Right, value is a measure of abstract labor embodied into commodity, right? There is a dollar amount that represents the total mass of value created in a year, approximates as Global GDP. Wages are prices paid to access that labor-power, and profit is obtained by paying less than that value of labor-power and trying to sell its precipitates closer to the real value. Wages paid, on average, are the portion of the value of labor-power that is required to reproduce said labor power. Workers in total take home about ~51% of global GDP, we can round to a half, workers take home, directly in wages, about half of global GPD. Workers on average, work about 2000 hours per year. So there is an estimate for the global value of labor per hour: (Gobal GDP/(Num Workers * 2k hours)) around ~$13/hr of labor. Since half is taken by workers directly, the global average wage is ~$6.5/hr, meaning that’s on average how much it costs to produce a worker in the world today.
Globally, Capital has to purchase an hour of labor for less that $13 to make a profit. So what’s going on in the US, where 94% of labor-power is purchased for more than that, where on average, USian labor-power is sold for ~$58 (2023, assuming 1800 hrs, 27T GDP, 62% labor share), where, if the US existed in a vacuum, USian labor-power is worth in wages ~$85?
What’s going on?
Well, specifically, because the US Bourgeoisie, the Imperialists main bloc, are monopolists, they get to command the prices labor-power over many more workers than just those that exist in the US. They purchase many times more labor-power in the Global South than they do from US (Global North in general), and they also purchase it for cheap, duress prices, significantly lower than even the average wage (which represents 50% exploitation). They purchase so much of this labor-power at such a low price, and make such big profits from it, that they can over-pay a numerically smaller group of workers in the Imperialist countries. It makes a lot more sense to take more surplus-value from very distant workers who barely know you exist, vs the ones who live across town. If the draw from the distant workers is large enough, then even a bulk of workers near “home” for the Imperialists can be given, or exact from them, prices for labor-power more expensive than its worth, but, by keeping them close and satiated, the overall systems is more profitable than it would be if all of the workers in the world were paid below value. Since the Imperialists made commodities from the distant workers cheaper by paying them lower wages, when those commodities are transformed into other commodities, the Imperialists account the value added as created “at home”, so the GDP of the US appears to be more significant than the actual value of labor-power it contains, because it is accounting the labor of the distant workers as its own. Dependent, smaller Bourgs are let in to keep them from competing with the Imperialists, by offering them the same prices as the Monopolists are able to obtain globally, so this allows Capitalists without a global labor force to match the high wages paid to the “home” workers of Imperialists. This is why doing such calculations within a US factory floor, can produce numbers that look like above.
So what does this mean for wage struggle relations between the GN and GS workers? Well, when one side struggles and gets back a proportion of profits, the Capitalists as a class have created a two-tier labor hierarchy, protected by deadly borders. They have a tendency of shifting the burden to the other workers. GN wages tend to go up, GS wages tend to go down. Real productivity gains in the collective production of humanity increase all wages, or the pool of available value, up over time. However, the gap between GN and GS wages are widening year over year. These wages aren’t abstract either, they are ultimately how much labor-power workers are able to purchase. So in the end, the wage gap is what allows GN workers to consume more labor-power, in calories, cars, meat, clean water, roads, gasoline, electricity. Anyway, this balancing act puts GN and GS workers in contradiction, and ultimately, profitability is determined mostly by the ability to exploit GS labor in much larger quantities. To actually attack profits, a struggle must be coordinated internationally to ensure the GS workers aren’t taking the burden for GN struggles, and that the Imperialists can’t just pass on the burden to the other group. Generally, the global working class contradiction is only lessened by GS struggles, because it’s the small minority of workers of the GN who are already receiving a share of profits globally.
Oh yeah. Not only landlordism, but landownerism, people who care about “property values”. Half of land owners are actively workers and half of landlords came from the working class. Overall, it’s like the renting LA is paying dues to the land-market so that it is valuable when they buy into it. Not like this is a conscious action of individuals, it’s just how the relationship between rents and land values works in the US.