s some groups become more adept at meeting urgent needs than others; those that rise to the top gain a coercive power over those below them by exploiting their labor, a process that leads to alienation (and ultimately, revolution).
On Marx's analysis, the capitalist, in pursuit of profits, will pay his workers only what they need in order to surviveùnothing more. In this way the individual worker's labor is systematically undervalued; labor comes to be worth more to the capitalist that extorts it than it is to the laborer who furnishes it. The surplus value of the labor is retained by the capitalist and put back into the system, allowing that system to expand and in turn exploit more workers. This phenomenon, called the labor theory of value, brings into sharp r
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