Where are the workers?

Every Christmas when I was a kid we played Monopoly. We’d open the box and find an entire economic system ready to go. Streets already built. The bank full of money and the state, in the form of taxation and jail, humming away in the background.

But Monopoly is a lie. Streets don’t build themselves, money doesn’t simply appear in banks and governments don’t just spring into life fully formed.

Where do streets come from? Streets, houses, hotels, airports and jails have to be built. Who builds them? Workers do. The same goes for the clothes on your back, the food on your plate and the phone in your hand. And the money in banks and taxes collected by the government? All of it comes from the labour of working men and women.

You would never know this from playing Monopoly. There are no workers in the box. The business news on TV is the same. You’ll hear about the rise and fall of prices, of inflation and interest rates. You are told that wealth is created not by workers but by “entrepreneurs”. It is corporations that “create” jobs, while workers and unions are told to exercise “pay restraint”.

The Irish government takes the same view. Workers are a nuisance. Private enterprise is everything. Every second thing that Michael Martin says contains the buzz words “strong enterprise economy, free trade, competitiveness”

The truth? All wealth in Michael Martin’s “enterprise economy” starts with workers. This is the core of the “labour theory of value”, developed by Karl Marx, following on from the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx most fully developed this analysis in his great work, Capital (1867). He describes how working class people are both the drivers and the prisoners of the capitalist system. He also lays bare the potential for workers to break free and build a system of “production by freely associated men under their conscious and planned control”.

Where profit comes from: Exploitation

All wealth is created by workers but they do not control that wealth. Why is that? It’s because exploitation is built into the DNA of capitalism. This was Marx’s central insight: profits can only come from the exploitation of workers.

If a developer wants to make a profit from building and selling houses this can only be done as follows: The builder/developer invests in raw materials (such as bricks, timber and glass) and instruments of production (such as cement mixers and diggers). But walls don’t build themselves and mixers don’t mix of their own accord. If they’re just left lying around they’ll rot and rust; at best, the builder can sell them off to break even.

The builder needs workers. In particular, the builder needs to buy “labour power”. Labour power is a commodity unlike all the others in that it “possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value”.

Work literally creates value.

So the builder buys the workers’ time by paying them a wage. In technical terms, the builder “consumes” the “use value” (labour) of the worker’s commodity, (labour time) and the worker sets about working with the materials and tools that, crucially, they do NOT own. Marx describes this as a “productive consumption”. The worker “raises the means of production from the dead” - they’re no longer piles of bricks and idle machines, they are “the material in which fluid, value-creating labour power has to be incorporated”.

So the worker turns bricks into walls and gets cement from the mixer. Walls are more valuable than piles of bricks and mixed cement is more valuable than when it was in a sack. After a time the worker has produced the same value as they receive in wages.

But they do not stop at that point!

They keep working because they are compelled to. This is for two basic reasons: the amount of wages received by the worker is no more than the amount needed to keep them coming back for more the next day. And the simple fact remains - the worker does not own the means of production (the raw materials and machinery).

Under this compulsion, any value produced after the point of “paying back” the wage goes into the boss’s pocket.

This value is “surplus value”. It is the source of profit. Industrial production is necessarily exploitative but the “scene of the crime” is hidden under the appearance of a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.”

The illusion of freedom

Defenders of capitalism call this a voluntary contract. Right wing theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman thought of the market as a realm of freedom, where people “cooperate voluntarily”.

Marx disagreed fundamentally. True, the worker is not a slave and Marx insisted that capitalism could only exist if the workers were free to sell their labour to the boss. There is no legal barrier stopping the worker from quitting or changing jobs. But this is not worth much because the worker is also “free” from control over the means of production. A worker is a worker because they do not own the factory, data centre, company shares.

Under capitalism, a worker who exercises their “free” right not to work is “free” to starve soon after. This is compulsion dressed up as freedom.

Workers the world over will recognise the truth of the power imbalance between the capitalist and worker that Marx describes here: “The one smirks self-importantly…the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but - a tanning”.

Commodities: the world in things

Under capitalism, everything we need comes as a commodity. The things we need (use values) must be bought and sold (as exchange values). Marx saw this sharply. He begins his book Capital by describing how “an immense collection of commodities” is how the wealth of capitalism appears. His insight is more valuable today than it was in 1867. As of July 2025, Amazon alone had over 600 million individual commodities for sale.

So, you can’t just get a house because you need one - you need to pay the price. The sale of a house for profit realises profits originating in exploitation. As a commodity, however, that theft is “laundered”. Slap an exorbitant price tag on it, dress it up as the rise and fall of the market, and the nature of the social relation of production slips from view. As Marx puts it, money used in this way “conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual worker”. This distorting effect of commodities and most particularly the money commodity is described by Marx as “commodity fetishism”.

Commodity fetishism pulls the wool over our eyes. It is not so much a lie as a mask that cannot be removed. The mask is the market: “the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour”. Under capitalism, there is no other way. Under a planned, socialist economy a house would be produced for need - as a use value. But under capitalism a house is sold as an exchange value. The point is not to provide a house. The point is to turn a profit. Under a system like this, money talks. For example, in Ireland, in 2025 there are 16,000 homeless people and yet the twenty largest landlords own nearly 20,000 houses.

Marx cuts through the mask of fetishism. And he does so by going to the most fundamental truth about commodities: they have value. They have been produced by workers, however exploited, however “atomised”, that truth remains. If they had no value they would be useless and they would be worthless. “The value form of the product of labour is the most abstract but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production”. In other words, what all commodities have in common (universal), regardless of their use or price (abstract) is that they are products of labour.

Workers may be exploited, abused, atomised, ripped off, turned against each other but, when it comes down to it, they produce everything of value. So, while there is a great imbalance in power and wealth between the small layer of capitalists and the majority working class, the latter does have the potential to reverse that imbalance. The challenge is for workers to organise. The challenge for revolutionary socialists is to encourage and build that revolutionary potential. But for now, that potential lies dormant as “value”.

Value

It is worth bearing in mind that what Marx means by the “value” of commodities is not that they are “good” or “desirable”. Value is a “social relation”, by which Marx meant the value of any commodity shows how much of the total pool of human labour was expended on commodities of that type. Marx investigates commodities because they are how the ill-gotten gains of exploitation are laundered. Capitalists may want to just get on with buying and selling, sustaining the myth of a “fair wage for a fair day’s work” but the commodity is the visible evidence of exploitation of workers. It can only come into existence as the product of exploited labour, its profit can only be realised in social exchange: “value converts every product into a social hieroglyphic…we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products”

Value is a “social relation” distorted into the exploitative and profit-chasing capitalist economic system.

Value is the thread that ties the whole capitalist system together. It answers three big questions:

1. Why are two different commodities exchangeable in the first place? Because they share some “third thing”: they’re all products of human labour in “abstract” form. The abstraction of labour is not an intellectual abstraction - what Marx means is that in the cold, calculated system of production of commodities to turn a profit, all labour is abstracted from its concrete form. Marx refers to this as the “substance” of value.

   Opponents of the labour theory will point to utility or desire as the common “third thing” that enables two very different commodities to be exchanged as equivalents. True, appetites and taste, the various needs of various people in various places, all determine whether or not commodities are bought. However, Marx goes to the root of the matter and asks what is it that ALL commodities have in common? It can’t be that they’re desired or that they’re useful because that does not apply in the same way to all commodities. All commodities have been produced by workers - for Marx, their equivalence or “commensurability” is tied to their being products of labour.

2. Why are things exchanged in certain proportions? Because different commodities embody different amounts of “socially necessary” labour time. The amount of socially necessary labour time in a commodity is the “magnitude” of value.

   Neoclassical economics points to supply and demand as a law that determines price.

   But Marx argues that supply and demand actually explain nothing: fluctuations in price revolve around a point of gravity that is set by value. Prices fall and rise but the amount of abstract labour in an apple will never come close to the amount of abstract labour in a nuclear reactor. Marx describes how capital investment migrates to high demand markets but as soon as the amount of surplus value produced by workers falls to the level of the capital invested, production will be scaled back.

3. Why does the whole system obscure exploitation? Because value only appears as price. Money hides the social relation beneath. Marx calls this “phantom-like objectivity.” We never see value without its “exponent” in the money form: it always shows up disguised as a price tag. This is the “form of appearance” of value.

Why bother with Value?

Neoclassical economics - the dominant model in universities, media, politics and therefore “common sense”, tends not to look beyond prices. There could not be a clearer example of Marx’s idea that “the dominant ideas in every age are the ideas of the ruling class” in how people seem to know the price of everything but the value of nothing. But prices alone can’t explain capitalism’s laws of motion. Why productivity growth lowers value, why profits tend to fall, why crises erupt.

Value theory reveals what’s hidden: the domination of human life by abstract labour and capital accumulation. This is why the concept of value is important: it constantly draws our understanding back down to the “social relation” of exploitation driving it. Value places the working class at the base of the economy; within capitalism, anything worth using or exchanging is produced by labour. In this way Marx reminds revolutionaries of the challenge - value is production under conditions of exploitation. He also reminds us of the potential for revolution - with such power, workers can cast off the exploitative yoke of the capitalist system.

Why does this matter?

Value is capitalism’s DNA. It is the measure of wealth as exploited labour and alienated social relations. Marx believed that innovation to increase productivity would inevitably lead to falling rates of profit. This was because innovation leads to lower demand for labour and since labour is the only source of surplus value, profit would lose its only fuel. It would also lose its other social necessity - consumers with enough disposable income to buy the commodities spewed out for profit.

Capitalism has gone from crisis to crisis in the 150 years since Marx wrote Capital, roughly in the same ten year cycles that he described. Its expansion by means of mass murder and imperialism and its constant reinvention right up until today are proof enough that it is a system driven by exploitation, and defined by crisis. The victims of this are the working class in Ireland and globally. The most horrific violence is often exported away from advanced economies - millions upon millions of people die. The civil war in Congo, the US annihilation of Iraq, the Israeli genocide in Gaza all hit the headlines while the everyday “business as usual” of capitalism kills far more. There really is no other way out of this death-spiral than for workers to organise and fight to end exploitation and abolish capitalist production for value. We need to build production for use in a system that is democratically controlled by workers.

Until then, Monopoly never ends. The bank wins. The workers stay out of the box.