askchapo

I guess that would depend on how much access you have to the financial records of the organization you work at. Most companys are pretty open about their net profit. It varies depending on the industry. In some industries, a profit rate of 5% is good. Others might be looking at 20%. If the company has a profit rate of 5%, AFAIK that means that: sales volume divided by total costs equals 1.05. That 5% goes directly to the companies coffers, and is then divided between the owners or set aside for future investments.

Now of course the costs of the company are not only your wages. If that was the case, the surplus would be exactly those 5% of your time. The company has other obligations. They might have to pay off a loan for some investment they made in the past. This applies to almost any company. To pay off the loan, they have to extract that value from their workers, and it is of course not part of the 5% profit in their books. Maybe another 5% of what you produe belongs to the bank. The banks have costs too, but not very much. The same goes for the rent of the office space or production hall you work in. 5% of your time might be devoted to paying the landlord for doing nothing at all really. The company (and yourself for that matter) will have to pay taxes as well. Depending on where you live, some of the taxes might be redistributed to your class in the form of infrastructure/education/healthcare or other public insurances. Some of the taxes are likely subsidies to private companies. You will have to refer to the government budget.

Those kinds of costs, the ones that are not directly inputs to the production process, are all extraction of surplus value. If you add those up, including the profit rate, you get a percentage. That percentage is the average time that the workers do not work for themselves, but for private profiteers.

If your company makes some sort of machined steel parts, you might need steel as an input. The costs include the price of the steel of course. But naturally, that price is included in the sales as well. The value of the steel is not relevant to your production process. Also, the office needs heating, the vehicles need gas, and there are a trillion other costs like this, which are of course passed on to the customer, but are not extracted from you.

Especially if you consider taxes, I think it's pretty clear that answering this question on an individual level is very subjective. Some working people do not want to pay for a public unemployment insurance, even though the money goes back to their class. Do you consider the money that the state extracts from you and redistributes to working class people "surplus vlaue"? Do you think that it should belong to you? Or do you think that maybe the extracted value can only be calculated on the level of class war? Or maybe you have a different answer altogehter.

This is my current understanding at least, I'm not sure it's all correct tho.