Activity

[...] If higher wages were all that is necessary, Marx would have been no more than a wordy and over-philosophical union activist. The problems, however, are much bigger: the wage relation and capitalist social relations themselves. The point is not to redistribute capitalist value, but to overcome…

[...] the "extra" or surplus value created in the producton process comes not from capital's contribution, but from the labour power workers contribute to the whole relationship. In other words, the appropriation of labour's surplus value--you can pay them less than what they produce in words--is t…

[...] Labour is the specific or "real" act of working. Labour-power is the abstract "capacity to work": skills, knowledge, energy, etc. specific to each of those without access to means of productions except through capitalists. Wage workers do not sell "living labour," they sell the commodity labo…

What needed explaining, according to Marx, was why there were capitalists at all. Why didn't everyone have, or at least have access to those things that enabled you to produce things for use or exchange? How did the capitalists get to be the ones with the tools and resources? In search of an answer…