I like to think that I'm a very knowledgeable organizer, so if folks want some advice ask me in the comments!
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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You are literally reversing cause and effect.
Price inflation is prices being increased, and prices are set by vendors. Whatever other changes also may be occurring, raising prices is a choice made by vendors or manufacturers to raise their profits.
Thus, your objection is not broadly meaningful.
When workers have more income, prices may tend to rise as a ramification under our current systems. Workers fight for better wages, however, because employers profit from the labor workers provide, instead of allowing them to realize the full value of their labor. Thus, workers fight for higher wages, and regardless of inflation, continue fighting for higher wages.
Placing blame for inflation on higher income for workers obfuscates broader understanding over the structure of our society.
Anyone concerned with the workers' struggle may have reason to advocate for broader measures to control inflation, but not among them is repressing the fight for higher wages.
All value in society is generated by the labor provided by workers. Support workers, by supporting their struggle to realize the full value of their labor.
From a response I wrote to another commenter:
Your are not engaging the substance of the discussion, as much as reiterating explanations you have encountered in other contexts, and which you have not understood adequately to apply more generally.
We can try another approach.
A living wage is an income that supports a particular standard of living considered socially as an acceptable base. Therefore, the nominal value for the living wage at any time will depend on the price of goods.
Even if the price of goods rises, that is, if inflation is occurring, there will always exist some nominal value suitable to be considered the living wage. Anyone who has an income equal to or greater than the value, at some particular moment in time, will have, at the particular moment, a living wage.
The nominal value of the living wage is not fixed, but rather adjusted over time.
Therefore, a living wage and inflation are not incompatible.
No I'm not. Prices for products or services drive inflation. Consumer price index (which inflation is) is literally derived from goods.
But even from a less pedantic point of view and examining the causes for inflation, wages are only a small part of what determines the price for a product. Wages among the people who extract rubber for your tires are extremely low and fixed by the buyers of this rubber. The local buyer then processes it and takes a markup, but the huge price increases is when they in turn need to sell the processed rubber to world corporations and they buy it for extremely cheap and then toss in a huge markup and sell it to the west. The meaningful wages in the product that goes directly to workers might be as low as 10% of the price of the final product.
The ultimate goal here is to costs, and primarily wages so they can extract a maximum amount of surplus value from the workers, and there's nothing in this world that guarantees that workers will be paid a certain percentage or even a reasonable amount. The claim you make is downright laughable because it's so wrong both in practice and theory.
Therefore, the claim that wages are the only drivers for inflation or even the primary driver is a complete lie! We are drained for billions of dollars to the capitalist parasite class every step in the production chain until it's finally distributed. This extraction is so valuable that entire countries can be financed through VAT alone.
It's truly disheartening that there are still people like you roaming around and spreading misinformation and citing neoliberal think tank pseudoscience.
Inflation refers to the increase in the monetary supply without at least a corresponding increase in the available amount of goods and services. It's this increase (inflation) in the monetary supply that causes the increase (inflation) in prices.
That's a basic understanding of inflation that is taught to children in elementary school, but it's not correct as I've explained to you earlier. Also people don't set prices or wages from the money supply for the simple fact that pretty much nobody knows how large money supply is compared to their good or service or what the price of wage should be compared to the money supply.
In fact it's entirely divorced from the money supply which we can see an example of in the rampant price increases of property which haven't followed inflation but rather increased unproportionally fast.
Oh really? Because I did a presentation of inflation in grade 8. I didn't have the same understanding of it back then as I did later when I decided to study macroeconomics through college literature so I kind of regret what I said during that presentation. You sound like you've been especially unfortunate and lagged behind on your studies and I thought my teachers were holding me back, but in your case I assume you might not have had any real interest in learning anyway. That's at least what you show evidence of during these conversations.
It is probably best not to bother.
By now, further responses would just be feeding the trolls.