Mary Edna Tobias Marcy

“ It is not only necessary, but it is a highly desirable matter, that we continue to resist and to advance and attack in our daily struggle with the capitalists. For it is through present defeats and victories that we learn our strength and our weaknesses. We learn to fight by fighting. New tactics are often evolved in struggles that seem to be total failures. And class solidarity becomes a living thing, a resistless weapon, when we are fighting and acting more or less as a class. ”

“ No man was ever able to raise the general price of a commodity at will, and get that price. If any man ever held such power, he would have charged an unlimited price for his commodity and immediately assumed the world's dictatorship.
John D. Rockefeller may be able to raise the price on oil in certain communities, but he cannot force men to buy at this price. So-called monopolists are subject to economic laws just as are wage-workers. No monopolist was ever so great a philanthropist that he did not charge all the traffic would bear at all times. ”

“ Remember that we do not sell our labor. We sell our strength to work our laboring power, our labor power. Labor is the expenditure of labor-power. See Value, Price and Profit, pages 71, 72 and 73. When we apply for a job, we do not offer to sell our WORK, but our strength to WORK. The commodities we make are crystallizations of our work or of our LABOR, but it is our strength to labor, or laboring power—our labor-power which we sell to the boss. ”

“ Would it ever be possible for him to pay the laborers MORE than the value of their labor power and to sell their products at LESS than their value, and still make a profit? Explain why this would be possible.
Are the workers any better off where the cost of living is low than where the cost of living is high? Are they able to save any more in the countries of low prices? Do low prices benefit the working class? Do we find wages high or low where the cost of living is high? Where the cost of living is low? Does a low cost of living benefit the capitalists? ”

“ But intelligent workmen and women are not content with selling their laboring-power at its value. They are coming more and more to demand the value of their products. We are growing weary of being mere commodities, compelled to sell ourselves, for wages at the regular "market price." We are weary of receiving a product of two hours of labor for products containing ten hours of our labor. We are tired of living on meagre wages while we pile up millions for the capitalist class. ”

“ Now you know that any man who is selling a commodity asks as high a price for it as he can. The little grocer who runs the small store near your home charges just as much as possible in selling butter to you. The coal dealers raise their prices whenever they can. And when you strike the boss for a job, you ask him as high a price for your labor-power as you think you can get.
High prices for labor-power is what wage-workers want. Low prices for labor-power is what your employer wants. ”

“ In discussing prices in the last two lessons, we have not said much about wages, or the price of labor-power. Labor-power is a commodity just as stoves, coats or flour are commodities. And the value and price of labor-power are determined exactly as the price and value of all other commodities are determined.
Wage-workers are always trying to get higher wages, or a better price for their labor-power. ”

“ But men and women who have nothing to sell but their labor-power have no choice in the matter. They are compelled to sell their strength or labor-power in order to get wages to live. Capitalists, on the other hand, employ them for the sole purpose of taking profits. Capitalists are forced to give the working class enough to live and work on, but they try by every means at their command to prolong the working day into ten, or even twelve hours, in order that more surplus products, or surplus value, may remain for themselves. ”

“ Workers make shoes; bakers of bread are working men or women; houses, street cars, trains, palaces, bridges, stoves—all are the product of the laboring man. All commodities are the product of labor.
There is one common thing which all commodities contain. This is labor. A commodity only has value (exchange value) because it contains human labor.
Horses are commodities, cows are commodities, gold is a commodity. Human labor has been spent in producing all these. Labor-power is also a commodity, the result of human labor in the past. ”

“ But Capital makes continual war upon the workers. It reduces wages to the bare cost of living and lowers the standard of living whenever and wherever possible. It prolongs the hours of labor as far as the physical endurance of the workers themselves will allow. And the workers find themselves forced constantly to fight in order to hold the little they already have. So that, on every side, we see little groups of workers in conflict with their employers, fighting to maintain working conditions, or to improve them where they become unendurable. ”

“ This was the commodity which you workers supply. It is human power, human labor-power.
One hundred years ago almost everything was produced by human labor-power, but gradually improved machinery has been invented that lessens the human toil needed to make things. Big machines, run by steam, or water-power, now do-most of the heavy and difficult work. But the owner of the mine or factory or mill needs one other commodity to guide the machines, to tend the machines and feed them. He needs your labor-power. ”

“ But we will take an extreme case to illustrate who pays the increased price where an imaginary Octopus doubles the price of the necessities of life.
Let us suppose that 500 miners are receiving $5 a day working a copper mine in Alaska. Five dollars just affords them a comfortable or tolerable living in Alaska. The man who owns the food and clothing supply in Alaska at this time has a temporary monopoly—an absolute, temporary monopoly of these necessities. ”

“ In saying that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor worked up or crystalized in it, we mean the quantity of labor necessary for its production in a given state of society, under certain social average conditions of production, with a given social average intensity, and average skill of labor employed. ”

“ A cotton shirt and cotton trousers clothe a man as well as his neighbors, so that the cost of living is a very negligible quantity. Bread fruit and bananas grow wild, and 10 or 12 cents a day will keep a native in comfort. A recent magazine article, which dwelt upon the advantages of capital in Central America, reports that Guatemala natives receive, on the average, 9, 10 or 12 cents a day.
If the Central American natives were driven to toil as fiercely as we are of the states, Guatemala would be a heaven for capitalists. But it is still possible for them to live without much labor. ”

“ You exchange your labor-power—to the boss—for perhaps $2 in gold a day, and in turn the gold is exchanged for the necessities of life—food, clothing and shelter. Why do these commodities exchange for each other? ”

“ Working men and women spent labor producing you and me. Somebody made bread, sewed shoes, built houses and made clothes for us. All the things we ate and drank and wore and used were made by the labor of working men and women. Their labor was necessary labor. Without it we should never have grown old enough or strong enough to have labor-power to sell. Labor-power was spent in raising us to the point where we would be able to work.
The value of a commodity is determined by the social labor-time necessary to produce it. ”

“ There is always the danger of killing the Goose That Lays the Golden Egg.
You see how if the price of A is doubled, wages will need to follow, and as B (wages) are increased there remains less surplus value for the employer to appropriate. ”

“ If you are a working man or woman, no matter what you do in the shop or factory, or mine, you know that there are two kinds of power used in the plant—human, or labor power, and steam, or water (or perhaps—gas explosion) power. ”

“ Flood the nations with your ballots, workingmen and women of the world. Elect your shop mates, your companions of the mines, your mill hand friends, to every possible office. Put yourselves or coworkers into every government position as possible to render your court decisions, to hold in readiness your army; to control your arsenals and to protect you with your constabulary, to make your laws and to serve your fellow workers, whenever and wherever and however possible. ”

“ The rate of surplus value, all other circumstances remaining the same, will depend on the proportion between that part of the working day necessary to reproduce the value of the laboring-power and the surplus time or surplus labor performed for the capitalist. It will, therefore, depend on the ratio in which the working day is prolonged over and above that extent, by working which the working man would only reproduce the value of his laboring-power or replace his wages. ”

“ Rubber is steadily growing more valuable because the available world supply has been nearly exhausted and it requires more time hunting or planting, and caring for rubber trees—more labor is contained in a pound of rubber than a few years ago.
Gradually we see huge machines replacing the smaller ones in all the great producing industries and, with the constant introduction of more improved machinery, the quantity of human labor contained in commodities produced by modern methods—grows less and less. Such commodities decrease in value with every decrease in the labor embodied in them. ”

“ Sheep are commodities, as are shoes, houses, gloves, bread, steam-power and water-power, when sold by one man to another. And your strength to make things, your human laboring-power (or, as Marx says, your labor-power) is also a commodity when sold to an employer for wages. ”

“ But gold is a commodity just like bread, or overcoats, or dresses, or automobiles. And commodities tend to exchange for the sum of gold containing a quantity of labor equal to the quantity of labor contained in them. ”

“ We propose to own the commodities we produce ourselves and to exchange commodities containing a certain quantity of necessary social labor, for other commodities representing an equal quantity of necessary social labor.
You and I work for the boss because he owns the factory or mine or railroad or the mill. Ownership of the means of production and distribution (the factories, land, mines, mills—the machinery that produces things) makes masters of capitalists and wage-workers of you and me. ”

“ They are not gaining higher wages through class conscious efforts, although every struggle is a breeder of class consciousness, even though it be only in a negative way.
Modern machinery is eliminating the need of skilled labor and unskilled labor with ever increasing speed. Skilled workers are thrown into the ranks of the unskilled and unskilled workers are thrown into the ranks of the unemployed. And gradually all workers are being more and more forced to compete with each other for jobs upon a common level. ”

“ If, speaking broadly, and embracing somewhat longer periods, all descriptions of commodities sell at their respective values, it is nonsense to suppose that profit, not in individual cases, but the constant and usual profits of different trades, spring from the prices of commodities, or selling them at a price over and above their value. ”