bought your human power (to work)–your labor power.
And you sold him your labor-power, just as a stockman sells horses or a baker sells bread. You went to the boss with something to sell. He was in the market to buy human labor-power, and if your price was low you probably got a job.
Some of us work many years before we realize that even we wage-workers have one commodity to sell. As long as we are able to work we try to find a buyer of our labor-power. We hunt for a job and the boss that goes with a job.
Men and women who have no other means of support have to sell their labor-power for wages in order to live.
A commodity is something that satisfies some human want; something produced by labor-power for sale or exchange. A dress made by a woman for herself is not a commodity. A dress made to be sold to somebody else is a commodity. It is not made for use, but for sale.
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.
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.
Are your interests identical?
What happens when there are ten men competing to sell their labor-power? Who gets the job?
What happens when there are several jobs and only one worker? Will he receive higher or lower wages? Will he get a good price for his labor-power?
When workingmen are scarce and manufacturers are forced to pay a high price for labor-power (high wages) in a certain locality, does the scarcity of workers last long? If not, why not?
When men are hunting jobs toward which cities do they go? Why?
Does supply and demand have anything to do with the price at which you are able to sell your labor-power?
Why is the steel trust putting up a fifty million dollar plant in China? Will they be able to make more profits manufacturing steel there than in America? Why? Why do Chinese workmen come to America to sell their labor-power?
Karl Marx talks much of commodities–their value and their price, and in order to understand his teachings, we must know first of all that we are sellers of a commodity called labor-power.
In the next lesson we shall take up the question of what determines the value of your labor-power and the value of all other commodities.
We suggest that students buy and study Capital, by Marx; 3 vols; cloth, $2.00 each.
Value, Price and Profit, by Marx, 10 cents.
These lessons are only an attempt to say, in the language of working men and women, the things Marx says in his own books.
In the preceding chapter, we learned that the wageworker's relation to the boss is that of a seller of a commodity. Whether you work in a mine, a mill or a factory, whenever you get a job you are selling your strength to work–or your labor-power–to the boss.
We know that labor-power is a commodity like shoes or hats or stoves.
Now all commodities are the product of labor, that is, there was never a commodity that was not the result of the strength and brains of working men or women. 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 pa