The study of society must be based on the study of the way that a society reproduces itself through the division of labor. Contemporary societies are reproduced by a division of labor performed by a system of social relations between producers their products. This system is called capitalism. In capitalist societies the product of society is not owned by the producers of society's wealth, because the means of production of that society are not owned by the producers who use them. Neither then is the system of social relations controlled by society, but by a small class of owners.
Philosophical challenge:
Logan Lewis
Aaron Lee
To sell your labour you would literally be selling yourself; to literally lease yourself as a chattel slave for a definite amount of time until you are free. Instead, what you sell is your labour-power; you enter the tacit agreement to receive a wage for every verified hour worked. You may otherwise leave at any time. That which keeps you into needing to do this all the time (why we call it wage slavery), is that there is a propertied class which violently defends any other alternative mode of production with different social relations to production (e.g. a communist one, where there is no exclusive right to private property at all, hence creating a completely free association of producers). How it came to do so? It developed itself out of the shell of a prior mode of production and vested itself as class and organised as class for itself (which we call the class struggle), and enforced its mode of production through a developed, more robust, now generalized system of commodity production.
In less developed terms here, by Marx himself:
marxists.org
Bentley Thomas
someone screencap this plz
John Thomas
"Ill describe the world in a materialistic way and then pit the poor against the poorer, so that both consider money the only value"
Jackson James
Hunter Cook
Connor Lewis
ty
Owen White
Perfect
Cameron Kelly
Other user already explained better, but what you are selling as a worker is your ability to work for a certain amount of time in exchange for a wage, not yourself for a certain amount of time or the product of your labour created in that amount of time. If you were doing those 2 things you'd be a slave or a communist, because on the one hand you'd have sold yourself and on the other hand you'd realise that you're getting fucked but do nothing about it. The lack of a distinction between labour and labour-power is a very good way of obfuscating class relations.
John Gonzalez
"I'll be a retarded fascist who doesn't understand the difference between 2 definitions of words"