>>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 sell their capacity to labor for a period of time, as a commodity. He calls this commodity "labor power" to distinguish it from labor.
Marx points out that, for labor power to be sold as a commodity, two things must be true. First, the worker must be free to sell his own labor power. He can sell it only for a limited time. If he sold it forever, he would become a slave. Second, the worker must have no other commodity to sell. He has no tools, no raw materials, and no means of living except his own labor power. This is the part of Marx's argument people like to ignore because people in the developed world are very rarely like this anymore. He must sell his labor power to live. This relation does not come from nature. It comes from a long history. Capital needs free workers in this double sense.
Labor power has a value like any other commodity. Its value is the labor time needed to produce it. Producing labor power means keeping the worker alive. The worker needs food, clothes, shelter, and fuel. These things cost a certain amount of labor time. The value of labor power also includes the cost of raising children to replace workers, since otherwise capitalism would die out without workers. It may also include the cost of training for skilled work. The value of labor power changes if the cost of living changes. There is a lowest possible value. It is the value of the bare minimum needed to stay alive. If wages fall below that, labor power is not properly maintained.
The use of labor power is different from its sale. The worker agrees to work, but he gets paid later, often at the end of the week. So the worker gives credit to the capitalist. If the capitalist goes bankrupt, the worker may lose his wages. But for our study, we can assume the worker gets paid right away.
The capitalist buys labor power to use it. Using labor power means making the worker work. The worker makes a useful thing, a use value. The capitalist does not change the basic nature of work. He just controls it. Work is a process between man and nature. Man moves his body to change natural things into things he needs. While working, he also changes himself. What makes human work special is that the worker first imagines the thing in his head. Then he builds it. A bee builds a honeycomb, but the bee cannot picture it first. The worker can. The worker must pay close attention to his task. The key parts of work are the worker himself, the thing he works on, and his tools. The earth gives us the first things to work on, natural resources, like fish and trees. If a natural resources has already been worked on before, i.e. extracted, we call it raw material. A tool is something the worker puts between himself and the thing he works on. Tools can be simple like st
ones or complex like machines. The tools people use tell us about their time period. The worker uses up the raw material and wears down his tools. The product is a new use value. The worker's labor power disappears into the product. The product now belongs to the capitalist, not the worker. The capitalist makes sure the worker does not waste anything.