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 production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists.

If history took a long time to get at the bottom of the mystery of wages, nothing, on the other hand, is more easy to understand than the necessity, the raison d’être, of this phenomenon.

The exchange between capital and labour at first presents itself to the mind in the same guise as the buying and selling of all other commodities. The buyer gives a certain sum of money, the seller an article of a nature different from money. The jurist’s consciousness recognises in this, at most, a material difference, expressed in the juridically equivalent formalæ: “Do ut des, do ut facias, facio ut des, facio ut facias.”

Further. Exchange-value and use-value, being intrinsically incommensurable magnitudes, the expressions “value of labour,” “price of labour,” do not seem more irrational than the expressions “value of cotton,” “price of cotton.” Moreover, the labourer is paid after he has given his labour. In its function of means of payment, money realises subsequently the value or price of the article supplied—i.e., in this particular case, the value or price of the labour supplied. Finally, the use-value supplied by the labourer to the capitalist is not, in fact, his labour-power, but its function, some definite useful labour, the work of tailoring, shoemaking, spinning, &c. That this same labour is, on the other hand, the universal value-creating element, and thus possesses a property by which it differs from all other commodities, is beyond the cognisance of the ordinary mind.

Let us put ourselves in the place of the labourer who receives for 12 hours’ labour, say the value produced by 6 hours’ labour, say 3s. For him, in fact, his 12 hours’ labour is the means of buying the 3s. The value of his labour-power may vary, with the value of his usual means of subsistence, from 8 to 4 shillings, or from 3 to 2 shillings; or, if the value of his labour-power remains constant, its price may, in consequence of changing relations of demand and supply, rise to 4s. or fall to 2s. He always gives 12 hours of labour. Every change in the amount of the equivalent that he receives