talking of surplus labor one time my father and I calculated how much money he moved at his warehouse job with one single shipment and it was several times his monthly salary. the technical base of capitalism is so advanced that a warehouse peon can generate the value necessary to sustain themselves for an entire month in mere hours, having the rest consitute surplus labor that can be reinvented to economic development exclusively. the monumental amount of value generated by a mature capitalist economy is large enough to sustain its entire population multiple times over, but at the same time, the parasitism of the small class that owns all of this surplus labor is monumental enough on its own that those workers are barely paid enough to take care of their own health and their working hours cannot be reduced a couple of hours without sending shocks through the entire capital chain. never has the degree of separation between producer and production been so large, never has the chasm between the classes been so ample
of course he didn't produce the commodities being moved, his job was to put them into various boxes and shipments. this warehouse moved textiles, as part of a large international textile company. this one single shipment that could have fed him for multiple months came from an unnamed place in Bangladesh. Even greater is the dispossession and alienation suffered by the proletariat of the parasatized nations, paid for cents on the hundredth euro. Were those textile workers paid fairly, the parasitism of the capital owners wouldn't be sustainable at its current magnitude, but the products would still be sold and the materials would still be paid and the supply would still be more than enough. and the price or production wouldn't even rise that much or at all.
