Tryna understand the LTV. I get that only labor creates value, but how do you figure the indirect labor of managing the workers? Whether it’s managed by the state directly or private citizens or elected ppl or whatever, you still need people to manage the people directly adding value, right? so how do you know how much value those people add? Maybe this is an incoherent question, idk. Linking me a thing to read is fine but i’m not gonna read more than ~15 pages b/c i think it’s a fairly simple question.

  • truth [they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Many managers are like police, where they labor they perform doesn't directly create any value but serves to preserve and maintain the existing relationships of production. However, some managers do perform useful labor, like helping regular service employees on the line directly or performing an administrative role by managing resources between departments. All value in a firm is produced collectively, even if different individual members of a firm suffer under different rates of exploitation. Because the rate of exploitation on a manager is generally less, and they often at least partially must perform as a part of their job 'unproductive labor' of disciplining and protecting the relations of production, they will produce less 'value' than the least productive highly exploited employee. At least imo. But when you try to talk Marxist economics in terms of a general undefined 'value' the whole thing is confusing. Check out Cockshott's how the world works and you can see the LTV implemented against real quantitative units of measurement, like hours and calories.