It is important to take note of the historical character of this phenomenon. While the purchase and sale of labor power has existed from antiquity,\* a substantial class of wage-workers did not begin to form in Europe until the fourteenth century, and did not become numerically significant until the rise of industrial capitalism (that is, the production of commodities on a capitalist basis, as against mercantile capitalism, which merely exchanged the surplus products of prior forms of production) in the eighteenth century. It has been the numerically dominant form for little more than a century, and this in only a few countries. In the United States, perhaps four-fifths of the population was self-employed in the early part of the nineteenth century. By 1870 this had declined to about one-third and by 1940 to no more than one-fifth; by 1970 only about one-tenth of the population was self-employed. We are thus dealing with a social relation of extremely recent date. The rapidity with which it has won supremacy in a number of countries emphasizes the extraordinary power of the tendency of capitalist economies to convert all other forms of labor into hired labor.
The worker enters into the employment agreement because social conditions leave him or her no other way to gain a livelihood. The employer, on the other hand, is the possessor of a unit of capital which he is endeavoring to enlarge, and in order to do so he converts part of it into wages. Thus is set in motion the labor process, which, while it is in general a process for creating useful values, has now also become specifically a process for the expansion of capital, the creation of a profit.\*\* From this point on, it becomes foolhardy to view the labor process purely from a technical standpoint, as a mere mode of labor. It has become in addition a process of accumulation of capital. And, moreover, it is the latter aspect which dominates in the mind and activities of the capitalist, into whose hands the control over the labor process has passed. In everything that follows, therefore, we shall be considering the manner in which the labor process is dominated and shaped by the accumulation of capital.\*
Labor, like all life processes and bodily functions, is an inalienable property of the human individual. Muscle and brain cannot be separated from persons possessing them; one cannot endow another with one's own capacity for work, no matter at what price, any more than one can eat, sleep, or perform sex acts for another. Thus, in the exchange, the worker does not surrender to the capitalist his or her capacity for work. The worker retains it, and the capitalist can take advantage of the bargain only by setting the worker to work. It is of course understood that the useful effects or products of labor belong to the capitalist. But what the worker sells, and what the capitalist buys, is not an agreed amount of labor, but the power to labor over an agreed period of time. This inability to purchase labor, which is an inalienable bodily and mental function, and the necessity to purchase the power to perform it, is so fraught with consequences for the entire capitalist mode of production that it must be investigated more closely.
When a master employs the services of a beast of burden in his production process, he can do little more than direct into useful channels such natural abilities as strength and endurance. When he employs bees in the production of honey, silkworms in the making of silk, bacteria in the fermentation of wine, or sheep in the growing of wool, he can only turn to his own advantage the instinctual activities or biological functions of these forms of life. Babbage gave a fascinating example:
A most extraordinary species of manufacture . . . has been contrived by an officer of engineers residing at Munich. It consists of lace, and veils, with open patterns in them, made entirely by caterpillars. The following is the mode of proceeding adopted:—He makes a paste of the leaves of the plant, which is the usual food of the species of caterpillar he employs, and spreads it thinly over a stone, or other flat substance. He then, with a camel-hair pencil dipped in olive oil, draws upon the coating of paste the pattern he wishes the insects to leave open. This stone is then placed in an inclined position, and a number of the caterpillars are placed at the bottom. A peculiar species is chosen, which spins a strong web; and the animals commencing at the bottom, eat and spin their way up to the top, carefully avoiding every part touched by the oil, but devouring all the rest of the paste. The extreme lightness of these veils, ,,15 combined with some strength, is truly surprising.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Labor and Labor Power
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\* Aristotle includes “service for hire—of this, one kind is employed in the mechanical arts, the other in unskilled and bodily labor along with commerce and usury as the three divisions of exchange which form an unnatural mode of wealth-getting, the natural or “"true and proper"modes being through livestock raising and husbandry. He seems, however, to have in mind the sale of one's labor power rather than the purchase of that of others as a means to wealth, an attitude the precise opposite of that which is characteristic in the capitalist era.13
\*\* Thus Marx says of the process of production that “considered . . . as the unity of the labour-process and the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist ,14 process of production, or capitalist production of commodities.'
\* This is not the place for a general discussion of the capital-accumulation process, and the economic laws which enforce it on the capitalist regardless of his wishes. The best discussion remains that of Marx, and occupies much of the first volume of Capital, especially Part VII. A very clear and compressed exposition of the capitalist drive for accumulation, considered both as subjective desire and objective necessity, is to be found in Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York, 1942), pp. 79-83 and 92-95. This should be supplemented with Paul M. Sweezy and Paul A. Baran, Monopoly Capital, which is devoted to the conditions of accumulation in the monopoly period of capitalism (New York, 1966; see especially pp. 42-44 and 67-71).