Marx’s concept of Surplus Value
All wages are theft. The wage system itself is built on a structural imbalance: workers sell their labour power, but the value they produce always exceeds what they are paid in modern industries.
Marx’s concept of surplus value is the key to understanding the full value of what is being stolen from Air Canada’s flight attendants and from workers everywhere. In capitalism, the worker produces more value in a day than they are paid for. A flight attendant might be scheduled for eight hours, but in that time, they generate value for Air Canada far beyond their wage.
That difference, the unpaid portion of their labour, is appropriated by the company as surplus. This is the very motor of capitalism. Wage theft—the fact that under their previous contract, flight attendants were not even paid for the full time they worked or were on the job site—is only the most visible form of the constant appropriation of labour that defines the wage relation itself.
Strikes are a negation of capitalist logic
When any workers go on strike, they interrupt the smooth reproduction of capital. Marx wrote that labour is the source of all value. In the case of Air Canada, a strike made the truth unavoidably clear: planes cannot fly, profits cannot be made, unless workers consent to their own exploitation. Strikes therefore carry a theoretical charge: they reveal that production is collective, not the achievement of the capitalist class alone, and exposes capitalism’s exploitation for all to see. In this sense, every picket line is a critique of political economy. It shows that the wealth of the capitalist class is rooted in exploitation and without workers, capital is powerless.
The lesson to be learnt through the Air Canada strikes is not only that workers deserve better contracts, though they do. It is that as long as labour is commodified, exploitation will persist. By socializing the means of production, labour would cease to be something sold on the market and would instead become the conscious, collective activity of society.
The fight against wage theft is therefore not only a legal battle but a political one. It points us back to the fact that under capitalism, exploitation is not only an “accident”. It is what the system continues to profit off of.
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