Right now, as you're listening to this, you are being robbed. A chunk of everything your hard work creates is being stolen from you. And it's a system called capitalism that's robbing you. Every day, when you check in to work for your boss, you are being taken advantage of and stolen from. You are being deprived of the full value of what you contribute.
What is a capitalist? Let me break it down. A capitalist isn't someone in a top hat burning library books to run a misery factory. Anyone who puts forward capital – money – to set workers in motion becomes a capitalist, and their goal is to turn a profit. People will tell you it's innovation, or competition, but down in the real world, it's pretty simple: capitalists have one goal, and that goal is to turn a profit. Pursuing profits to accumulate money is just how capitalism works. That's the nature of the beast. It's the single impulse of capitalism. That doesn't make capitalists personally greedy, though some might be. We're not even talking about good or evil here: capitalists need to maximize profit, to the exclusion of all other considerations, or they'll get eaten up by capitalists who are smarter or more ruthless than them. The Jungle Law. That's the jungle law of the market. So capitalists need profit to survive.
But where does this profit come from? That's where you come in. Literally. Profit comes from YOU. Here's a little thought experiment. Meet Harold. Harold has a chain of buildings full of kitchens full of ingredients. But Harold doesn't know how to make a burger himself. How does Harold get someone to make enough burgers that he can sell them and turn a profit? It's not a trick question – he pays you! Because you know how to make really good burgers. The money he uses to pay you is what we call "capital." That's money used to set production into motion.
Let's say Harold spent $1,000 buying all the ingredients in the restaurant. After you work for a few weeks there—turning the ingredients into burgers—they brought in $3,000. That's not bad! You added $2,000 worth of value to the ingredients.
But wait. You don't get all the money.
Because Harold now has $3,000 on his hands. $1,000 of that just covers the cost of the ingredients. And if you were paid for the full value of your labor, you'd be making $2,000.
But then Harold decides not to pay you for the full value of your labor. Maybe he pays you just $1,000 of the value you produced. Maybe he pays you $1,500. The Dirty Truth. No matter what, you've been stolen from. You spent more of your labor than you were compensated for. But here's the dirty truth: the story doesn't end with you and Harold. This process plays out across your city or town, your state, the country and the entire world – the rich get richer and the little guy barely gets by. We call the process – a boss's stealing from you – "exploitation." We don't mean that in an emotional sense about how we feel about it, but something that's actually a documented economic phenomenon – the gap between how much the worker produces and how much they get paid. Exploitation is a universal feature of capitalist economies. And it never ends: the system requires more and more exploitation – paying workers less, making them work more, or making them more productive without increasing wages.
When you see in the newspaper that a corporation's recording record profits, that is what they are doing: your hard work is producing more value, but you're not getting enough compensation in return. There are tens of thousands of Harolds out there. But billions of people just like you. You and Harold are two different types of people. You belong to two different classes. There's a capitalist who owns the means to produce goods and services, and there's workers who only have their own labor to survive on. The capitalists appropriate the value that the worker's labor creates and keeps it for themselves. And you are not immune from it. At any job you work at, the condition of your employment is that you produce more by your labor than you get paid. So in the capitalist system, no one is paid what they're worth. Capitalism means they get paid significantly less. All profit is value extraction. And that means that all profit is theft – from you.
This is Richard Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and founder of Democracy at Work, for the Gravel Institute.
And to make matters worse, Harolds don't just control the means of production; they also effectively control the political system. Through massive campaign donations, high-paid lobbyists, and their ownership of influential media outlets, the Harolds of the world ensure that laws and regulations are written to favor their interests, not yours. They fund the politicians who promise to cut taxes on corporations, weaken unions, and dismantle worker protections, all under the guise of "economic growth" or "job creation." This ensures that any chance you have to collectively bargain for fairer wages, safer working conditions, or a greater share of the value you create is systematically undermined. They create a system where the rules of the game are rigged in their favor, making it nearly impossible for workers to challenge the exploitation and secure a truly fair shake, or to create a more just fair, and sustainable world.
This is K-Dog, webmaster of this place on the dark web, for the Doomstead Diner.