Add to that, the more they extract from the worker the less the worker has to expend on whotsits, hence the recent phenomenon of trending toward focusing more and more on luxury items and "premium" versions of for example games, live services, etc. The more the capitalists extract from labor, the smaller the pool of consumers becomes. It's a self defeating cycle.

They begin to essentially cannibalize their own class at this point. Just like capital accumulates and coalesces into monopolies, they all keep chasing after the few "whales" left that can afford their inflated pricing chasing ever increasing profits. The worker layoffs in the games industry the past few years I think are woefully underexamined. A product sells millions of copies, the creators get laid off to boost stock value, and the cycle repeats across all sectors of the economy.

RPS had a great article about all this recently with a broader focus on genAI a year or so ago which is worth a read (Edwin even cites Marx in the article) https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/we-need-to-reclaim-softwares-wishing-well-from-the-cruelty-of-generative-ai

@FunkyStuff@hexbear.net @Nakoichi@hexbear.net this piece, I think, supports both of your comments in thread and has quantitative examples

Number go down AND YOURE LAUGHING.

It's, practically speaking, really hard to just "be fine with it" because of how finance works. If all new capitalist development is financed by banks that are expecting 7%+ annual returns, either the capitalists rush to find reliable ways to turn $100 into $107 in a year, or they all default and cause a financial crash.

And if the banks were to lower interest rates dramatically as the rate of profit falls, it means they're making no money themselves, making them extremely risk averse. They can't really win.

I’m not sure what the standard use is. I mean that production is oriented around social needs as opposed to valorization.

Which is where imperialism, dividing up land between monopoly capitalists, comes in.

All concepts for capitalism are contingent on the market. Thankfully, Marx isn’t so silly as to reify “perfect” competition as bourgeois economics does.

“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.