Comment on The billionaires and politicians did it

gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Except corporate profits are higher than they’ve ever been. Only thing falling is the workers’ share of the obscene dragons hoards of riches.

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  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Corporate profits are higher than ever largely because corporations have been able to get greater productivity out of workers without increasing pay. If wages had kept up with productivity, profits wouldn’t be nearly as high.

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    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Corporate profits are higher than ever largely because corporations have been able to get greater productivity out of workers without increasing pay. If wages had kept up with productivity, profits wouldn’t be nearly as high.

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      the reason this is a mystery to so many mainstream economists is because they don’t want to reconcile with one simple fact: in order for profits to keep going up, worker wages must be suppressed while also increasing productivity.

      That, and they don’t want to admit their own complicity in the increasing oppression and exploitation of the very people without whom everything falls apart.

      Why do you think so many billions of dollars are being spent on AI development? Many see it as the key to ever increasing profits, because the worker, and their pesky demand for adequate compensation can be removed entirely.

      Spot on again.

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    • tehn00bi@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Anyone working in these environments knows the inevitable is coming.

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• AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’m unskilled at economics, so I may well be missing something, but this explanation doesn’t sit well with me. I think it’s because I’m not sure how well Marxian economics applies to the current conditions; As part of a university scholarship, I had to do an internship somewhere exceedingly corporate, and I was aghast at how there were entire divisions whose functions seemed to produce nothing of real value, just more metrics and dashboards and spreadsheets. I imagine people more learned than I have applied Marxian economics to problems like that, but trying to reconcile that situation with any notion of “value” makes my head hurt.

  To be clear, I’m a big fan of Marx, even if I haven’t the patience for parsing economics definitions.

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  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    yeah the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is one of the great riddles of our times

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