Page:Lily Gair Wilkinson - Revolutionary Socialism and the Woman's Movement.djvu/10

 Rh was largely recruited from the expropriated peasantry, who, being deprived of their lands, were forced to enter the towns and there to live by selling themselves to the capitalist owners as workers of the machines. Thus capitalism acquired an enormous impetus, and the foundations of modern wage slavery were laid.

The wages paid to such workers represent the price of the labour-power which they sell to the owners of the machinery of production. Labour-power being the only thing which a member of the dispossessed class has for sale, and by the sale of which he can live, he is forced to bring that labour-power (and he himself goes along with it of course) into the market, to endeavour to sell it there for what it will fetch, in just the same way as any other goods are sold. If the supply of labour-power is large in relation to the demand for it, the price (wages) will be low. If the supply of labour-power decreases relatively to the demand, the price will go up. Thus that price (wages) constantly rises and falls above and below a central point—that centre being the cost of production (or, more correctly, the value) of labour-power. The cost of production of labour-power is equal to the amount of labour which is necessarily expended upon the production of those things which create, maintain, and reproduce that labour-power. This, in the long run and on the average, is what a worker will get by the sale of his power to labour—only this and nothing more.

Now this bargain between capitalist and worker must also be understood from the capitalist's point of view. Why the worker has to make the bargain is obvious; he has no other means of living. But why does the capitalist make the bargain? Because in operating the tools of production, with their wonderful modern productive powers, the workers will produce more than the equivalent of that amount of wealth which the capitalist must return to them in the form of wages in order that they may go on living and come back to work another day. In the capacity of owners the capitalists appropriate and enjoy this surplus-wealth created by the labour of the working class; not, be it marked, because they take any active part in production, but merely because they are owners. To the owner goes the product.

When the workers themselves will own and control the machinery of production which they alone operate, they will enjoy the full product of their labour, but so long as there is a parasitic master-class standing between them and their instruments they will be robbed of the greater part of that which they produce.