An examination of the aspect of surplus-labor in these three environments shows that it has the appearance of being all labor in the first, a larger or smaller fraction of the whole labor in the second, and apparently falls to zero in the third. In fact, in slavery, during a part of the day, the slave only replaces the value of what he consumes and so really works for himself; notwithstanding, even then his labor appears to be labor for his owner. All his labor has the appearance of surplus-labor, of labor for others. Under serfdom or the _corvée_ system, the labor of the serf for himself and his gratuitous labor for his feudal lord are perfectly distinct, the one from the other; by the very way in which the labor is performed, the serf distinguishes the time during which he works for his own benefit from the time which he is compelled to devote to the satisfaction of the wants of his lordly superiors. Under the wage-system, the wage-form, which appears in the guise of direct payment of labor, wipes out every visible line of demarcation between paid labor and unpaid labor; when he receives his wages, the laborer seems to get all the value due to his labor, so that all his labor takes on the form or appearance of paid labor. While, under slavery, the property-relation conceals the labor of the slave for himself, under the wage-system the money-relation conceals the gratuitous labor of the wage-worker for the capitalist. You will readily perceive the practical importance of this disguised appearance of the real relation between labor and capital. The latter is deemed to breed or expand by its own virtue, and the former to receive its full remuneration. FOOTNOTES: [4] In America where, since 1865, we have had no landed aristocracy, bourgeois and wealthy are well nigh synonymous.--Tr. IV. Wage-labor as an economic form existed before the actual appearance of industrial capital which in fact only dates from the day when production by the aid of wage-labor became general. Capital, in fact, is not a quality with which the means of production are naturally endowed, which they have always had and which they are destined always to have. It is a character which they possess only under definite social conditions. The means of production are no more naturally capital than a negro is naturally a slave. And when socialists talk of suppressing capital and capitalists, those who do not wish to make a ridiculous confusion, ought to remember that it is simply a question of taking away from the means of production and those who hold possession of them a character which they now have, and which can be taken from them without destroying an atom of their material substance, just as in suppressing slavery, it is not necessary, in order to take away the slave-character from the negro, to kill the negro.