Surplus extraction works identically for skilled and unskilled labour

Evidence

One may protest that there is many a factory populated by uninspired, joyless, robotic workers producing tin cans or gadgets worth more than the cost of paying the workers. True. But this happens only because employers cannot buy the effort put in by unskilled, manual labourers. They can only buy their time, during which to pressurise them, in a variety of ways, to work hard and to sweat. The point here is that this blue-collar sweat, exactly like the waged architect’s flair, can never be directly bought or sold. This is, indeed, the secret power of employers: to extract any surplus, either from highly skilled or from uninspired, repetitive, robotic work, they must pay for their workers’ time (commodity labour) but cannot actually buy their sweat or flair (experiential labour). — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 72

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that even robotic blue-collar work contains experiential labour — employers buy time and pressure, never the sweat itself.
• XREF: connects to: Surplus value is the gap between labour infused and labour bought — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 795; Profit comes from surplus value workers generate — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 103; Surplus value arises from the gap between labour time given and reproduction cost — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1364

Broader Connections

• Surplus value is the gap between labour infused and labour bought #expands (0.90) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 795
• Surplus value arises from the gap between labour time given and reproduction cost #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1364
• Profit comes from surplus value workers generate #corroborates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 103