memes

All labor under capitalism is subject to "wage theft" according to Marx. Idk where you got this idea that things under"wage theft" don't produce a "labor value". The "labor value" is just the socially nesscery time required to make something. A part of that socially nesscery time is the time required to acquire the resources. The 'labor value' savings that the Spanish found were two-fold, they were able to simply take a melt down existing gold jewelry and statues into bullion, and they did not care if they worked their native slaves far below the actual "labor value" required to sustain human life. Less resources = Less time = Less labor value. For the Spanish, the "labor value" in comparison to domestically mined gold was extremely low. Now, from an actual humanitarian perspective, let's call it the 'real labor value' of extracting gold does not change. Marx's point is that while supply and demand are real things that affect each other, the primary drivers of both supply and demand are, at their core, the labor value, not each other. If you reduce the your inputs of something past it's 'real labor value', you don't actually see any larger economic boons, and it, in fact, causes economic stagnation.

Basically, slavery is regressive as an institution not only because it is morally abhorrent, but because it doesn't actually stimulate national economic development, it stagnates it. This is why others of his time believed that Southern plantation slavery would eventually go away naturally. This, of course, underestimated the North's ability to innovate on the process and introduce the cotton gin which reduced the real labor value by over three times, thus breathing new life into the practice. A real life example of why we can't just wait for capitalism to wither away due to it's inability to sustain the real labor value and maintain the rate of profit. You have to have a revolution to kick the rotting structure over and set it on fire, otherwise people will just keep trying to prop it up.

In our modern case, that is with industrial robotics (something I am keenly aware of as that is usually my job, to prop up the rotting structure) and 'AI'. However these practices are hollowing out the real economy, when they produce the efficiency wanted at all, because that means that they are spending less and less money on the real labor value required to sustain the laboring community that really drives the business. As the guy who just burned that warehouse down said, "All you had to do was pay us enough to live." They might pay me well, but even if I create an overall system efficiency improvement of 3 times, they aren't going to pay me the salary of 3 employees, which means that despite creating the ability to create three times more of whatever it is, my ability to purchase what was made doesn't rise unless the exchange value of the item drops. But the exchange value of the item cannot be allowed to drop because then what was the point of increasing the efficiency? This is how you get a crisis of overproduction, where the shelves are full because no one can afford what is on them.

The issue is that all of this stuff is, on it's own, simple, but the dynamics (one could say dialectics) are what make it horrendously complex, because things that are static in isolation (like a supply demand curve) suddenly behave entirely different when seen within a whole system.

Yeah the exchange value fluctuates when gold is used instead of fiat, however the 'real labor value' remains the same, unless technology comes along to reduce that.