>>Yes, that's exactly why unions are needed, there is no way to live in capitalism without selling your work-force, or living out of rent on other people's work-force, by owning the means of production
No one compels any one to do anything under the capitalist ruleset, which is simply a ruleset that restricts interactions to those that are mutually voluntary.
And hiring someone and making a profit by employing them to operate your capital (what you Marxists call "means of production) is not "economic rent". The enterprise/capital that enables the labor to produce more value than is expended to hire it is provided by the business owner, and contributes value to the economy.
I strongly recommend you don't base your understanding of Economics on Marxism. Marxism gives no credit to investors for their role in providing capital. Marxism just takes it for granted that capital will emerge, when in reality you need to compensate those who create capital, through the process of saving and investment, in order to incentivize its emergence.
Marxism's non-recognition of this fact is not only a massive oversight that makes the theoretical framework utterly pseudoscientific, it is a consequence of the fact that Marxist theories are totally motivated by an anti-rich ideology, as opposed to the pursuit of scientific truth.
>>If an owner wants to decrease wages of their workers, they may only receive resistance if the workers are unionized
This is totally baseless. Wages for unskilled labor doubled between 1870 and 1900, a period during which unions were extremely weak, and there was a massive influx of poor immigrants to the US pushing up labor supply which would counter-act the economic forces that push up wage rates.
There are other forces that push wages up besides the violations of contract freedom that can locally push up wages for unions. Unlike laws that give unions local monopolies on workforces, economic forces like investment don't depress wages economy-wide. They are positive sum, leading to generalized wage growth.
I strongly recommend you to actually read some Marx, it might get you out of the Web3 sham, but here's a good economic analysis of cryptocurrencies if you haven't seen it yet (judging from your username you need to see it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g .
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain. This Luddite fallacy: that automation causes wages to decline, is something that laymen, who haven't studied Economics, believe. In reality, automation is the primary source of wage growth, and the reason wages today in the US are 20 times greater, after adjusting for inflation, than they were 200 years ago, in 1822.
And like I said, he didn't understand the basic fact that capital contributes value to the economy, and thus that profits accrued to business owners are not "economic rent", and that furthermore, capital does not emerge unless those who create it - by saving and investing - are compensated via ownership-rights and profits.
I suggest you study real Economics, and then analyze Marx' claims in light of what it teaches you.
Only in capitalism can automation of work be a problem for the workers, as their work is not tied to their/the company's productivity, but to the market rate of wages, which is detached from productivity.
No one compels any one to do anything under the capitalist ruleset, which is simply a ruleset that restricts interactions to those that are mutually voluntary.
And hiring someone and making a profit by employing them to operate your capital (what you Marxists call "means of production) is not "economic rent". The enterprise/capital that enables the labor to produce more value than is expended to hire it is provided by the business owner, and contributes value to the economy.
I strongly recommend you don't base your understanding of Economics on Marxism. Marxism gives no credit to investors for their role in providing capital. Marxism just takes it for granted that capital will emerge, when in reality you need to compensate those who create capital, through the process of saving and investment, in order to incentivize its emergence.
Marxism's non-recognition of this fact is not only a massive oversight that makes the theoretical framework utterly pseudoscientific, it is a consequence of the fact that Marxist theories are totally motivated by an anti-rich ideology, as opposed to the pursuit of scientific truth.
>>If an owner wants to decrease wages of their workers, they may only receive resistance if the workers are unionized
This is totally baseless. Wages for unskilled labor doubled between 1870 and 1900, a period during which unions were extremely weak, and there was a massive influx of poor immigrants to the US pushing up labor supply which would counter-act the economic forces that push up wage rates.
There are other forces that push wages up besides the violations of contract freedom that can locally push up wages for unions. Unlike laws that give unions local monopolies on workforces, economic forces like investment don't depress wages economy-wide. They are positive sum, leading to generalized wage growth.