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The masters recognize you as merchandise and often treat you as such. They build fences around their industrial slave pens with barbed wire at the top. You are then listed on the corporation books and given a number. A brass check with your number is given you, the same as though you were a tagged convict in a prison. You are henceforth known by your number or label in the same way that a certain brand of ham is known in the packing houses. Some corporations have reduced this to such a system that all that is necessary to make it identical with the penitentiary is to add the lock-step and the ball and chain. Before getting a job many require that you should fill out an application blank telling your age, whether married or single, how many children you have, where you last worked, whether you belong or intend to belong to a union. They want a full knowledge of the article they are buying, for they intend to use it up, together with other commodities in the factory. Human beings are thus reduced to merchandise; they are bought and sold, crippled, maimed, exhausted, killed in the service of the ruling capitalist class.
The fortunate thing for the masters and the unfortunate thing for you is that while they must buy labor power they do not have to buy all that is offered for sale. They only have to buy a part of all that is offered. The more labor-displacing machinery is used the less labor power is needed. So that thousands, yes, millions, stand in the labor market, offering tissues and brains for sale, with the certainty that all cannot be hired. This leaves a surplus of unhired, unemployed men, whose competition and needs have a tendency to reduce the price paid for labor power. Slowly the price sinks until it hovers about a wage that will barely enable the worker to have enough food, clothing and shelter to reproduce his labor power each night for sale the next day. The wealth he produces above this "living wage" is taken by the capitalist employers and is the source of all their accumulations.
The value of labor power and the values the worker. produces are two different things. The worker may sell his labor power for $2 per day and yet produce $8 in values. If he works eight hours per day he is working for himself the first two hours; the remaining six
