We exchange the fruits of our own labor for the the fruits of others' labor. Strictly speaking the labor times need not be equivalent for the exchange to be just as long as the exchange is voluntary and serves the respective interests of the parties. ******************************** MB: In the trinity forumula, Marx outlines how it appears that Capital, rent and wages are all just equivalent values trading along nicely in just exchanges; but that the reality is quite different. Individual labourers actually *produce wealth* which is in turn *owned by those who employ them*, capitalists. Wages are the price of labour skills on the market, but they are *not* related to the wealth which ends up in the product. Once labour time is crystalized into a wealth of goods and services, that social product is owned by the capitalists and then marketed as commodities for profit. The price/wage of labour *might* be created in the first two hours of wealth produced during an eight hour day. The wage could even be equivalent to the price of seven hours of work. Still, the capitalist keeps the product of labour and sells it making more money from this transaction than s/he has paid in wages. Rent is paid to lanlords because they *own* the wealth of Nature. Ownership is a legal form, enforced by the implied violence of the bourgeois State.
As Marx put it:
Capital — profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), land — ground-rent, labour — wages, this is the trinity formula which comprises all the secrets of the social production process.
Furthermore, since as previously [Present edition: Ch. XXIII. — Ed.] demonstrated interest appears as the specific characteristic product of capital and profit of enterprise on the contrary appears as wages independent of capital, the above trinity formula reduces itself more specifically to the following:
Capital — interest, land — ground-rent, labour — wages, where profit, the specific characteristic form of surplus-value belonging to the capitalist mode of production, is fortunately eliminated.
On closer examination of this economic trinity, we find the following:
First, the alleged sources of the annually available wealth belong to widely dissimilar spheres and are not at all analogous with one another. They have about the same relation to each other as lawyer’s fees, red beets and music.
Capital, land, labour! However, capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital is rather the means of production transformed into capital, which in themselves are no more capital than gold or silver in itself is money. It is the means of production monopolised by a certain section of society, confronting living labour-power as products and working conditions rendered independent of this very labour-power, which are personified through this antithesis in capital. It is not merely the products of labourers turned into independent powers, products as rulers and buyers of their producers, but rather also the social forces and the future [? illegible] [A later collation with the manuscript showed that the text reads as follows: "die Gesellschaftlichen Kräfte und Zusammenhängende Form dieser Arbeit" (the social forces of their labour and socialised form of this labour). — Ed.] form of this labour, which confront the labourers as properties of their products. Here, then, we have a definite and, at first glance, very mystical, social form, of one of the factors in a historically produced social production process.
And now alongside of this we have the land, inorganic nature as such, rudis indigestaque moles, [Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, 7. — Ed] in all its primeval wildness. Value is labour. Therefore surplus-value cannot be earth. Absolute fertility of the soil effects nothing more than the following: a certain quantity of labour produces a certain product — in accordance with the natural fertility of the soil. The difference in soil fertility causes the same quantities of labour and capital, hence the same value, to be manifested in different quantities of agricultural products; that is, causes these products to have different individual values. The equalisation of these individual values into market-values is responsible for the fact that the
"advantages of fertile over inferior soil ... are transferred from the cultivator or consumer to the landlord". (Ricardo, Principles, London, 1821, p.62.)
And finally, as third party in this union, a mere ghost — "the" Labour, which is no more than an abstraction and taken by itself does not exist at all, or, if we take... [illegible] [As has been established by later reading of the manuscript, it reads here: "wenn wir das Gemeinte nehmen" (if we take that which is behind it). — Ed.], the productive activity of human beings in general, by which they promote the interchange with Nature, divested not only of every social form and well-defined character, but even in its bare natural existence, independent of society, removed from all societies, and as an expression and confirmation of life which the still non-social man in general has in common with the one who is in any way social.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm ******************** Rakeesh: But it is indeed an injustice to exchange someone's else labor for even more of his labor, for this is not exchanging but appropriating. And certainly that can't be described as a just exchange even if we think what counts as justice is relative to the mode of production; understood scientifically or dialectically, this wage exchange is neither just...nor an exchange.
The injustice is not that the wage has cost the capitalist nothing (of course the money serving as variable capital does have an opportunity cost); it is that its cost has already been borne by the working class, so that the working class is having to buy back the fruits of its own labor with even more labor. If this is the content of the exchange, how can it be accepted as just even if equivalents are exchanged freely? ********************************
The freedom of the working class is relative to the necessities imposed by the class dominated societies they live within. In bourgeois society the owners of the lion's share of the wealth are the ones who make the laws or see to it that these laws are made for them. A worker owns only his/her skill. A worker doesn't own most of the wealth s/he creates. This alienation between the product and the producer forms the basis for "injustice" in class societies. The point, of course, is to change those societies into classless ones.
Mike B)
An injury to one is an injury to all http://www.iww.org/
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