Jonathan Blow

Sure, and Twitter is also not a good place to have real discussions anyway. But, the problem is, this idea is so core to what you want people to believe, that not resolving it makes it impossible to proceed to higher-level ideas.

Correct, the basics of what I advocate are frustratingly hard to communicate in this medium, doubly so when there are many who use similar language to opposite ends (for example, using "exploitation" in moral terms).

Okay but if you mean a purely functional version of the word “exploit” then the employee is also exploiting the employer, so, I still don’t get it.

I mean it in the Marxist sense; the worker produces value, a part of which the employer takes. Maximizing the amount that is kept is a logical consequence of the profit motive, particularly once everything else has been squeezed as far as it can be.

Yeah, but "the worker produces value, a part of which the employer takes" is exactly what I am saying is conceptually incorrect.

If workers can just produce value like that, then they would just sit around at home and produce value and keep most of it. Some people do manage to do this, though it's a small fraction of the population!

workers don’t own the resources to produce value on their own. you have to have means of production... "workers" refers to a class of people who have no choice but to sell their labor

Correct. That's what defines a worker - their relationship to the means of production. (The people who can produce their own value, like artists, are technically not workers, though this gets very complicated under current conditions.)