>>790717> Can you guys explain it to me? Why labor cannot be fully sold? The prole and the capitalist consent.This is addressed and capital volume 1. Capitalists use money, to buy commodities, to make more money than they initially started out with. A worker sells a commodity, like their labor-power, to get money, a wage, to buy things they need like housing, food, shelter, water. A worker uses money for its original intended purpose: to buy things of equal value. A capitalist uses money to make more money.
The capitalist does not just want a use value. He wants a commodity to sell. And he wants that commodity to have more value than the things he paid for. He wants surplus value. So we must look at work as a value creating process. Let us take an example of spinning yarn. The capitalist buys ten pounds of cott
on for ten shillings. He also uses up a spindle worth two shillings. That is twelve shillings of value already in the product. The worker spins for six hours. Six hours of labor add three shillings of value. So the yarn is worth fifteen shillings. But the capitalist paid three shillings for the worker's day of labor power. The worker only needed six hours to produce that three shillings worth of value. But the worker can work twelve hours. So the capitalist makes the worker work twelve hours. In twelve hours, the worker spins twenty pounds of cott
on. The cott
on costs twenty shillings. The spindle wear is four shillings. That is twenty four shillings of old value. The worker adds twelve hours of labor, which is worth six shillings. The total value is thirty shillings. But the capitalist only advanced twenty seven shillings. He made three shillings of surplus value. The trick worked. The worker gave more labor time than he was paid for. That extra labor is surplus value. The capitalist bought labor power at its value and used it to create more value. That is how money turns into capital. The labor process makes use values. The valorization process makes value. When the labor process goes past the point of replacing the value of labor power, it becomes a surplus value process. Skilled labor creates more value per hour than unskilled labor, but the same rule holds. The worker always creates more value than he costs.
Marx points out that a person doesn't sell their labor, they
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