Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/13

 the same terms as above, will pay the laborer a little over 16½ cents a piece, for 12 pieces—9 dollars, for which the laborer has toiled 12 hours. The capitalist receives for the 12 pieces 20 dollars: out of these—16 dollars go for raw materials and wear and tear, out of the balance of 4 dollars—2 go for wages and two are pocketed by the capitalist. The result then, is the game as above. In this case as well as in the first, the laborer works six hours for himself i, e. in return for his wage (½ hour out of each 12 hours) and six hours for the capitalist.

The difficulty, which brought to grief even the best economists as long as they started their reasoning with the value of “labor” disappears as soon as we start in its stead with the value of labor-power.

Labor-power is a commodity in our present capitalist society to be sure a commodity like any other, but still a peculiar commodity. It has the peculiar quality of being a power that generates value, or of being the source of value, and what is more, of being with proper treatment, the source of more value, than is embodied in itself.

As a matter of fact, productive efficiency has nowadays reached such a stage, that human labor-power produces during one day not only a greater value, than that which it possesses and costs; but also, with each scientific discovery, with each new technical invention, the excess of its daily product over and above its daily cost increases: in other words, that part of the work-day during which the laborer is working merely to reproduce the equivalent of his daily wage is constantly decreasing, while that part is increasing, during which the laborer has to make a free gift of his labor to the capitalist, for which he is not paid at all.

And this is the economic constitution of our entire modern society; it is the working class alone, which produces all values. For value is merely another expression for labor, that expression by which in our present capitalist society is designated the quantity of socially necessary labor, embodied in a difinitedefinite [sic] commodity. But the values, produced by the laborers, do