. The worker is not selling "labor" as a finished commodity. He's selling his labor-power, his capacity to work, for a definite period of time. And Marx distinguishes labor-power from other commodities for a MATERIAL reason, not because he arbitrarily decided workers deserve more money. Labor-power is the commodity whose USE produces new value. The capitalist purchases labor-power at its value, determined by the socially necessary labor required to reproduce that capacity to work. Food, housing, clothing, education, raising the next generation of workers, etc. But the USE of labor-power can create more value than is required for its own reproduction. THAT is where surplus value comes from. Suppose the worker receives $100 in wages, and during the working day produces $150 in new value beyond the value required to replace the machinery, materials, and other means of production consumed. The capitalist purchases labor-power at its value, but appropriates the additional $50. No cheating in the exchange is necessary. No violation of the wage agreement. No argument that the worker was secretly owed $150 instead of $100. The exploitation arises from the SOCIAL RELATION itself, not from somebody breaking the rules of the transaction. Now, regarding your hammer analogy... A hammer doesn't produce new value independently. It transfers its own existing value to the products it helps manufacture as it wears out. The person USING the hammer performs the labor that creates new value. You can purchase a hammer for $100 and use it to make $250 worth of products, sure. But the hammer didn't spontaneously create that additional value. Somebody had to do the work. A hammer on its own just sits there. And if you did that work yourself, then congratulations! You've demonstrated the difference between owning a means of production and employing somebody else's labor-power. If you hired somebody to use the hammer, we'd have to examine the relationship between what you paid for their labor-power and the new value their labor produced. See the difference? There’s something else you're missing here too. Why does the worker have to sell his labor-power in the first place? Why does one class own the factories, machinery, land, and productive infrastructure, while another class must sell its capacity to work in order to survive? These aren't eternal facts of human existence. They're historically developed property relations, reproduced through capitalism. Your argument accepts those relations as natural, then declares that because the exchange is voluntary and legally agreed upon, there's nothing left to investigate. But Marx's entire project is to investigate what those exchanges conceal about production and class relations. And the last part of your argument, that the worker should have "no interest whatsoever" in what the capitalist earns from his labor, is particularly revealing. Why shouldn't he? The worker's labor is part of a collective social process that reproduces society, including the wealth of the capitalist class. His wages, livelihood, and future are bound up with how the products of that labor are appropriated and distributed. You're treating the legal completion of a transaction as though it eliminates the material relationship between the people involved. It doesn't. You're defending the capitalist's legal right to appropriate the surplus while mistaking that defense for a refutation of Marx's explanation of how the surplus is produced. 👇