Because you, being poor, have only your labor.

Because you, having only your labor, are poor. You have a brain. Think and grow rich. I never read the book by that name, but I know a rich college drop-out who swears by it. The point is that all this Marxist drivel is like the letters complaining that the author gets all the profit from their hard work. Wages are the price of disorganized energy; profit is the price of reducing its entropy. Workers hire bosses to organize their activity. The price may be high, but organizing energy (Ram Dass's expression for writing a book) is where the money is.

Speaking of organization, Marx missed that unions were a better tactic than revolution. Marx did not expect all revolutions to be violent. He saw democracies voting in communism. What he did not see is that democracies would first vote to support private collective bargaining, which, until globalization came along, would be enough.

The advent of collective bargaining was good for employers because it increased the number of autos Ford could sell. Mass production made it profitable for manufacturers to pay their workers well, and industrial/trade unions made paying well possible without losing market share. Win-win.

If the people who make iPhones can't afford them, that's not capitalism's fault. We have capitalism here, but we don't pay our workers little enough to make iPhones here. But unions leave the entropy reduction to business people rather than aparachiks. That's where political effort must go.