en the value of your labor-power and the value of the things you produce in the factory or mine? Suppose you are working in a California mine and earning $3.00 a day, which is sufficient to buy food, clothing and shelter IN CALIFORNIA, enough to produce your labor-power. Suppose your employer wants to send you, and some of your California comrades to work in his mines in Alaska. The value of the necessities of life are far more in Alaska than they are in California. It requires $6.00 a day to buy food, clothing and shelter (to produce LABOR-POWER) in Alaska.
Will you be able to save any more money in Alaska at $6.00 a day than you would in California at $3.00 a day? Why not? Who pays the difference in the high prices of the necessities of life? YOU or YOUR BOSS? (We are not speaking of individual cases, but of high prices charged for food, etc., in general.)
Of course, we all know that the working class produce all exchange value. We make all commodities, but as we have sold our labor-power to the boss, our products belong to HIM. So the boss pays for nearly everything, because he has appropriated the things we have made.
When the value of the necessities of life RISE, does the working class or the capitalist CLASS pay the bill? In the case of our mining jobs in Alaska, do WE pay $6.00 for our board, clothes and room, or does the $3.00 increase in OUR cost of living FALL ON THE CAPITALIST?
We know that strength to work, or labor-power, is a commodity. The value of a commodity is determined by the necessary social labor time contained in it.
If it takes three hours of social labor to produce the necessities of life for you one day, the value of your labor-power one day will be three hours of necessary social labor.
Figure A will represent the value of your labor-power, because 3 hours of social labor are contained in the necessities of life which will support you one day.
Let Figure C represent your product for one day. It contains 9 hours of labor time. The capitalist who employs you will need to return to you sufficient value to enable you to pay for A (or the cost of living).
Figure B is equal to A because it contains 3 hours of labor. It represents the value returned to you by the boss in the shape of gold or wages.
We know that A is equal to B. And we know that C contains three times the value of a or B. We know also that the capitalist is constantly trying to prolong C into ten or even eleven hours, and that capitalists cut wages whenever and wherever possible. It is only by constant struggle that the
working class has been able to maintain its position, to secure a, perhaps normal, increase in wages, or a shorter workday.
It is self-evident that if you secure more wages (B) there will be less of the value of your product (C) remaining for the capitalist employing you, just as a reduction in wages leaves more surplus value for him.
An increase in the length of your workday (C) to ten hours will leave 7 hours of unpaid labor instead of six. A shorter workday will leave less surplus value for the capitalist.
Reformers believe that if we could decrease the cost of living we would better our condition. They think if A (the cost of living) were lowered, we could save a part of our wages (B). Of course, the value of our labor-power falls with a decrease in the value of the necessities of life, but they imagine we might be able to lower the cost of living without suffering a corresponding decrease in wages.
Personally, you know if your landlord should cut your rent down one-half next month, you would have more money left to spend for other things. Personally, you know if your brother offered to board you at half the regular rate, you could save a still larger sum of money next month. This is true of your individual case.
But we are not talking about individual cases, though we use concrete examples for the sake of making things clear. We are asking if low prices would benefit the wage-working class.
We will suppose an extreme example in order to illustrate our explanation. Suppose the City of Chicago should buy up all the 