places open to him, he will not accept low wages; on the other
hand, if the employer knows that there are ten men for every job, he
will not pay high wages. So, as with the prices of things in general,
supply and demand enter into the question of the price of labor in any
given time or place.

Then, also, by combination workingmen can sometimes raise their wages.
They can bring about a sort of monopoly-price for their labor-power.
It is not an absolute monopoly-price, however, for the reason that,
almost invariably, there are men outside of the unions, whose
competition has to be withstood. Also, the means of production and the
accumulated surplus belong to the capitalists so that they can
generally starve the workers into submission, or at least compromise,
in any struggle aiming at the establishment of monopoly-prices for
labor-power.

But there is one thing the workers can never do, except by destroying
capitalism: _they cannot get wages equal to the full value of their
product_. That would destroy the capitalist system, which is based
upon profit-making. All the luxury and wealth of the non-producers is
wrung from the labor of the producers. You can see that for yourself,
Jonathan, and I need not argue it further.

I do not care very much whether you call the part of the wealth which
goes to the non-producers "surplus value," or whether you call it
something else. The _name_ is not of great importance to us. We care
only for the reality. But I do want you to get firm hold of the simple
fact that when an idler gets a dollar he has not earned, some worker
must get a dollar less than he has earned.

Don't be buncoed by the word-jugglers who tell you that the profits of
the capitalists are the "fruits of abstinence," or the "reward of
managing ability," sometimes also called the "wages of superintendence."

These and other attempted explanations of capitalists' profits are
simply old wives' fables, Jonathan. Let us look for a minute at the
first of these absurd attempts to explain away the fact that profit is
only another name for unpaid-for labor. You know very well that
abstinence never yet produced anything. If I have a dollar in my
pocket and I say to myself, "I will not spend this dollar: I will
abstain from using it," the dollar does not increase in any way. It
remains just a dollar and no more. If I have a loaf of bread or a
bottle of wine and say to myself, "I will not use this bread, or this
wine, but wil