In old days there were slaves. The entire man was sold as a commodity. Rather less of the man, but still a portion of the human-being himself was incorporated in the economic process by serfdom. To-day, capitalism is the power, through which still a remnant of the human-being,--his labour-power,--is stamped with the character of a commodity. I am not saying, that this fact has remained unnoticed. On the contrary, it is a fact which in social life to-day is recognised as a fundamental one, and which is felt to be something that plays a very important part in the modern social movement. But people in studying it keep their attention solely fixed on economic life. They make the question of the nature of a commodity solely an economic one. They look to economic life itself for the forces that shall bring about conditions, under which the worker shall no longer feel that his labour-power is playing a part unworthy of him in the body social. They see, how the modern form of industrial economy came about historically in the recent evolution of mankind. They see too, how it gave the commodity character to human labour-power. What they do not see, is, that it is a necessity inherent in economic life, that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity. Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One cannot divest human labour-power of its commodity character, unless one can find a way of separating it out from the economic process. It is of no use trying to remodel the economic process so as to give it a shape in which human labour may come by its rights inside that process itself. What one must endeavor, is to find a way of separating labour-power out from the economic process, and bringing it under social forces that will do away with its commodity character. The worker sets his desire upon some arrangement of economic life, where his labour-power shall find a fitting place; not seeing, that the commodity character of his labour is inherently and essentially due to his being bound up in the economic processes as part and parcel of them. Being obliged to surrender his labour-power to the economic processes, the whole man himself is caught up into them. So long as the economic system has the regulating of labour-power, it will go on consuming labour-power just as it consumes commodities,--in the manner that is most useful to its purposes. It is as though the power of economic life hypnotised people, so that they can look at nothing except what is going on inside it. They may look for ever in this direction without discovering how labour-power can escape being a commodity. Some other form of industrial economy will only make labour-power a commodity in some other manner. The labour question cannot find place in its true shape as part of the social question, until it is recognised that the considerations of economic life which determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption