Similarly with piece-wages.Let us suppose that in 12 hours our worker makes 12 commodities.Each of these costs a shilling in raw materials and wear-and-tear, and is sold for 2.5 shillings.On our former assumption, the capitalist gives the laborer.25 of a shilling for each piece, which makes a total of 3 shillings for 12 pieces.To earn this, the worker requires 12 hours.The capitalist receives 30 shillings for the 12 pieces; deducting 24 shillings for raw materials and wear-and-tear, there remains 6 shillings, of which he pays 3 shillings in wages and pockets the remaining 3.Just as before! Here, also, the worker labors 6 hours for himself -- i.e., to replace his wages (half-an-hour in each of the 12 hours), and 6 hours for the capitalist.
The rock upon which the best economists were stranded, as long as they started out from the value of labor, vanishes as soon as we make our starting-point the value of labor-power.Labor-power is, in our present-day capitalist society, a commodity like every other commodity, but yet a very peculiar commodity.It has, namely, the peculiarity of being a value-creating force, the source of value, and, moreover, when properly treated, the source of more value than it possesses itself.In the present state of production, human labor-power not only produces in a day a greater value than it itself possesses and costs; but with each new scientific discovery, with each new technical invention, there also rises the surplus of its daily production over its daily cost, while as a consequence there diminishes that part of the working-day in which the laborer produces the equivalent of his day's wages, and, on the other hand, lengthens that part of the working-day in which he must present labor gratis to the capitalist.
And this is the economic constitution of our entire modern society:
the working class alone produces all values.For value is only another expression for labor, that expression, namely, by which is designated, in our capitalist society of today, the amount of socially necessary labor embodied in a particular commodity.But, these values produced by the workers do not belong to the workers.They belong to the owners of the raw materials, machines, tools, and money, which enable them to buy the labor-power of the working class.Hence, the working class gets back only a part of the entire mass of products produced by it.And, as we have just seen, the other portion, which the capitalist class retains, and which it has to share, at most, only with the landlord class, is increasing with every new discovery and invention, while the share which falls to the working class (per capita) rises but little and very slowly, or not at all, and under certain conditions it may even fall.
But, these discoveries and inventions which supplant one another with ever-increasing speed, this productiveness of human labor which increases from day to day to unheard-of proportions, at last gives rise to a conflict, in which present capitalistic economy must go to ruin.On the one hand, immeasurable wealth and a superfluidity of products with which the buyers cannot cope.On the other hand, the great mass of society proletarianized, transformed into wage-laborers, and thereby disabled from appropriating to themselves that superfluidity of products.The splitting up of society into a small class, immoderately rich, and a large class of wage-laborers devoid of all property, brings it about that this society smothers in its own superfluidity, while the great majority of its members are scarcely, or not at all, protected from extreme want.
This condition becomes every day more absurd and more unnecessary.It must be gotten rid of; it can be gotten rid of.A new social order is possible, in which the class differences of today will have disappeared, and in which -- perhaps after a short transition period, which, though somewhat deficient in other respects, will in any case be very useful morally -- there will be the means of life, of the enjoyment of life, and of the development and activity of all bodily and mental faculties, through the systematic use and further development of the enormous productive powers of society, which exists with us even now, with equal obligation upon all to work.And that the workers are growing ever more determined to achieve this new social order will be proven on both sides of the ocean on this dawning May Day, and on Sunday, May 3rd.[Engels is refering to the May Day celebrations of 1891]