This whole meme needs to die. I'm so sick of reading "Piotr the factory worker spends an hour making a chair. Piotr is paid 5 roubles, but chair sells for 10! Piotr has been robbed of 5 roubles!" No, Piotr supplied one hour's labour, but not the training, raw materials, design, packaging, tools, workshop, electricity, financing, liability, insurance, accounting, management, marketing, shipping, or after-sales support. If the company is being run competently then the total cost will be less than the sale price, and the company will make a profit, but that doesn't mean the workers could produce the same value independent of the company. If they could, they wouldn't be working there.
Marxists are insane. GDP per capita in my country is $71,000. Wages are $59,500 which means all other capital gains make up $11,500. A good chunk of that is non-business capital gains (like housing) which means capital is taking under 10%. But Marxists always act like you could double your wage if not for the greedy capitalists. That’s not true, do the math.
GDP doesn’t include capital gains. Actually income and GDP should be equal if they are calculated correctly, so the 10% gap is probably just an accounting error.
Correct that it doesn't include capital gains, but it does include business profits... and in the long term those average out to be the same.
Similar to how it doesn't include housing appreciation, but does include imputed rent... in the long term rents and the cost of a house will track each other as well, just sometimes for even maybe a decade one surges ahead of the other.
As the other comment mentioned GDP per capita includes non-wage things like imputed rents and business profits so wages are not supposed to be equal to GDP per capita. You absolutely can use the difference between them to measure how much money goes to capital instead of labour.
It's less about the self-serving approach which I've seen on rare occasion. It's more the complete inability to estimate magnitude effects. If you found a way to replace capital entirely but keep all the efficiency of price mechanisms you could maybe give people a 10% raise (but I bet whatever mechanism replaces price loses the entirety of that 10% due to inefficiency) but the average marxist will confidently tell people they could double their paycheque if the greedy capitalists weren't taking half.
