The Communist Manifesto, Baeksan Seodang Notes

; - but also

value - moral worth, economic value

do away with

decry

set ~ in motion
Help, automobile
help on, to assist

existence refers to 'existence' in a somewhat objective sense. Along with being, it can mean both existence itself and an existent thing. It is sometimes translated as survival, but considering the nuance of Korean, survival is closer to subsistence. In existentialism, existence refers to existential existence.

upstart: newly rich person.

* out of question: certain.

out of the question: impossible.








25
The worker sells labor power to the owner of the means of production. For part of the day, the worker works to cover the cost of maintaining himself and his family, that is, wages. During the remaining part, without compensation, the worker creates capitalist surplus value, the source of profit for the capitalist class.

The theory of surplus value forms a cornerstone of Marxist economic theory.

The working day of a wage laborer is divided into necessary labor time, which produces the worker's wage, and surplus labor time, which produces surplus value and capitalist profit.


34
as correct as ever: literally, 'still as correct today as at any other time.'


70
work and labour: Engels explained in a note to Section 2, Chapter 1, Volume 1 of Capital that English has the advantage of having two different words for two aspects of labor. Labour refers to labor that creates value and is measured quantitatively, while work can refer to qualitatively determined labor that creates use-value.


71
The price of a commodity, which later in Marxist economics would be called its value, is determined by the socially necessary labor time required to produce it. Price is the expression of that value in money.

The price of labor, which later in Marxist economics should be called the value of labor power, is not really the price of labor itself. What the worker sells is not labor but the right to dispose freely of labor power for a certain time. Wages are the monetary expression of the value of labor power.

Marx clarified that what classical economics called the price of labor was in fact the price of labor power. This matters because it concerns the essence of wages themselves.

73
Modern industry transformed the small workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of workers concentrated in factories are organized like an army.