>far more than the exact amount required to sustain the worker

This would appear true, if it weren't for the fact that the capitalist would be losing out if it wasn't the case; the price of labour power is indeed governed and fluctuates with supply and demand, and I would agree that government regulations have also contributed to setting this price, but to pay workers more than what is required to sustain them would be as nonsensical in a business sense as paying more for a machine than its value. I was perhaps too succinct with that point, Marx writes elsewhere:

"The lowest and the only necessary wage rate is that providing for the subsistence of the worker for the duration of his work and as much more as is necessary for him to support a family and for the race of labourers not to die out."

> I signed up for the deal, and that's the deal I got. Nobody forced me into it in any way. Being kidnapped and forced to work for free, against your will?

This is a very short sighted and restricted view of coercion. Perhaps force was too strong a word. But the worker only works for the capitalist class on pain of death or destitution. If this isn't forced, I'm not sure what is. The prostitute must sell her body, and you can say that's a deal "she signed up for" but it won't change the fact that she's being exploited, having no choice but to sign such a deal with someone.

>If I wanted to find a deal where I worked part time, I could almost certainly find it.

That's still wage labour though, and you're still having your own labour decided its use by someone else. You don't have to be your own manager, the point is that you should have free association to choose who you want to work for and what you want to do, rather than a much more limited choice which restricts your true capabilities and creativity to merely what drives profit. This is a common complaint among programmers for example. It is a reason why workers are so alienated from the products they make; the products are made for people they'll never see, for uses they can't understand.

>Has automation left us worse off? I don't believe it has. I believe that, taken as a whole, it has made us far better off.

Automation usually means that the capitalist has been able to buy machinery which performs the same job with a lower socially necessary labour time than a worker. This means that one or more workers are replaced by such machinery, as the value of their labour is only some fraction of what it was before (going along with Marx's theory of value anyway). Marx writes:

"The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value."

Now instead of the worker being afforded the benefit of this replacement, it's used for short term profit. The savings could be passed onto the worker (rather than the "consumer") but instead the worker must be either re-purposed within the same firm or industry, or find himself out of a job. On a large scale, this usage of automation means that people find themselves having to do other labour, despite the demands of society not increasing. This seems ridiculous and wasteful to me. But the capitalist maintains that it is necessary - for if there are no labourers to pay wages to, who is there to buy back the products, unless production is for a bourgeois commodity economy?

And here is the paradoxical nature of capitalism: it relies upon inefficiency, to combat the falling rate of profit in the long run, due to less extraction of surplus and increasing number of people finding themselves without wage labour to perform, the introduction of automation is carefully controlled and indeed limited. It is not individual firms which do this limiting, but the flows of capital ensure it occurs.

Aside from this we have other examples such as the internal contradictions of capitalism[0]; one of which is the tendency to engage in constant overproduction (that is, production above what will drive a profit, not above what will satisfy human wants and needs). As [1] explains:

"For Marx, capitalist crises are crises of “overproduction”: too many commodities are produced than can be profitably sold, and too much capital has been invested in industry, in the attempt to claim a share of the available profits. This comes about because capitalism, on both the domestic and international scale, is a system of separate and independent ownerships. In prosperous times every capitalist invests as much as he can and steps up production; in particular, the periodic booms stimulate the production of “fixed capital,” the buildings and machinery which are not used up in one cycle of production and therefore do not have to be immediately replaced. When times are good, all resources are strained to bring new fixed capital into production; but once this capital starts producing, a flood of commodities is brought onto the market, and the crisis ensues. Unemployment, which falls during the boom, rises again; the high rate of profit that stimulated the boom declines, first when the low level of unemployment strengthens the bargaining power of workers, and further when the crisis forces production to slacken off.

The crisis eventually takes its toll: masses of workers are thrown out of their jobs, as a result wages are forced back down toward subsistence or below, and the weakest, smallest and least modern plants go under. But the effects of the slump enable profitability to revive: labor can be hired at low wages, factories, equipment and materials can be bought by the surviving capitalists at bargain prices. So the slump is followed by a new recovery period and in turn by a new boom."

This is no new theory, it is even recognised by the modern bourgeois economists of today. But they do not consider it something inherent to capitalism, they consider it instead merely an anomaly that occurs here and there.

This is all of course ignoring the ethical problems of capitalism, the fact of private property being acquired through barbarism (as Proudhon writes) and the concentration of the whole productive power of society in the hands of a few, leading to massive status of misery despite medical and technological achievements of capitalism which have lifted many out of poverty, as Kropotkin writes.

"rich in what we already possess... richest of all in what we might win from the soil, from our manufactures, from our science, from our technical knowledge, were they but applied to bringing about the well-being of all"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_contradictions_of_cap...
[1] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/socialistvoic...