Underrated post. Losers function similarly in gervais principle to marx's proletariat. In Capital there's a part in ch.15 "changes of magnitude in the price of labour power and in surplus value" where, in subsection 2, intensity of labour is considered with other things equal. Marx equates value of products with reified labour, aka a product is worth the time it takes to make it. So if the intensity of labor increases (ie loser works faster, dwight stacks the paper faster) the labor, the loser's valued commodity in the "bad deal" becomes worth less. (Ie a 50 stack of paper takes 20 min, instead of 30.) Stanley is familiar with this, and "runs out the clock." It's as if he knows that the labor, his only commodity to trade, being non-sociopathic, becomes worth more, the unit of paper worth more time, the less he stacks. Ty /u/ruffles . It is funny because the real clueless are watching the office, reinventing the wheel during commercial breaks, but it sure is a lot less dense learning economics with mocumentary drama than it is reading 19th century german translated into victorian english. (Capital by km)

To expand on the diagram, sometimes the "clueless" become more than brittle, they become hardened, and resist the cannibalization in the anarchy of capitalist competition, and instead form a worker's revolution.