to the riddle. By our hypothesis, he has paid the full value of the labour power for the working days. If 80 workers have worked 30 hours, three days for 10 hours a day, the factory owner will have paid them whatever sum was necessary for the recuperation of their labour power during these days. How much will this sum have been? The answer is plain; it will have been considerably less than 900. Why? Because the quantity of labour which is necessary to recuperate my labour power is one thing, whereas the quantity of labour which I am able to expend is another thing. I can work 10 hours a day. To provide a sufficiency of food, clothing, etc., my daily needs are a quantity of articles the total value of which is equal to 5 hours. That is to say, I can do more work than the work which is requisite to recuperate my labour power. In our example, the workers consume, let us say, in the form of food, clothing, etc., during the three days, articles to the value of 450 working hours; but they supply 900 hours of labour. There remain for the capitalist 450 hours; these form the source of his profit. In fact, the commodity has cost the capitalist, as we have seen, 600 + 450 = 1050 hours; but he sells it for the value of 600 + 900 = 1500 hours; 450 hours are surplus value created by labour power. It results that for half their working time (namely for 5 hours in a ten-hour working day) the workers are working to redintegrate what they have used up for themselves; but during the other half of the day they are working entirely for the capitalist.
Let us now consider society as a whole. What the individual factory owner or the individual worker does is of very little interest to us. What interests us is the structure of the huge machine which goes by the name of capitalist society. The capitalist class hires the working class, the latter being numerically of enormous size. In millions of factories, in mines and quarries, in forest and field, hundreds of millions of workers labour like ants. Capital pays them their wages, the value of their labour power, with which they unceasingly renew this labour power for the service of capital. By its labour, the working class does not merely pay its own wages, but it creates in addition the income of the upper classes, creates