Karl Marx argued that capitalist modes of production always involve\u00a0the exploitation of the working class by\u00a0the owning class. The owning class are the\u00a0capitalists. They secure\u00a0the means\u00a0of production — the factories, tools, and machinery\u00a0— and employ workers to use those resources to produce goods.<\/p>\n
When these goods are sold, capitalists\u00a0extract the surplus value. This isn’t an magical good that blinks into existence thanks to the Capital Fairy, it’s a concrete good derived directly from the exploitation of the working class. Surplus value only exists when workers are paid less than<\/em> the\u00a0value they added with their work. If they were paid as much as<\/em> their work was worth, capitalists would break even.\u00a0And that’s not what they have in mind.<\/p>\n This\u00a0comic at A Softer World<\/a>\u00a0illustrates this idea perfectly.<\/p>\n In other words, if capitalists paid workers what their work was actually worth, there wouldn’t be any profit left to skim off the top, leaving the rest of us with a value deficit.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Karl Marx argued that capitalist modes of production always involve\u00a0the exploitation of the working class by\u00a0the owning class. The owning class are the\u00a0capitalists. They secure\u00a0the means\u00a0of production — the factories, tools, and machinery\u00a0— and employ workers to use those resources to produce goods. When these goods are sold, capitalists\u00a0extract the surplus value. This isn’t an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,36,98,76],"class_list":["post-65713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-economics","tag-capitalism","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/01\/1a2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65713"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71712,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65713\/revisions\/71712"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}