Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/20

 product, or in the price of the product, as the loom itself.

Labor is, therefore, a commodity which its owner the wage worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live.

But the expenditure of the labor-power, labor, is the peculiar expression of the energy of the laborer’s life. And this energy he sells to another party in order to secure for himself the means of living. For him, therefore, his energy is nothing but the means of ensuring his own existence. He works to live. He does not count the work itself as a part of his life, rather is it a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity which he has made over to another party. Neither is its product the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk he weaves, nor the palace that he builds, nor the gold that he digs from out the mine. What he produces for himself is his wage; and silk, gold, and palace are transformed for him into a certain quantity of means of existence—a cotton shirt, some copper coins, and a lodging in a cellar. And what of the laborer, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads and so on? Does his twelve hours’ weaving, spinning, boring, turning, building, shoveling, and stone-breaking represent the active expression of