e and his class have been robbed of the
land and the tools and all the means of sustenance and production, and
have nothing left them but that empty bauble, legal liberty, liberty to
accept wages so small that they barely enable them to live like beasts,
or liberty to starve to death and be buried in unmarked graves by the
public authorities.

The wage system necessarily implies this surplus labor or unpaid labor.
So long as there are wages, workingmen, you will never get the full
product of your labor. Let no reformer beguile you into a struggle which
simply aims to secure a modification of the wage system! Nothing short
of the annihilation of the wage system will give you justice and give
you the full product of your labor.

But while wages necessarily imply surplus-labor, the reverse is not
true. You can have surplus-labor without wages. Surplus-labor is not an
invention of modern capitalists. Since Mankind emerged from the state of
Primitive Communism typified by the Garden of Eden in the Hebraic myth,
there have been three great systems of economic organization: 1.
Slavery; 2. Serfdom; 3. The Wage System. It is interesting to note the
varying appearances of surplus or unpaid labor under these three
systems.

Under the first, Slavery, all labor appears as unpaid labor. This is
only a false appearance, however. During a part of the day the slave
only reproduces the value of his maintenance or "keep." During that part
of the day he works for himself just as truly as the modern wage slave
works for himself during a part of his day. But the property relation
conceals the paid labor.

Under the second system, Serfdom, or the Feudal System,--the paid labor
and the unpaid labor are absolutely separate and distinct, so that not
even the most gifted orthodox political economist can confuse them.

Under the third system, Wage Slavery, the unpaid labor apparently falls
to Zero. There is none. You voluntarily enter into a bargain, agreeing
that your day's work is worth so much, and you receive the full price
agreed upon. But again this is only a false appearance. As we saw by our
analysis, a part of the wage-slave's day is devoted to paid labor and a
part to unpaid. Here wages or the money relation conceals the unpaid
labor and disguises under the mask of a voluntary bargain the struggle
of the working class to diminish or abolish unpaid labor, and the
class-conscious, pitiless struggle of the capitalist class to increase