Pastel materialism

🌸 profit and surplus value 🌸 [there is no graphic for this (yet) as it was hastily put together and decided to be stuck on this mostly inactive page to be shareable]

when we own a waluigi amiibo and want a splatoon amiibo worth the same price, we can perform a "commodity exchange" - we sell our amiibo for some cash and use that cash to buy the other amiibo. or anything else worth that much cash -- like however many potatoes are worth the equivalent price of our splatoon amiibo (this is called exchange value). we can denote this cycle as C-M-C where C stands for commodities (different at each end, otherwise theres no point of exchanging) and M stands for money.

C-M-C-M-C-M-C- ...

but how does profit work? lets break in the middle of the cycle and instead look at it from the perspective of the money: you start with some money, you use it to buy stuff, and you sell that stuff for more money: M-C-M

M-C-M-C-M-C-M- ...

but hold on -- there is no profit here, youre just moving the same sum of money around to get different items (commodities) based on their exchange value. correct! profit logically looks a bit different:

M-C-M'

where M' > M

all this means is, "you spend some money to get some commodities that will then ... give you more money ... somehow". what are these magical commodities that give you more money than you put in (ignoring commodity/finance speculation which is a more complicated but just as modelable topic) ??

if you want to make something big, something far beyond your personal labouring capabilities, like the next AAA title minecraft-fortnite hybrid, or even just making enough burgers to compete with all the other burger places while being able to get a profit to keep your burger place competitive while pocketing some money, youll need two things:

you spend your M to buy C, which consists of: the stuff you need to make the thing you want to sell (the "means of production") and the energy and time of your employees to use these means to make the thing for you (the "labour power" of labourers). the second is key - youre not buying your employees, you're buying their ability to work. under this ""neutral exchange"" * cough * they sell their labour-power and you purchase it - its as much a commodity as the waluigi amiibos - and youre not buying their work, but their *ability* to work

ok, but then how do we get profit? we know from the basic "commodity exchange" that just buying the means of production cant give a profit by themselves bc youd only be able to exchange them for something of the same exchange value (again, excluding speculation). so profit somehow comes from ... the labour-power?

remember how i called that a "neutral exchange"? well -- not really! you have the money, you have the means of production. what do your employees have? nothing to sell but their labour-power -- otherwise why would they be trying to find a job?? so you're in control here, and that means you have final say on how much time you want your employees to work and how much you'll pay them for it.

and you'll do it so that you'll profit and pocket the change. because if you did it just to "break even" what would be the point of going to all that trouble to get all that stuff if youre going to have the same amount of money in the end? its a dog eat dog world b a b e y and why settle for waluigi amiibos or splatoon amiibos when you can get b o t h ? (and like, groceries n stuff)

lets say youre setting up a fancy gelato place. youre going to pay your employees 20 an hour. your employees are going to use the gelato machines to make the gelato. since youre the one hiring employees, you wanted productive ones, so an average employee, using the machines, makes 20 bucks worth of gelato in just 15 minutes. 15, 30, 45, 60 minutes ... thats an hour, so in an hour, an average employee makes 20, 40, 60, ... 80! wow -- 80 bucks of gelato! dang!! but youve set the wage at 20 an hour only! 80 - 20 = 60, you get 60 bucks of revenue!! wow!!

but you need to maintain the space, the machines, the utilities, pay taxes, all that jazz ... you had to be strategic! couldnt get the best gelato machine, because the price of its upkeep combined with all the other costs was like 100 total, making you bleed money. you couldnt even get the second best, because its upkeep with all the other costs is like 60, so then whats the point of all this? so you get the fourth best which in total leaves you with a nice 35 bucks. solid!

a profit! 35 bucks worth of amiibos!

it turns out the commodity that imbues more value than what was paid for it is in fact labour-power. we call the extra value added “surplus value”. can’t the workers here do anything about this exploitation of surplus value? individually it seems impossible because theres that clear power imbalance. but workers banding together to refuse producing these commodities puts their employers at an impasse - they wont get money, and there wont be alternative workers they can buy the labour power of.