Means of production are described as the tools, machines, land, and resources that make production possible, and Marx emphasizes that these are owned by the capitalist class, not the workers who actually operate them. Labor, on the other hand, is the human activity that transforms raw materials into useful goods, like a warehouse worker scanning, lifting, and organizing packages. The video explains that value comes from the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce something, meaning things become valuable because human labor is embedded in them and they meet a human need. Labor and value are directly connected because labor creates value, and value is essentially a measurement of labor. Marx makes an important distinction between labor and labor power: labor is the actual work performed, while labor power is a worker\u2019s capacity or ability to work, which is what they sell to an employer for wages. This difference matters because workers are paid for their labor power, but the labor they perform produces more value than their wages. That extra value is what Marx calls surplus value\u2014the value workers create beyond what they are paid, which the capitalist keeps as profit. Surplus value is central to understanding social class because it reveals how exploitation is built into the economic system; for example, if I earn$18 an hour but I produce $120 worth of goods in that same hour, the owner keeps the difference, showing how surplus value fuels capitalist profit and class inequality<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Means of production are described as the tools, machines, land, and resources that make production possible, and Marx emphasizes that these are owned by the capitalist class, not the workers who actually operate them. Labor, on the other hand, is the human activity that transforms raw materials into useful goods, like a warehouse worker scanning,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12060,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion-board-5-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12060"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13655,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13654\/revisions\/13655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/pol-100-0502-fall-2026-american-government\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}