I disagree with the fundamental axiom of Marxism-labor theory of value.The left today may say that, but I don't think that's what Marx would have thought. He was well aware of how market economics works. He understood that the capitalists were fighting over workers, and the wages the workers were paid were a function of supply and demand. At the time he was writing, the industrial revolution was just getting started, and there was a lot more supply of workers than demand, largely caused by the migration of large numbers of people from rural to urban centers, which offered opportunities to be part of the "new" economy.
Marx was not a moralist - if you read Das Kapital you will see that the problems he pointed out were social and economic problems that would arise out of the development of capitalism - not moral ones. His point wasn't that the immoral capitalists would brutalise the poor workers to extract profit out of them.
Marx was making a far deeper point. Namely that capitalists will, by the very structure of our free market exchange operations, appropriate the value produced by their workers for themselves. How does this happen? Capitalists have money. Workers don't. Workers need tools to produce, but they cannot afford them. So capitalists buy the tools and they effectively provide them to the workers. The workers compete with each other for access to the tools to be able to produce. Then they use those tools to produce a certain quantity of goods. This quantity of goods is then sold. So SALES - LABOR COST - OVERHEAD (machinery, expanding production, equipment, etc.) will be the surplus value. Who owns this surplus value? The capitalists, not the workers who produced it.
Think about the modern world. Venture capitalists appropriate the value produced by the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. and the rest of their employees. Most of the wealth produced by Amazon, Facebook, etc. is not owned by the entrepreneurs and their workers. It's owned by the capitalists who funded them. Have a look at this diagram below... it shows the growth of productivity vs the growth of wages.
Who owns the excess productivity? There is no moralism here about giving to the have nots and what not. It's just a fact of reality.
Why shall we restrict ourselves to the "civilized" world as you call it? Does the civilized world not rest in large part on the manufacturing power of China, India, and, in your language, the rest of the "uncivilized" world where things are manufactured for $3 per hour or less?
In a globalised world, our economies in the civilised parts need the poor economies to function as they do. Without this, our prices would be significantly higher, and our people significantly poorer. The exportation of exploitation was something that Marx wrote about, and it's similar in principle to what happens in physical systems. We, as living organisms, reduce our internal entropy by increasing external entropy by more than we reduce ours - something known in physics as negentropy. Similarly, the civilized world reduces its internal exploitation by outsourcing it.
To say that we choose not to take that job is just a way of saying that our socio-economic conditions allow us that choice. But imagine for a moment saying to a miner in China that he is "free" to quit his job if he doesn't like the pay or the conditions. Sure, technically, he is free. Just like a child is "free" to find whatever place he wants to live if you kick him out of the house. But practically, choice is always limited by the market and your society. You cannot choose to be the CEO of Microsoft, any more than the miner in China can choose to have a different job.
There are other alternatives to capitalism which don't abolish the free market or private property. Have a read about distributism. How does that sound to you?
The whole argument about Labor theory theory of value is that your fruit of production is basically the cost of production and the factory owners are basically parasites who have a cut without any contribution.
Today you have many structurally failing business that have products that can only survive in the market due to investors burning cash for “market acquisition” or government subsidies. The biggest winners in this area are pay cheque players- employees. Who cares if the business burn and crash?
The world will not be in balance until North American, Western European and Japanese workers accept a much lower standard of living. There is no way to get around this end game.
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