class have been robbed of the land and the tools and all the means of sustenance and production, and have nothing left them but that empty bauble, legal liberty, liberty to accept wages so small that they barely enable them to live like beasts, or liberty to starve to death and be buried in unmarked graves by the public authorities.
The wage system necessarily implies this surplus labor or unpaid labor. So long as there are wages, workingmen, you will never get the full product of your labor. Let no reformer beguile you into a struggle which simply aims to secure a modification of the wage system! Nothing short of the annihilation of the wage system will give you justice and give you the full product of your labor.
But while wages necessarily imply surplus-labor, the reverse is not true. You can have surplus-labor without wages. Surplus-labor is not an invention of modern capitalists. Since Mankind emerged from the state of Primitive Communism typified by the Garden of Eden in the Hebraic myth, there have been three great systems of economic organization: 1. Slavery; 2. Serfdom; 3. The Wage System. It is interesting to note the varying appearances of surplus or unpaid labor under these three systems.
