e equivalent to his means of
subsistence, or to the wages actually paid to him, in a very small
number of hours. If he owned and controlled the means of
production,--land, machinery, raw materials, and so on,--he would,
therefore, need to work only so many hours as the production of the
necessities of life for himself and his family required. But the laborer
in capitalist society does not own the means of production, that
condition being quite incompatible with machine production upon a large
scale. A separation of the worker from the ownership of the means of
production has taken place as one of the inevitable results of
industrial evolution. So the laborer must sell the only commodity he has
to sell, namely, his labor-power. He sells the utility of that commodity
to the capitalist for its exchange-value, or market price. Like any
other commodity, the utility of labor-power, its use-value, belongs to
the purchaser, the capitalist. It is his to use as he sees fit. He has
it used to produce other commodities which he in turn hopes to sell--has
the labor-power used up in the manufacture of other commodities, just as
he has the raw materials used up. He buys, for example, the labor-power
of the workers for a day of ten hours. In five hours, say, the worker
creates value equivalent to his wages, but he does not cease at that
point. He goes on working for another five hours, thus producing in a
day double the amount of his wages, the exchange-value of the
labor-power he sold the capitalist. Thus the capitalist, having paid
wages equivalent to the product of five hours, receives the product of
ten hours. This balance represents the surplus-value (_Mehrwerth_).

This takes place all through industry. If the capitalist employs a
thousand workers under these conditions, each day he receives the
product of five thousand hours over and above the product actually paid
for. This constitutes his income. If the capitalist owned the land,
machinery, and raw materials, absolutely, without incumbrances of any
kind, the whole of that surplus-value would, naturally, belong to him.
But as a general rule this is not the case. He rents the land and must
pay rent to the landlord, or he works upon borrowed capital and must pay
interest upon loans, so that the surplus-value extracted from the
laborer must be divided into rent, interest, and profit. But how the
surplus-value is divided among landlords, moneylenders, creditors,
speculators, and ac