this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Memes of Production

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[–] Akh@lemmy.world 6 points 18 hours ago

This is only partially true. I would say excessive profits are unpaid wages. Some of it is rightly deserved profit for say starting a business. My wife owns a consulting company and has to go months some times without payment… her employees get regular pay and benefits etc, while wife does marketing etc all in the hopes she gets works. I do think large multinationals keep too much profit

[–] Gaja0@lemmy.zip 1 points 16 hours ago

Yes but this sort of blanket statement is going to trigger the deep lefty urge to meticiulously correct any potential misinterpretation/misleading information

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 1 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

So if I make a program by myself, sell it for profit, I am stealing the wages of the working class?

What if I run a company that does the same, I pay my employees well above market value, yet still manage to make profit for the company, is that also stealing from the working class?

What if I reduce the price to stop making profit, yet won't reduce the pay for my employees, how has that benefitted them?

The employees working at the company, collectively, have produced, maintained, and distributed the product. When the product sells, any profit (the money left after operational costs and reinvestment) was generated by that labor. It isn't all that complicated. That money, under capitalism, is siphoned off by a class that only exists to steal this surplus. I'm sure you'd counter with something about mutual funds and retirement accounts. However, this same class also steals from those dividends as well via fees and set percentages.

[–] Shirasho@lemmings.world 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
  1. No because you made it yourself.
  2. If a product is so wildly successful that your company makes massive profits, then the employees that made that product are entitled to that success as well. Why do executives, who usually don't have a hand in actually making the product, get so much more than the people who made it? Pay exists because there is no guarantee of profit on a product. Nobody will work for the promise of getting paid someday when promises don't put food on the table. Yes, a company should pocket a certain percentage to fund future projects and as a safety net, but everything left over needs to be divvied up across the entire company, not just the c-suite.
  3. Reducing the price to stop making profit is fine since more people can afford to use the product. Assuming you hit a user cap, the price savings allow customers to spend that money elsewhere thereby increasing purchasing power. If you are selling to other companies, the other company now spends less meaning an increase in profit. This goes back to your customer's company spreading the savings back to its own employees.
[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)
  1. Now you set a specific condition that the profits need to be massive to be counted as theft, where is the line drawn?
[–] Shirasho@lemmings.world 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Operating costs plus a certain percentage as savings.

You seem to be trying really hard to invalidate the point with whataboutisms as if a single gotcha will invalidate the entire argument.

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 hours ago

Nah, I just enjoy pushing arguments further.