Value Creation

Translation of https://dialoogid2.blogspot.com/2025/08/vaartuste-loomine.html

Value Creation 

Karmo Talts 

 

In this paper, I examine the creation of values. To do this, I examine how values ​​are created according to capitalist understandings and what are the alternatives to the capitalist and Marxist understandings of value creation. 

Lets examine the capitalist understanding of value creation. Values ​​are created by entrepreneurship and the company's profit belongs to the entrepreneur. 

Let us now examine whether the only alternative view of values ​​is that values ​​are created by employees with their work. It is possible that employees and the entrepreneur, taken separately, create a share of values ​​that is smaller than the total value created. 

Let us now look at the middle ground between capitalism and communism. On a scale with our current capitalist understanding of value creation at one end and the Marxist understanding of value creation at the other, in the middle is the understanding that half of the values ​​are created by the entrepreneur and the other half of the values ​​are created by the employees, and thus half of the profit belongs to the entrepreneur and the other half to the employees. 

Let us now consider what view the middle of our scale represents. This is a centrist view of value creation. If this is the case, then any view according to which the entrepreneur has right to own more than half of the company's profits is, at least from the point of view of value creation, right wing view. Consequently, social democrats are also right-wing on this issue, because instead distributing the company's profits differently among the members of the company's collective, they tax large incomes at a different rate than small incomes. 

Let us now examine left-wing view on the issue of value creation. On this issue, an individual is more left-wing, the more he believes that the company's profits belong to the employees. Views according to which the entrepreneur owns a share of the profits that does not reach half of the total amount of profits are left-wing alternatives to Marxism on this issue.* Any state property does not belong to private individuals at all, and economic systems centered on state ownership do not want to fit into the right-left scale on this issue. 

In this work, I studied the creation of value. I found that, according to capitalist understandings, value is created by the entrepreneur. I also found that an alternative to this view and the Marxist view is the view that part of the value is created by both the entrepreneur and the employees. Bigger the part of the value created by the employees in the individual's opinion, more left-wing her views on this issue are, and bigger the part of the value created by the entrepreneur in the individual's opinion, the more right-wing the individual's views on this issue are. * 

 

*Of course, an entrepreneur loses all motivation to engage in business if he does not own any share of the profits at all.