alt Hacker Newsthis is relatively unremarkable for those with an understanding of wage, labor, profit, price and capital.
capitalism will always seek to reduce labor cost. during the epoch of neoliberalism it achieved great strides in this by reducing labor power through union busting by both thatcher and reagan in the UK and US respectively. it has also effectively curtailed any increase in the minimum wage for nearly 20 years as well as reduced protections, regulation and prosecution for wage theft and overtime pay violations which it maintains as exclusively as civil matters while ensuring theft itself from a merchant in turn is always a criminal matter through the primacy of private property.
to learn more i recommend reading Marx's "Das Kapital," albeit its rather academic. Engels "wage labor" is also a good read to understand why housing is so persistently unaffortable but helps to understand why any other good or service slowly becomes so as well.
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Marx fails to imagine a world in which labor actually has little to no value.
His worldview is primarily that capitalists 'steal' the valuable labor. However it doesn't seem that that is actually the world we are in. Instead the intrinsic value of human labor seems to be slowly trending towards zero.
And it kind of makes sense, same has happened with oxen labor, horse labor, etc.
Unfortunate to see educated and smart people quote Marx. No serious economist takes him seriously.
Labour theory of value is useless. Falling rate of profit is not empirical. Capitalism didn’t go away as he predicted.
Workers enjoy highest living standards of any time in history.
The problem is we are one step beyond capitalist exploitation as described by Marx - basically the surplus which fatcat industrialists extract from the laborer does not really exist - you have to compete in the market with others who do the same, and offer things at the lowest possible margins, and if you need to be big enough to get capital in, you have investors who demand their profits.
So basically you are squeezed between the public demanding lower prices and the investors demanding record returns. If you are not a monopoly, that is an impossible ask
Basically the only truly profitable businesses left out there is selling hopes and dreams to investors, and shovels to those who build them, which just about describes tech & AI, with companies who regularly manage to 10x their valuations (and P/E ratios)