Unpaid Labor

I was thinking about the recent settlement at the occupied factory in Chicago. The banks conceded and lent the firm some money. In other words, the finance capitalists lent the industrial capitalists some capital and the industrial capitalists paid the workers with it.

But that is the worker's own money; the product of Labor. How so?

The answer to this is important for all workers to grasp and is one of the greatest contributions that Marx made to understanding the real world ; the discovery of surplus value.

The wages of workers are paid from an amassed capital pool. They are not paid out of the profit realized by the capitalist through the sale of the commodity they make, in the case above, doors and windows; they may be paid long before the product of their Labor is sold.

This accumulated mass of social capital (that the capitalists own and won't invest at the present)
has its source in surplus value, the unpaid Labor of the working class. This "appropriation" of unpaid Labor as Engels explained, "Is the basic form of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker affected through it". The capitalist pays wages or buys the use of a human being over a period of time and extracts more value from the use of this human Labor power than they pay for it. Even if they pay the full market value of this commodity (Labor Power) this occurs. This ongoing process allows capital accumulation by the capitalist out of which future wages are paid. This set up is maintained through their control of the state and means of production and is backed up with threats and violence. In other words, it is a system of coercion.

Once we understand though that what they call "their" individual capital is actually "our" collective property, it allows us to overcome the obstacles within our own mind that prevent us from going after it. We realize that their laws are phony and made with certain class interests in mind----theirs.

Woke up thinking about this and just had to write it down.