It is a truism in Marxism that there is a formal legal equality in capitalism which masks a material inequality. The fiction is that workers and employers meet under equal terms in the marketplace as buyer and seller: seller of labor power as a commodity and buyer of labor power as a commodity. The material inequality behind the formal legal equality is the asymmetry of circumstances and consequences between the two. Quite simply, the results are get bad faster and are over all worse for workers should the exchange not take place. This is because the workers don’t have money. They sell labor power under compulsion, because there are only limited means to meet needs without money, and there are limited means to acquire money without the sale of one’s labor power as a commodity.