ABSTRACT
The contemporary idea of “the labor process” is based on Marx’s distinction between labor and labor power. The employer can buy people’s ability to work, their labor power, but in general not their actual labor. Political-economic analysis of work, then, is the study of how the employer/capitalist induces and commands workers to perform “surplus labor,” labor whose value is over and above that necessary to reproduce the workers and replace machinery, buildings and raw materials.
