Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/18

 gets therefore a daily wage of 3 dollars from his employer. For this, the capitalist lets him work, say twelve hours a day. Our capitalist, moreover, calculates somewhat in the following fashion: Let us assume that our laborer (a machinist) has to make a part of a machine which he finishes in one day. The raw material (iron and brass in the necessary prepared form) costs 20 dollars. The consumption of coal by the steam-engine, the wear and tear of this engine itself, of the turning-lathe, and of the other tools with which our laborer works, represent for one day and one laborer a value of 1 dollar. The wages for one day are, according to our assumption, 3 dollars. This makes a total of 24 dollars for our piece of a machine.

But the capitalist calculates that on an average he will receive for it a price of 27 dollars from his customers, or 3 dollars over and above his outlay.

Whence do the 3 dollars pocketed by the capitalist come? According to the assertion of classical political economy, commodities are in the long run sold at their values, that is, they are sold at prices which correspond to the necessary quantities of labor contained in them. The average price of our part of a machine—27 dollars—would therefore equal its value, i.e., equal the amount of labor embodied in it. But of these 27 dollars, 21 dollars were values already existing before the machinist began to work; 20 dollars were contained in the raw material, 1 dollar in the fuel consumed during the work and in the machines and tools used in the process and reduced in their efficiency to the value of this amount. There remain 6 dollars, which have been added to the value of the raw material. But according to the supposition of our economists themselves, these 6 dollars can arise only from the labor added to the raw