The Value of Work: "Which is to be the Master"?

The relationship of production that binds the wage worker to the capitalist is not only inscribed within that specific monetary mediation that we call wage. The labor is not a commodity to be entrusted to the sole legal system based on contracts. The value of labor – and its correlate of surplus value – relies on orders of justification that are also external to the contractual relationship of exchange that allow the labor force to be treated "as if" it were a commodity. The sale of this "fictitious commodity" (Polanyi) is not simply an atypical contract of an economic nature, which is carried out on the basis of rational interest with respect to the purpose by exhausting the meanings of the exchange in the contingency of the same and in the outcome of the transaction. It is to all intents and purposes a social exchange between subjects placed in a position of different power (Gino Giugni went so far as to call it a "relationship of domination hidden by the contract"). The value of work as an object of exchange is embedded in the meaning of the relationship and this is bound or mediated by norms and institutions (as Thompson reminded us). The importance of those social relations are also evident from Marx's pungent irony towards Thomas Peel, cousin of Secretary of State Sir Robert Peel, who had founded a colony in Western Australia bringing with him capital and workers, all the "productive forces" he could, but not being able to carry with him what was not transportable, the impalpable reality of the "relations of production". So when, arrived at his destination he found that nobody was willing (or better, constrained), to sell his labor power.