9. Neither Marx nor Smith and Ricardo (or anyone else) ever argued that labor can be productive without the equipment and resources owned and used in the enterprises that pay their wages. But rents and profits are rewards for ownership (and, as noted earlier, the power that comes with it), not for production activity. (In this connection, managerial functions are seen as “labor.”) The means of production – “land, labor, and capital” – are, after all, the means of life, without any one of which the others are rendered useless (or considerably less productive). Ownership and control of the means of life, of course, is power.