Marxist Mondays (belated)

Capital is a process of wealth accumulation derived from the unequal relations between employers and employees. Employees may perform the necessary work of production, but because they enter into relationships with employers at a disadvantage, what they receive in return is only a fraction of the value of what they have produced; the "surplus-value," as Marx called it, becomes the property of the employer.

Capitalist economics says this is morally inconsequential: after all, the relationship is voluntary; in a word, "free." Nobody is forcing you to work for this or that employer, whereas in previous economic systems they were. Marx's innovation was to remain unimpressed, never divorcing economic relations from their social meaning -- a meaning that is contested politically between competing groups: employers and employees.