The Labor Deal: Why Workers Always Lose — Das Kapital

The puzzle of Chapter 5 resolves here. The money-owner must discover a commodity whose use-value is itself a source of value, and he finds it in labour-power. What is sold is not labour already performed but the capacity to work over a definite period.

For this market to exist, two conditions must hold. The worker must be legally free to sell labour-power, yet also free of the means of production and subsistence that would make selling optional. Freedom and dispossession arrive together.

The wage looks like a fair payment for a commodity whose value is set by the cost of reproducing the worker. Marx ends by noting the historical strangeness of this arrangement. Exchange appears equal at the factory gate, yet the buyer's whole aim is to consume a use-value that creates more value than it costs. The contract is formal equality preparing a substantive inequality inside production.