You can’t dance to it but it at least it fills the silence and beats back the boredom a bit. I have to turn it up pretty loud so I can hear it while I’m washing dishes.
I’m talking about these audio books. They’ve got Adam Smith too, and loads of Dickens.
EDIT:
So I’m listening to Wage Labor and Capital while I wash the massive amount of dishes that crowd round my kitchen. The reading’s only getting part of my attention, to be honest. I think the fact that I was tuning out a bit made this passage jump out at me even more when I tuned back in.
In chapter two Marx writes
Labour-power was not always a commodity (merchandise). Labour was not always wage-labour, i.e., free labour. The slave did not sell his labour-power to the slave-owner, any more than the ox sells his labour to the farmer. The slave, together with his labour-power, was sold to his owner once for all. He is a commodity that can pass from the hand of one owner to that of another. He himself is a commodity, but his labour-power is not his commodity. The serf sells only a portion of his labour-power. It is not he who receives wages from the owner of the land; it is rather the owner of the land who receives a tribute from him. The serf belongs to the soil, and to the lord of the soil he brings its fruit. The free labourer, on the other hand, sells his very self, and that by fractions. He auctions off eight, 10, 12, 15 hours of his life, one day like the next, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw materials, tools, and the means of life – i.e., to the capitalist.
I don’t think this is right, on one point. The slave “is a commodity, but his labour-power is not his commodity.” Why? That doesn’t make sense. The slave’s labor power _is_ a commodity, however involuntary the sale. I see very little difference between the slave being sold and the waged laborer selling “his very self.” (I mean, obviously there’s many important differences, what I mean is that I see no difference here in terms of labor power being a commodity.) Marx’s own discussions in the chapters on the working day and on machinery in v1 of Capital suggest that women and children under patriarchal families in capitalist societies are not free laborers, despite being waged laborers. Marx refers to this as something like slavery. Clearly those women and children still sell their labor power as a commodity (or rather, the capitalist bought their labor power, with the husband/father acting as broker).
Slaves in the Southern US were sometimes rented out to other slave owners on a temporary basis, in which case their owners were quite clearly selling their labor power to another in exchange for a cut of the surplus produced. See here.
Marx notes that slaves can be resold. It seems to me that at least one main reason for this resale was the need for labor power, such that the slave sales were in part multi-year purchases of relatively cheap labor power (large initial outlay but overall a decent investment for slave owners).
So in short it seems to me that this passage conflates commodified labor power with waged labor, when there is at least one form of commodified labor power (slavery, at least under some circumstances) which is not waged labor.