Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/29

 commodity, no more, no less so than is the sugar. The first is measured by the clock, the other by the scales.

Their commodity, labor-power, the workers exchange for the commodity of the capitalist, for money, and, moreover, this exchange takes place at a certain ratio. So much money for so long a use of labor-power. For twelve hours’ weaving, two dollars. And these two dollars, do they not represent all the other commodities which I can buy for two dollars? Therefore, actually, the worker has exchanged his commodity, labor-power, for commodities of all kinds, and moreover at a certain ratio. By giving him two dollars, the capitalist has given him so much meat, so much clothing, so much wood, light, etc., in exchange for his day’s work. The two dollars therefore expresses the relation in which labor-power is exchanged for other commodities, the exchange value of labor-power. The exchange value of a commodity estimated in money is called its price. Wages therefore are only a special name for the price of labor-power, and are usually called the price of work; it is the special name for the price of this peculiar commodity, which has no other repository than human flesh and blood.

Let us take any worker, for example, a weaver. The capitalist supplies him with the loom and the yarn. The weaver applies himself to work, and the yarn is turned into cloth. The capitalist takes possession of the cloth and sells it for twenty dollars, for example. Now are the wages of the weaver a share of the cloth, of the twenty dollars, of the product of his work? By no means. Long before the cloth is sold, perhaps long before it is fully woven, the weaver has received his wages. The capitalist, then, does not pay his wages out of the money which he will obtain from the cloth, but out of money already on hand. Just as little as loom and yarn are the