let us embark on our journey into the fields of Marx and Marxism.
It is now practically a half century ago that Marx presented the first volume of his immortal work "Capital" to the world: a work which for the first time, since the inception of the capitalist mode of production, laid bare the laws and forces governing this economic structure. Through the analysis of capitalist production, Marx exposed the source of all profits, and showed this to rest in the appropriation of surplus value from the workers. His theory of surplus value is a most valuable addition to classical political economy, and raises itself upon the theories of value evolved by Petty, Ricardo and Adam Smith, however, also supplemented and perfected by Marx. With the aid of this theory, Marx demonstrated that although the worker under the system of capitalist production receives in the last analysis the full value of his labor-power, he is nevertheless exploited, because he produces in excess of this value, and does not receive the full value of his product.
Going out from the theory of value as evolved by classical political economy of which Ricardo was the last representative, and which formulated that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor time consumed in its production, Marx started to analyze the only thing the worker has left to sell, namely his labor-power, and also stamped this a commodity. And in just this commodity-status of labor-power he conceived the source of all profit and the source of all accumulated wealth. Marx clearly pointed out that the value of the worker's labor-power is determined by the same law that controls the values of all other commodities, namely: that the value of a worker's labor-power is also fixed by the volume of socially necessary labor time required to produce the commodities necessary to maintain the life of a wage-slave, i.e., that the articles—food, clothes, shelter, etc.,—consumed by the worker in order to sustain life, a life that is again fixed by a certain historical and social standard, deter-
