Capitalism exploits workers. Since the vast majority of people in our capitalist society have to work for a living, it’s no exaggeration to say that the majority of people in our country, and throughout the world, are exploited workers.

What does it mean to say that workers are exploited? In Marxist theory, exploitation means that workers are literally robbed by capitalists. Of course the capitalists never admit this. They claim that they pay their workers a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, that you’re paid for what you produce, no less and no more. But Marxists say that’s not what really happens.

The capitalists have set up a system in which they (the minority) own the machinery, factories, farms and other means of production needed to produce the necessities of life such as food, clothing, and shelter. The workers (the majority) usually have no other way to make a living than to sell but their ability to work. They have to sell this ability (their labor power) to the capitalists in order to earn wages. In other words, they have to get jobs. Wages are then used by workers to buy the products necessary to sustain their lives.

What is the value of your ability to labor? According to Marx, your labor power is worth whatever amount of money (or commodities) is necessary to keep you alive and working. That doesn’t sound like much of a life, but let’s go with that assumption and see what happens.

Imagine that you need to make $50 per day in order to feed, house, and clothe your-self. You find a job at an auto parts factory owned by a capitalist who agrees to pay you $50 per 8-hour day, or $6.25 an hour. Your day is spent making parts that the capitalist sells to one of the big automakers for $100 a piece, and you manage to produce 100 parts per day. Think about it – you are producing $1,250 worth of product per hour, $10,000 worth per day and $80,000 worth in a 40-hour week! Amazing isn’t it? You, the worker, have the ability to create a tremendous amount of value where there was none before. And it’s in the capitalist’s interest to get you to produce as much as humanly possible either by forcing you to work more hours in a day or making you work faster – preferably, for the capitalist, both.

But we need to get clear about something you might not have noticed. Remember that you are producing $1,250 worth of value every hour, which boils down to about $20.83 cents per minute. Is it really important to know that? Absolutely.

Here’s why it’s important. At $20.83 per minute, it takes about 2 minutes and 40 seconds for you to produce $50 worth of value. In other words, you have to work less than 3 minutes to produce the $50 that covers your salary. At this point, everything seems fair and square. You do $50 worth of work, and that’s exactly what you’re going to be paid. But don’t forget that you have to work 8 hours to get the $50 that it takes you less than 3 minutes to produce. That’s the catch, and that’s how you get robbed. In order for the privilege of working in that capitalist’s factory to get a measly $50, you have to agree to stay 8 hours and produce over $1000 worth of value, value that is stolen from you by the capitalist – literally stolen because the capitalist takes it without paying for it.

Capitalists constantly tell you that you’re getting paid for what you produce, that you’re compensated fairly for the time you put in, but in reality the capitalist can pay you for less than 3 minutes of work and force you to work over 7 hours of unpaid labor just to get that tiny paycheck. In our example, if you had been paid for what you produced, you would have made $1250 that day. Think about your own situation at work and how it fits this example.

That 7-plus hours of unpaid labor time is called surplus labor, and it produced $1200 in surplus value—surplus for the capitalist, not the worker! It’s as if you are paying the capitalist more than the capitalist is paying you. You are giving him un-paid labor time. The entire capitalist society is set up to make this look normal and fair, and the police, courts, and army set up to enforce capitalists’ ability to exploit labor. Surplus labor, and the surplus value that it produces, is the source of capitalist profit. Thus the wealth of capitalist societies is based on the robbery of workers through forced, surplus labor.

Here’s a brief look at how exploitation was explained in some of the Marxist classics, which are still the best sources to read for a deeper understanding of this issue and other aspects of the conflict between capitalism and socialism. In Chapter II of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Frederick Engels wrote:

the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his labourer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes.

Karl Marx’s Capital is the best source for an in-depth, technical explanation of labor exploitation under capitalism. In Capital, v. 1, chapter 9, Marx used the term “necessary labour-time” to designate the part of day during which workers labor to cover their own wages. He called the rest of the day, “the second period of the labour process,” in which the worker produces:

surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing. This part of the working day I call surplus labourtime, and to the labour expended during that time I give the name of surplus labour.... What distinguishes the various economic formations of society—the distinction between for example a society based on slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour—is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker.

Outraged by this extortion and want to put an end to it? Sounds like you’re a Marxist. Are you unconvinced and thinking of all kind of questions and objections? Stay tuned. They’ll be dealt with next month.

Garment workers in Los Angeles. (Photo by alossix, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0)