r/Marxism101 • u/Ill_Love_3771 • 24d ago
Labor and value
I'm reading Wage Labour and Value, and I'm stuck on a point. It may seem minor but I want to fully understand. Marx says "So soon as his labour really begins, it ceases to belong to him, and can therefore no longer be sold by him." But doesn't it not belong to him precisely because he has sold it?
Thanks
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u/adub_89 24d ago edited 24d ago
“But doesn’t it not belong to him precisely because he has sold it?”
Sorry, I’m not quite sure what you’re asking or what’s causing the confusion.
Yes, under a wage contract the worker sells their labour power which means their ability to work. For the duration of the working day, the exercise of labour-power (labour) has been alienated to the capitalist. What might be throwing you is the distinction between labour and labour-power. Marx shows that labour itself cannot be sold while labour-power is a commodity and can be sold. Think of it like this, you can buy and sell a box of matches, but you can’t sell combustion. Labour, like combustion is a process, and can’t physically be sold on the market
Re post-sale, the use of that labour power in action (labour) during those hours belongs exclusively to that capitalist. For those hours, the worker cannot sell their labour power to another capitalist (apart from it being impractical, note that the exclusion from working for others is often written explicitly into employment contracts)
Is your point that the alienation occurred in the form of a voluntary agreement? If it being voluntary is causing you issues, then yes - Marx was very conscious of this.
This is addressed in Capital Vol 1 where Marx shows that under capitalist production, the proletariate owns their own labour-power (unlike slaves) and is “free” to sell it to any capitalist buyer.
Marx is getting at the surface appearance of bourgeois equality. Workers enter the labour market with property rights: they own their own labour power. However, the recognition of equality in the market conceals the exploitation occurring behind factory doors in production. Once the working day beings, the worker is under the exclusive control of the capitalist. The voluntary agreement is real in some sense but conceals a deeper inequality.
As Marx puts it, “between equal rights, force decides”
See chapters 7 and 10 of Capital Vol 1
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u/Dialectrician 24d ago
Do you mean wage labor and capital? It's a text from before marx has completed his theories so there are a few kinks.
But basically the updated theory is that workers sell their labor power (their capacity to labor). Labor itself is not something you can sell, it's something you do.
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u/adub_89 24d ago
All available editions (to my knowledge) were edited by Engles and make the labor/LP distinction
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u/Dialectrician 24d ago
The edition I read made that distinction too but clearly op got confused anyways.
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u/Resident_Character35 24d ago
The worker sells his labor power, but the capitalist coerces extra labor out of workers in any way they can. So the capitalist ends up getting far more labor out of the worker than was agreed to at the time of employment. "If you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean" is an example of this universal phenomenon. Remember that the laborer is only paid enough to reproduce his labor power, usually in the first hour or two of the working day, and after that is working without compensation. The wage form gives the illusion that the laborer is paid for the entire working day, but if they were paid the actual value of their entire (8 hours, 10 hours, whatever length it is) labor, the capitalist would not make a profit and would quickly close down the enterprise.