and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations. Additionally, as per anthropologist David Graeber, the earliest wage labour contracts we know about were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money, and the slave, another, with which to maintain their living expenses.) Such arrangements, according to Graeber, were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or Brazil. C. L. R. James argued in The Black Jacobins that most of the techniques of human organisation employed on factory workers during the industrial revolution were first developed on slave plantations. For Marxists, labour-as-commodity, which is how they regard wage labour, provides a fundamental point of attack against capitalism. "It can be persuasively argued," noted one concerned philosopher, "that the conception of the worker's labour as a commodity confirms Marx's stigmatisation of the wage system of private capitalism as 'wage-slavery;' that is, as an instrument of the capitalist's for reducing the worker's condition to that of a slave, if not below it." That this objection is fundamental follows immediately from Marx's conclusion that wage labour is the very foundation of capitalism: "Without a class dependent on wages, the moment individuals confront each other as free persons, there can be no production of surplus value; without the production of surplus-value there can be no capitalist production, and hence no capital and no capitalist!" See also Capitalism Capitalist mode of production (Marxist theory) Child labour Critique of work Eight-hour day Four-day workweek Full employment Immiseration thesis Labour (economics) Labour theory of value Marxian critique of political economy Marx's theory of alienation Rate of exploitation Reserve army of labour Surplus value Six-hour day Sweatshop Unfree labour Wage slavery Working class Working poor Footnotes Bibliography Articles Books Krahn, Harvey J., and Graham S. Lowe (1993). Work, Industry, and Canadian Society. Second ed. Scarborough, Ont.: Nelson Canada. xii, 430 p. . External links LaborFair Resources – link to Fair Labor Practices Labor relations Capitalism Marxian economics Socialism