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Umm, no, it isn't? Profit is whatever is left over from your income after expenses. If you run a business for yourself, with zero employees (so there literally is no "others [sic] labour"), once you subtract the cost of any rent, materials, etc. what you have left is your profit.
Except in your example you are stealing your own labor since your business is not paying its one employee, you.
He is correct that in business profit is derived from the balance of labor vs what the business can sell the products of that labor for. Yes, overhead costs exist, material costs exist, but without labor, nothing happens. You can buy all the materials you want, rent all the spaces you want, get all of the utilities brought in you want, without labor, it all does nothing. So profit is a derivitive of labor, even if all of the labor done is your own, and even if the labor is turned into a passive source of income. Even landleeches profits are derived from the labor of their tenants since without a tenant doing labor, there is no paycheck to hand over to the landleech.
The view you have of "profit" is honestly the result of a concerted propaganda effort undertaken over the last eighty years to swing public opinion away from the the anti-trust labor-centric mindset of the past. It is brainwashing on the grandest of scale. I learned it too. It was not until I got my math degree and started studying capitalism through the lens of it being a dynamical system that I really started to piece of together. So much of what is "taught" about economics and business in the USA is spoon fed by people who do better and make more money if people think the way you described instead of understanding why unions came into existence in the first place, and what they fought for, and why we still need them.
🤷♂️ I don't expect any of this to change any minds. You have your reality which you ascribe to and maybe it lines up with mine, maybe it doesn't, but odds are it is a reality you find comfortable and are willing to fight tooth and nail to protect that comfort.
Costs and prices are an attempt to measure units of work (Not Joules, to be pedantic, but job-type work).
The models M-C-M and C-M-C explain clearly and simply how capitalists steal job-value from others (doing M-C-M) and how workers get poorer and poorer (edit: doing C-M-C)
https://www.newappsblog.com/2017/10/c-m-c-m-c-m-and-marxs-understanding-of-power.html
Thins is one among many resumes around this topic treated in The Capital from Karl Marx.
No, I understand that capitalists exploit labour for profit. I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the nonsensical claim that profit always comes by exploiting workers, and that in a non-capitalist system there would be no such thing as profit.
I'm actually interested in your reason on why the claim that "profit always comes by exploiting workers" is nonsensical.
First, to clear up, I understood that you meant that "capitalism can (sometimes) profit without exploiting workers"
And I also want to make clear that I agree with Marx claims about labor is what have value (that later is codified as money or as profit).
If you could provide an example where there is profit without exploitation of worker, I think that would help clarify.
Again, and to make clear, I'm just interested in getting a clear picture on why you claim that.
So to be clear, I absolutely was not saying that. Almost by definition, capitalism requires exploitation. I'm not sure I agree with the Marxist point of view of the labour theory of value that labour is the only thing that provides value (because it seems obvious to me that capital does provide value—I think there was a great video from Unlearning Economics on the subject), but I do agree that when workers don't own the capital, their labour is going to be exploited and the surplus value extracted.
Because of the example I described earlier. I could run a business consisting only of myself, and still theoretically have a profitable business.
By extension, it should be possible (maybe in a worker-owned co-op) for multiple workers to work in a business which is also profitable. Maybe they decide to spend that profit on bonuses for each other; maybe they invest it back into the business by buying more capital to make themselves more efficient. Maybe something else. But the point is that workers don't have to be exploited for profit to exist.
If you pay your workers their fair share, you wouldn't have any profits.
And if your product was 'priced' at its real cost you wouldn't be stealing any from customers either.
I'm not going to agree with you either. While difficult to maintain and impossible to make a consistent system due to the nature of some humans, ethical capitalism can and does exist. I would prefer a universal egalitarian society with no money and labor for the sake of labor, not survival, but that is not realistic either.
There should be fair pay. The gap between executive pay and laborer pay should be under 10x, in my opinion at least. There should also be fair pricing. But there does need to be some functional level of income above expenses for labor and materials. That is where responsible growth lives. That is where being able to hire on more people that you still pay fairly lives. If you are paying a minimum of 75k, you need at least 75k over your outlay before you can give another person a job. If businesses operated how you described, always existing at break even, then the job marker would quickly stagnate and the only positions that would be available to entry level people would be ones that were vacated by termination or death, because promotions would also not be possible. You described an equilibrium state which prevents growth of any kind.
The problem with ethical capitalism is that, in the long run, it is an utopia.
I say that because any ethical capitalism will under perform against unethical (or even criminal) capitalism. By that, I mean that ethical capitalism earns less profit margins compared with unethical capitalism.
At some point, the ethical company will either be bought by an (richer) unethical one or will be pushed out of the market.
Anyways, I do agree with you that an ethical capitalism would be better and, maybe even an first step towards socialism?
There are examples of Ethical Capitalism in the market. Arizona Iced Tea, Costco, and Valve are all companies that I would say are as close as we are going to get to ethical capitalists. Neither Arizona Iced Tea nor Valve are publicly traded, which means that there is only one way to buy them, and neither are interested. I'm pretty sure this is a key to Ethical capitalism, an end to trading on companies.
Honestly, there is probably only one change that needs made to being even traded companies in line, and that is to make a mandate that a successful company is one that provides the best work environment and a great product, not the one with the largest market cap.