be seen that this contract is made between two parties; on the one hand the workman or producer, who has no means of producing, on the other the possessor of money, who has all the means necessary for the producer to effectively exercise his faculty of production, and has therefore become a capitalist. “He who was before the money-owner now strides in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business: the other timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market, and has nothing to expect but—a hiding.”
The labour-process necessary to capitalism exhibits two characteristic phenomena: first the labourer works under the control of a capitalist, and 240 secondly the product of the labourer is the property of a capitalist, and not of the labourer, its immediate producer. This product appropriated by the capitalist is a use-value, “as for example yarn, or boots;” says Marx with a grin, “but although boots are in one sense the basis of all social progress, and our capitalist is a decided ‘progressist,’ the capitalist does not for his special purpose look upon them as boots, or any other use-value. He has primarily two objects in view: first he wants to produce a use-value, not, again, for the sake of its use, but in order that he may exchange it; and next, in order that his exchange may be fruitful to him, he wants to produce a commodity the value of which shall be greater than the sum of the values used in producing it—that is, the means of production and the labour-power.”
This he is able to accomplish as follows. He buys the use of the labour-power of the workman for a day, while a certain duration of labour in the day is enough to reproduce the workman’s expended labour-power—that is, to keep him alive. But the human machine is 241 in all cases capable of labouring for more hours in the day than is necessary for this result, and the contract between the capitalist and the labourer, as understood in the system under which those two classes exist, implies that the exercise of the day’s labour-power shall exceed this duration