Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/17

 The labor of a day, a week, a month, a year. If labor is the measure of all values, we can express the “value of labor” only in labor. But we know absolutely nothing about the value of an hour’s labor, if all that we know about it is that it is equal to one hour’s labor. So thereby we have not advanced one hair’s breadth nearer our goal; we are constantly turning about in a circle.

Classical economy, therefore, essayed another turn. It said: the value of a commodity is equal to its cost of production. But what is the cost of production of “labor”? In order to answer this question, the economists are forced to strain logic just a little. Instead of investigating the cost of production of labor itself, which unfortunately cannot be ascertained, they now investigate the cost of production of the laborer. And this latter can be ascertained. It changes according to time and circumstances, but for a given condition of society, in a given locality, and in a given branch of production, it, too, is given, at least within quite narrow limits. We live to-day under the régime of capitalist production, under which a large and steadily growing class of the population can live only on the condition that it work for the owners of the means of production—tools, machines, raw materials, and means of subsistence—in return for wages. On the basis of this mode of production, the laborer’s cost of production consists of the sum of the means of subsistence (or their price in money) which on the average are requisite to enable him to work, to maintain in him this capacity for work, and to replace him at his departure, by reason of age, sickness, or death, with another laborer—that is to say, to propagate the working class in required numbers.

Let us assume that the money-price of these means of subsistence averages 3 dollars a day. Our laborer