This text was written by Marx and published in 1865. Much like Wage Labour and Capital, the text overlaps with parts of Capital. You can read the text here.
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Previous texts
- The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War
- How to Be a Good Communist
- The Wretched of the Earth (1, 2-3, 4, 5-)
- The Foundations of Leninism
- Decolonization is not a metaphor
- Marxism and the National Question
- China Has Billionaires
- Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism
- Wage Labour and Capital
This book is a very good summary of how the workers are the ones responsible for the creation of value in any society, how the final price of a commodity is not based solely on wages (a fact commonly hidden by modern “economists” and sometimes forgotten even by comrades who mistakenly believe that a raise in wages or social securities for some would lead to an increased exploitation for others) and how the only way for the workers to improve their condition as a whole is through political action.
What do we mean by saying that the prices of the commodities are determined by wages? Wages being but a name for the price of labour, we mean that the prices of commodities are regulated by the price of labour. As “price” is exchangeable value (…) value expressed in money, the proposition comes to this, that “the value of commodities is determined by the value of labour,” (…) The dogma that “wages determine the price of commodities,” expressed in its most abstract terms, comes to this, that “value is determined by value,” and this tautology means that, in fact, we know nothing at all about value. Accepting this premise, all reasoning about the general laws of political economy turns into mere twaddle.
The values of commodities are directly as the times of labour employed in their production, and are inversely as the productive powers of the labour employed.
Part of the labour contained in the commodity is paid labour; part is unpaid labour. By selling, therefore, the commodity at its value, that is, as the crystallization of the total quantity of labour bestowed upon it, the capitalist must necessarily sell it at a profit. He sells not only what has cost him an equivalent, but he sells also what has cost him nothing, although it has cost his workman labour. The cost of the commodity to the capitalist and its real cost are different things.
Rent, interest, and industrial profit are only different names for different parts of the surplus value of the commodity, or the unpaid labour enclosed in it, and they are equally derived from this source and from this source alone. They are not derived from land as such or from capital as such, but land and capital enable their owners to get their respective shares out of the surplus value extracted by the employing capitalist from the labourer.
A general rise of wages would, therefore, result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but not affect values.
As to the limitation of the working day in England, as in all other countries, it has never been settled except by legislative interference. (…) the result was not to be attained by private settlement between the working men and the capitalists. This very necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely economical action capital is the stronger side.
They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects (…) They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"
Not to mention that supply and demand is not an invisible hand that knows no bias. Since the capitalist controls supply they will ensure that there is artificial scarcity in order to increase profits without increasing the cost to obtain the commodity. The increase in scarcity also directly increases the depression of the labourers’ wages.
Is there any particular reason that Marx did not mention potential reasons for the capitalist in the USA paying greater average wages compared to the British capitalist? Such as gathering labor aristocrat allies against the labor underclasses[slaves and certain foreigners]? Especially since this was published in 1865.
You might be in luck. While I can’t say why Marx didn’t mention the reasons why he didn’t do that,
He did mention why U.S wage laborer earned relative higher, compared to their British and European counterparts, in Chapter 33 of Capital
We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free {settler} colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the {indigenous}soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.[10] This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.” [11]
In other words, in a world of Euro-Amerikan petty bourgeoisie settler proprietors, why be a wage laborer? Hence, to attract more wage laborers, a transitional above-average wage was put into place, by necessity.
Only when
the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil
by growing Capital is in major process, will Capital thus reduce and later equalize the wage of wage laborers to what it is in Europe
I don’t remember them talking about the US condition but they did talk about the bourgeoisification of the english working class in correspondence.
After that affair one might almost believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish utterly before it can evolve in a new and viable form. And yet it is not possible to foresee what the new form will look like. It seems to me, by the way, that there is in fact a connection between Jones’ new move, seen in conjunction with previous more or less successful attempts at such an alliance, and the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat.
That’s why I thought it was odd that he did not talk about capitalism and its relationship to colonialism. Since Marx stated in his letters to Engels that the English working class would never achieve liberation without decoupling itself from Irish exploitation.
This text along “wage labour and capital” were written as agitprop pieces so its ok that it doesnt have as much depth.
