 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 past.
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 as 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. On page 61 of the Kerr edition of Value, Price and Profit, Marx says:
"It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor bestowed upon its production, the lazier a man, or clumsier a man, the more valuable his commodity, because the greater the time of labor required for finishing the commodity. This, however, would be a sad mistake. You will recollect that I used the word social labor, and many points are involved in this qualification.
"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."
If you spend three months cutting up a log with a pen-knife into a kitchen chair, it will be no more valuable in the end than the kitchen chair made in the big factories where many men working at large machines produce hundreds of chairs in a single day.
Of course we know that every new improvement in machinery lessens the labor-time needed in making certain commodities. Oil is less valuable than it was ten years ago because it takes less labor- power to produce it. Steel has fallen in value, because owing to the new and improved machinery used in making steel it requires less human labor-power for its production.
Suppose every shoe factory in the country were working full time in order to supply the