Surplus labour

Summary Karl Marx proposes several ideas about the political economy from modes of production to labor power and wages. With laborers and their labor power, Marx hypothesizes the the true minimum wage should be enough to ensure subsistence. Subsistence is defined as the minimal amount of necessities, such as food and shelter, for laborers to maintain their health in order to return to work the following day (Marx, “Labour-Power and Capital,” p.50). I propose to test this hypothesis by looking at the United States’s (U.S.) minimum wage and whether it’s enough for low-wage workers to get by with. The method used to evaluate this hypothesis will be examining important benchmarks used for minimum wage from purchasing power, wage growth, and productivity growth. Data pulled from governmental and agency sources will be analyzed to determine whether the current minimum wage, $7.25, is actually enough for the American laborer to get by with (The Editorial Board, 2014). II. Theory…

connected with the natural world. Any further human development, based on his understanding, is directly linked to natural and ecological elements. Capitalism, through Marxist views, has led the need of production to be what defines human beings and our personal human nature. “Labor is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature.” (Capital I, Pg.…

Marx specifically details how the system has come to affect the operation of the family unit. As machinery was introduced into the factory setting the wages earned by the worker decreased making it more difficult for the worker to obtain the things necessary to sustain their family. As a result, more members of the family entered into the workforce. This meant that both women and children became involved in the production of goods and thereby profits for the capitalists. Marx iterates this point…

Accounting for the production of wealth under capitalism, Marx notes that the profit made on any commodity is decided on the outcome of the tension between necessary labor time and surplus labor time.[1] Necessary labor time refers to the amount of labor required for the worker to reproduce themselves as a commodity. That is to say, it is how much money a worker needs to continue performing their tasks as a laborer. Generally, Marx notes the wages a worker accepts reflect the monetary value of…

In today’s capitalist society, those who own the means of production must devise ways to rationalize paying their workers at relatively low wages while still trying to earn a profit for their businesses. In this scenario, I will explain how “Moneybags”, the owner of the means of production, rationalizes paying his workers at a factory that assembles cell phone parts, through a Marxist perspective. According to Marx, every day, the worker’s means of subsistence “must therefore be sufficient to…

price. The product is sold under the market price easily since it’s value is of production is now lower. Also the lower market price gives this industry an opportunity to outsell the other firms because the output is being sold below the market price. The innovative industry becomes a price leader and gains super profit because the lower price draws consumers away from its competitors. As a result of this, the other nineteen firms must catch up to the innovative firm that instigated the change…

As with the property-owning proletariat, these contractors do not sell their labor in fixed increments to capitalists but for a duration of their own choosing. Capitalists cannot extract increase profits by either lengthening the working day, which Marx called absolute surplus value, or by increasing the productivity of the contractors through technological improvements to the means of production, or relative surplus value. Instead, the bourgeoisie must extract surplus value from the contractors…

exposure to toxic chemicals, and explosions are a daily danger to these people all in exchange for a wage. Why don 't we see about these poor conditions in the media? Why don 't we read about the labor that is put into these commodities? Well for starters many of our media sources are sponsored by big companies such as Apple. Imagine one of these media companies exposing what goes on in an Apple factory, it is of no doubt that this company will lose their sponsorship and funding provided by…

industries. As ironic as this sounds, there is significant amount of evidence in modern society of that capitalism can turn into its reciprocal. Globalization, within the economic value helped stimulate more accessible movement of capital and labor among developed and developing nations in the 20th century after the second World War. Ironically enough, while the many nations that were fighting Communism, actually embraced the echoes that were sounded by Marx (1894), almost a century earlier. As…

was based on the means in which production and distribution is created through the means of worker. The workers exchange their value for a wage to private owners which in return pay them a wage for their time producing something. As Marx writes: “whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labor, the different kinds of labor expended upon them” (Capital, I: 74). In other words, in an exchange, the values differentiate based on…