Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/11

 one is double the other or that 12 equals 6. In either case the result is—utter nonsense.

Turn and twist as much as we like but we cannot extricate ourselves from this contradiction, as long as we use the terms “buying and selling labor” and “the value of labor”. And this was exactly the fate of the economists. The last offshoot of classical economics, the Ricardian school, perished mainly for the reason that it was unable to solve this contradiction. Classical Economics had become irretrievably lost in a “cul-de-sac”. The man to find the way out of it, was Karl Marx.

What economists had regarded as the cost of production of “labor” was not the cost of labor, but that of the living laborer. And what they thought the laborer was selling to the capitalist, was not his labor. “As soon as his labor really begins, says Marx, it ceases to belong to him, and therefore can no longer be sold by him”. At best, he is able to sell his labor, i.e. he can assume the obligation, to perform a definite labor service at a definite time. But by doing this he does not sell labor (which is only performed) he transfers to the capitalist for a definite time (in case of time-wages) or for the sake of a definite labor service (in case of piece-wages) the control over his labor-power for a definite payment; he leases, or rather sells his. This labor power is coalescent with and inseparable from his very person its cost of production therefore coincides with that of the individual; what the economists called the cost of production of labor, is that of the laborer and at the same time that of his labor power. It is thus that we are able to go back of the cost of production of labor to the of labor power and to determine the amount of socially necessary labor, requisite for the production of labor-power of definite quality, as Marx has done it