Richard D. Wolff

The consumer can be the workers who produce other commodities, or it can be the capitalists, the self-employed people, soldiers, etc. etc.

Isabel, at least in ideal situations where we can ignore interfering factors, it is impossible for workers to rip off consumers by raising the prices. Why? Suppose that there are only two commodities in the market; X and Y which have exactly the same value. If you raise the price of the commodity X over its real value, workers would find producing X more profitable than Y. They would tend to stop producing Y and shift their activity to producing X. This would cause an imbalance between the amount X and Y in the market. The price of Y would rise because its supply would become relatively low in proportion to the demand for it. The price of X, on the other hand, would drop because its supply would become relatively high in proportion to the demand for it. “The invisible hand” returns everything to balance in the market. However, there are activities which prevent the invisible hand from doing its normal job. One of these evil activities is merchandise, the other one is usury, and, if I get it right, the third is industrial capitalism. Merchants, usurers, and capitalists are parasites of the market, they gain money but do no labor for it. But, in my idea, it is hard to determine who do they really exploit; producer (worker) or consumer?

Worker value added $10.00, chair materials $2.00, item is NOT going to be marketed for $12.00. But in your question you pose the following…. But what if chair was sold for $32?? Well….then chair materials still $2.oo, so let’s give all those $10.00 to the worker! Yay! Uh…no. Not yay. Why? Because the value added is not only based on the 10$ the value added is ultimately what transformed the materials into a chair. The chair, final product is what’s being sold. The total surplus of that production is no longer only ten. It went up with the cost of the marketed item to a whole $30.00

Worker and consumers can be one and the same at most instances. So elevating the price of the product any higher doesn’t really help the worker as rising the price still puts the capitalist getting a surplus. The higher the cost of the item, as long as the surplus maker gets still less than the price marketed for, the surplus being not received by the actual production worker is still not resolved. It is simply illogic to think that increasing the cost of the item out to market would resolve the surplus being taken away from the producer. Because that chair isn’t going to be sold for ten dollars if all ten dollars went to the producer. Rising cost of item, if not matching 100% the value of the surplus, solves no mathematical purpose nor moral purpose. The labor must cost always less than the cost of the chair for sale for the vicious capitalistic cycle to continue and for the worker to remain worked. (Employed).

Isnt the worker also the consumer? Yeah, they git it goin in and comin out.