Everyone should be familiar with Marx’s essential criticisms of capitalism.
In summary, while constant capital (machines, workhouses, and such) is a necessary factor for production, it produces no profit. Profit only comes from variable capital (labor). With automation, less labor and hence less value goes into each good. Increased productivity means that more use values, but those commodities are cheaper in real value*.
It’s not true that more useful goods means less labor is necessary. In the commodity economy where valorization in the highest aim, there can never be enough work. While socialized production would negate this horrible fact, capitalism always wants more labor to exploit.
Yet, the market compels continual automation to give individual capitalists an edge. This process leads to less and less value going into goods and more and more constant capital compared to variable capital. Even if the gross mass of profit grows (which is what the capitalist cares about), the relative profit from production perpetually decreases. And the problem of too much stuff calls for destruction: planned obsolescence, destruction of goods while people have needs unmet, and, of course, wars.
*with inflation, l monetary wealth increases quantitatively without real wealth increasing
I have a hangup with this concept that hopefully Hexbears can help with: passive income. There are ways to make money under Capitalism where there's either a little or close to no labor needed to start, but profit/income is generated on a regular basis.
A good example of this is dividends. The companies that the dividends are based off of perform some sort of labor, create products, etc. But from my end all I have to do is buy shares of the company or fund holding the company and collect money. Same with landlords, loans, credit cards, and all sorts of systems that don't use up labor on an individual level after an initial investment.
IDK, it's just hard to see "labor" producing all of the "value" with the way our economy works these days. A lot of trading profits comes from bots trading with other bots. Lots of online engagement is bots replying to other bots. AI tools make this more blurry because if a person is willing to buy a picture generated in seconds by a machine does the labor value of actual digital artists stop mattering?
When human labor is no longer needed to produce things of value, how do humans stay relevant?
“Passive income” just means you’re disconnected from the value production process. You buy into capital and others use that investment to perpetuate the MCM’ circuit.
Marx absolutely dealt with landlords. The price of land/rent is contingent on the labor that goes into producing the state the land is currently in. If you flip a house, the resources consumed and labor expended account for the raise in price.
As I tried to note in the post, goods have both an exchange value and use value. Socially necessary labor time is a vital element of exchange value. When less labor goes into something the price is less, even if it’s more useful. Use value is secondary if it’s not sellable.
Someone with more theory under their belt can probably articulate it better than me, but I think this stems from a conflation of capital and value. Dividends come from capital you provide to hold shares, and then the company pays out some of its profit. If you were buying those shares directly from the company, they would get that capital to use, but of course unless you're buying an IPO that capital is going to whoever bought the share before you, in that chain back to the company.
But my understanding is value is different - because where did the capital above come from? You were presumably paid it as a wage, which you used to buy the stock. You were paid that wage because you used your labor to generate value, and the value was in surplus to the expenses of the company, generating capital for the company. They paid you some, but not all, of that capital, so that you would keep working.
Bots are a different problem, but you can think of them as embodying the energy used to run them, which eventually leads back to the human labor building the servers and operating the power plants and extracting the fuel. That being said, bots trading capital back and forth like that does not actually produce any value, it's just changing the ownership of the capital that was already produced previously. They generate relative wealth, but not wholly new capital
It's all financed via exploitation (except for rent, with different logic attached). Dividends are literally exploitation of workers as they come from company profits unpaid for labor.
Trading works slightly differently, imagine a blackbox with input cashflows (retirement funds mainly, dividends, coupons, investments) and output cashflows (retirees, capital repatriation). Inside the blackbox traders do their stuff, moving money from one line to the other, equilibrating expected profits (big funds), or providing liquidity (medium funds) or taking risks (small ones)), but all in all the sum of total profits of all traders inside whole world would be equal to input minus outputs cashflows. There is inherent inequilbrium due to required payments being percentage wages, while older people may not be in that exact percentage, but largely the new money inside the system comes from profits and coupons which again comes from profit which come from exploitation.
say you bought an otm option and cashed out a million bucks, who did you get it from exactly?
On the surface your counterparty is likely a bank, so you took money from a bank. But bank doesn't sell one option to lose money, it sells whole ladders of options, and unless extremely cool stuff happened, their algorithms have sold option in other range which didn't get triggered, and they still made money. So did you take money from other traders, who were unlucky? In a way, but they also bought options with a goal. While retail trading options is not new, large orders are typically big hedgefunds who either have insider info or need to lower risks in a timeframe to not get margin called (the original purpose of options)/escape position. But they have to do that stuff cause they are leveraged out, and they are leveraged out because profit rate on 1x leverage just isn't there (why would you tie up yourself in 30y old bonds 5%yoy, when you can buy a restaurant for expected 25?). So not only leverage flows from expected profit rate, the money of the fund itself comes from either profits or voluntary contributions (retirement funds or whatever), and the money of the profitable option trade comes from either someone doing same shenanigans and losing or someone saving their ass, because they got too greedy.