A bit of economics

As a wage-working man or woman, your life is conditioned upon having access to a job; you must establish yourself as an employee to some employer. You have the power to produce wealth—labour power. It is the only thing you have, but it is an essential factor in industry. In fact, all capitalist industry is predicated upon the existence of men and women like you who have no other way to live, except by offering their life energy, labour power, for sale. When you sell your labor power to the boss you agree to deliver to him the use of it for so many hours per day, for which he, in turn, agrees to pay you a stipulated price known as wages.  You sell your labour power to the boss, measured by the clock. The boss buys labour power because he needs it to operate his establishment, whether that be a factory, a mine, a railway company or a farm. The most up-to-date equipment is valueless as a means of producing wealth unless the magic influence of labor power sets it in operation.  Workers sell their labour power and receive in return a wage, out of which they must provide the means of life for themselves and their dependents.  It is not a philanthropic motive that inspires the boss to employ the wage worker; it is because he must employ him, or fail in his enterprise. A favorite argument on behalf of capitalism is that "labour needs capital and capital needs labour." This is not at all so, for capital in that connection is meant to disguise the capitalists. Labour does not need capital as capital. What labour needs, and will eventually have, is the instruments of production, without their character of capital. This character, which is a character imposed upon the means of production, the workers will destroy without injuring these tools, without so much as even scratching the paint on them. Only the instruments, without their capitalist ownership, are necessary to labour.

The capitalist system must be replaced by a system which will recognise in industry a means through which social wants and comforts are provided. To accomplish this is the mission of the working class. It is our duty to ourselves and to the future to profit by the experiences of our predecessors and by our own.  The power of the workers in production is the power of the life and death over society. This power can only be used to serve society by organisation of all the workers in all the working places. The capitalists are using their control over industry to destroy society with wars, unemployment and inadequate living standards. Industry must be for human service, not for the profit of the few. To bring this about is the mission of the working class.  The workers are learning more and more about the necessity of removing every barrier and impediment to class unity.

Under any system in which the means of producing a living are the exclusive property of a limited class, the worker, deprived of such means, purchases the right to work for his living, paying for it in surplus labor. The worker's day, economically speaking, is divided into two parts; the first period during which he or she works to reproduce the value of his or her own labour-power, or, in other words, their living; and a second and longer period in which employees produces the surplus value which by necessity is yielded to the owner of the land, machinery or other means of producing wealth. The commodities produced during the entire working day, no matter what their kind or character may be, are sold by the employer and thus are transmuted into a price-form, money, and the employer returns the worker's portion to him in this form. It is called wages, but the money-form in which it is paid to the worker merely conceals the commodity-form in which it was originally produced. It is in reality merely part of the total amount of commodities produced by the worker during the whole day's work, and the smaller part; for the greater portion is retained by the employer. The transmutation into the money or price-form also conceals the division of the day's work into its two constituent parts—the necessary labor and the surplus labour. The part of the day's product retained by the capitalist employer is surplus value. It is the wealth produced in this second period of the working day—surplus value—that constitutes the sole object of all capital investment. It is the basis of all capitalist values. It is the substance of all so-called earning power of capital. It is the soul of capitalism. It is the sacred cow that is worshipped as a god. It is the incentive of all endeavor by capitalist-minded humans. It is the subject of all sermons and precepts by gowned clerics and bewhiskered philosophers who do homage to the sacred cow: 
"Servants, obey your masters—work long and hard for him, and great will be your reward—in heaven. On earth you will get just wages—a mere subsistence—while your master takes the rest; but in heaven, after you are dead—ah! the golden glories that await you—ideological reflections of all the product of the unrequited surplus labor which you gave to your master on earth and which he converted into the physical earthly realities that he enjoys ease, comfort, luxury, peace."

To, produce this surplus value and to convert it into the price form of money and credit to the utmost possible expansion is the object of all capitalist endeavor. The more efficient the worker and the more effective the machinery and tools upon which his labor-power is expended, the greater the share of wealth accruing to the owner of the means of production. The workers' share remains fairly constant—just enough to reproduce their labour-power—relatively subsistence-level plus enough more to breed and support a family—reproducing a new generation of workers when they are worn out and "scrapped." There is also always a reserve army of unemployed workers on hand even in the best of times to keep down the wage through competition for the job at the level of a mere subsistence. Indeed, the entire working mechanism of capitalist society—its laws, institutions and political forms as well as its religions and ethical and moral codes are devised to that end—to maintain a surplus army of propertyless, unemployed workers for the purpose of stabilizing the wages and controlling the workers at a subsistence level. 

The surplus wealth that may be produced by the extension of the working day or the intensification of the surplus labour, either through speeding up the work or developing the effectiveness of the implements and means of production, is practically unlimited. We may say that while the worker's share of the wealth produced always remains practically at a bare living level, the master's share may be indefinitely increased by any or all of the following means:
1.—By prolonging the working day.
2.—By improving and increasing the efficiency of the machinery and means of production.
3.—By lowering the wages or the worker's share of the day's product.
4.—By intensifying the labour by speeding up the worker.
5.—By expanding the market or raising the price of the produce without raising wages

It will be noticed that by any or all of these means the part of the product of the day's work remaining in the hands of the employer is increased while the worker's share remains unchanged. That is the peculiar quality of the surplus value upon which our capitalist system rests and which so endears it to the gamblers in the wealth produced by others, called capitalists—the unproductive gentry who "toil not neither do they spin," yet Solomon in all his glory was a poor skate compared to one of these latter-day parasites.