jas’s Reviews > Wage Labour and Capital > Status Update

"labour-power of the wage-labourer can exchange itself for
capital only by increasing capital, by strengthening that very power whose slave it is"

"But the putting of labour-power into action – i.e., the work, is the active expression of the labourer's own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life-activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life."

"every revolutionary uprising, however remote from the class struggle its object might appear, must of necessity fail until the revolutionary working class shall have conquered; – that every social reform must remain a Utopia until the proletarian revolution"

"splitting up of society into a small class immoderately rich and a large class of wage-labourers devoid of all property, brings it about that this society smothers in its own superfluidity, while the great majority of its members are scarcely or not all protected from extreme want."

"And this is the economic constitution of our entire modern society: the working class alone produces all values. But, these values produced by the workers do not belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of the raw materials, machines, tools, and money, which enable them to buy the labour-power of the working class. Hence, the working class gets back only a part of the entire mass of products produced by it"