Wage Labour, the labour of workers in capitalist enterprises, who, for a certain wage, work for capitalists—owners of the means of production—and are exploited by them. Characteristic of the bourgeois system are economic forms of compulsion to work for exploiters. As distinct from the slave and the serf the wage worker is not personally dependent on the owner of the means of production and is legally free. He is, however, deprived of the means of production, has no source of subsistence and has to sell the only thing he does own—his labour power. In this connection, the relations between capitalists and proletarians are realised through commodity-money bonds and outwardly appear to be relations between free and equal commodity owners: sellers and buyers of labour power. All the worker can do is change one buyer of his labour power for another; he cannot break out of the system of wage labour dominant in capitalist society. The wage form of labour veils capitalist exploitation, giving the impression that the wage received by the worker (see Wages under Capitalism) is paid for all his labour. In fact, only the value of his labour power is paid for, i. e., the value of the means of subsistence required by the proletarian and his family for reproducing his labour power. Meanwhile, in the process of capitalist production, the worker creates not only value, equal to his labour power, but also surplus value, which is appropriated by capitalists without compensation. This serves as the basis for the antagonistic contradictions between the interests of capital and wage labour. With the development of bourgeois society, the army of the proletariat expands at the cost of the ruined small commodity producers—peasants, craftsmen and petty bourgeoisie. In the contemporary age, with science increasingly becoming a direct productive force, the intelligentsia in capitalist countries more and more swells the ranks of wage labourers and its social interests interweave with those of the working class. Although there is a fundamental difference in the positions of different groups of the intelligentsia, an ever growing part of it comes into conflict with the monopolies and with imperialist government policy. The drawing closer together of the interests of the intelligentsia and those of the working class and the growing cooperation between them help in narrowing the social groundwork of the power of the monopoly bourgeoisie, aggravating its inner contradictions and stepping up the struggle waged by the popular masses against imperialism. The struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation intensifies during the development of capitalist production and the material and subjective prerequisites are created for eliminating the system of wage labour. This system is eliminated completely as a result of socialist revolution and the scrapping of the capitalist relations of production.