ke
these things. These all belong to another class who by owning them, in
fact, own him. He cannot offer labor for sale, because his labor does
not yet exist. He cannot sell a thing that has no existence. When his
labor comes into real objective existence, it is incorporated with
materials that are the property of the class that rules him, and no
longer belongs to him. He cannot sell what he don't possess. There is
only one thing he can sell, namely, his mental and physical or muscular
power to do things, to make things. He can sell this for a definite time
to an employer, just exactly as a livery stable keeper sells a horse's
power to trot to his customers for so much per hour. Now this power of
his to do things is what we call his labor-power; that is, his capacity
to perform work. Now, its value is determined precisely like the value
of every other commodity, _i. e._, by the labor-time socially necessary
for its production. Now the labor-time socially necessary for the
production of labor-power is the labor-time socially necessary to
produce the food, clothing and shelter or lodging that are necessary to
enable the laborer to come on the labor market day after day able
physically to work, and also to enable him to beget and raise children
who will take his place as wage-slaves when he shall have been buried
by the County or some Sick and Death Benefit Fund.

In the example we used above we assumed that the laborer worked three
hours a day to produce a value equal to the value of his labor-power.
The price of this value, the value produced by his paid labor, we call
"Wages." This price is often reduced by the competition of "scabs" and
other victims of capitalist exploitation, below the real value of
labor-power, but we have not time to go into that here, so we will
assume that the laborer gets in wages the full value of his labor-power.

Well, then, if he produces in three or four hours a value equal to the
value of his labor-power or wages, why doesn't he stop work then, and
take his coat and hat and go home and devote the rest of the day to
study, reading, games, recreation and amusement? He don't because he
can't. He has to agree (voluntarily, of course) to any conditions that
the class who by owning his tools own him choose to impose upon him, and
the lash of the competition of the unemployed, Capital's Reserve Army,
as Marx called it, is ever ready to fall upon his naked back.

Why is he so helpless? Because h