mine the size of his wage. Marx now shows that due to its physical peculiarities and the wonderful productivity of our age, labor-power is the only commodity which in the process of productive consumption yields far more than its value, i.e., far more than it needs to reproduce itself. He clearly underscored that where all other commodities when consumed yield but the value contained in them, labor-power yields far in excess of its value, because the worker is the only commodity which produces or yields far more than what is consumed in its production. And he concluded that all work performed by the worker in excess of the work necessary to keep him alive, or to produce the value of his wages, is surplus work, or surplus labor appropriated by the purchaser of the worker's labor-power, the capitalist.
With the aid of this theory of surplus value, he was able to explain the cause and nature of the periodical crisis or panic in capitalist society. He predicted that as capitalism developed, the markets in which to dispose of the surplus wares, or in which to realize the surplus value extracted from the workers at home were bound to become scarcer, and the industrial depressions more frequent. And in the contradiction between the ever increasing social aspects of production and the growing features of individual ownership; in the contradiction that increased productivity on the one hand spells increased laziness on the other; in the contradiction between over-production and underconsumption—a contradiction which so graphically illustrates the economic status of the surplus-value sponging idler and the exploited proletarian respectively; and finally in the contradiction between social creation and individual appropriation, a contradiction which is the dynamo of the class struggle, Marx saw the inevitable collapse of the capitalist system of production. By cementing his economic deductions with his philosophical system of historical development, known as the Materialist Conception of History, he was able to clearly outline and formulate the historical mission of the workers, a mission based upon hard economic conditions and clearly flowing from and truly in accord with the
