Wages

Karl Marx

Wages

[A]

Already elucidated:

1. Wages = price of the commodity.

The determination of wages therefore coincides, in general, with the general determination of price.

Human activity = commodity.

The expression of life – the life-activity appears as a mere means; the existence separated from this activity <(Old MEGA) appearance> as end.

2. As a commodity, wages depend upon competition, upon demand and supply.

3. Supply itself depends upon the costs of production, i.e. the labour-time required to produce a commodity.

4. Inverse relation of profit and wages. Antagonism of the two classes, whose economic existence consists in profit and wages.

5. Struggle for the raising or lowering of wages. Workers’ associations.

6. Average or normal price of labour; the minimum, holds good only for the class of workers, not for the individual. Coalitions of workers to maintain wages.

7. Influence of abolition of taxes, protective tariffs, reduction of armies, etc., upon wages. The minimum on the average determined = the price of the necessary means of subsistence.

[B]

Additions

I. Atkinson

1.
Handloomweavers
<
Handweber
>
.
(They work 15 hours daily.) (Half a million of them.)

“Their distress <Not> inevitable condition of the kind of labour which is easily learned and constantly exposed to being displaced by cheaper means of production. A brief cessation of demand with so great a supply occasions crisis. The becoming useless of one branch of labour and the rise of another brings on temporary suffering. Example of the hand cotton weavers of the Dacca district in India; starved or thrown back into agricultural labour by the competition of English machinery.” (Extract from Dr. Bowring’s speech in the House of Commons, July 1835.)

(This example of the transition from one trade to another to be used for the free trade filth.)

2. Something to be said on the
population theory
.

3. Influence of altered and extended division of labour upon the determination of wages.

II. Carlyle

1. Not merely the quantity of wages <Arbeitslöhne> to be considered. In their quality, fluctuating, determined by chance.

2. Advantage of wages, that now only necessity, interest, bargaining link the worker to the employer. Nothing patriarchal any more, as in the Middle Ages.

Poor laws, rat extermination, chargeable labourer.

3. The largest part of labour is not skilled labour <gelernte Arbeit>.

4. The whole Malthusian and economist theory reduces itself to the proposition that the workers have it in their power to diminish the demand by producing no children.

III. MacCulloch

“The day’s wage which the worker earns is equal to the ordinary rate of profit for the owner of the machine called man, plus a

sum to replace the wear and tear of the machines <den Verschleiß der Maschinen zu ersetzen>, or, what is the same thing, to supply newones <neue> in place of old and worn-out workers.”

IV. John Wade

1. “If the object is to make the worker into a machine, from which the greatest quantity of labour can be drawn in a given occupation, there is no more efficacious way than division of labour.”

2. A reduction of wages drives the workers either to curtail their expenditure or to increase their productivity, in machine factories, e.g. (and in general), by working a longer number of hours, or, in the case of handicraftsmen, hand weavers, etc., by producing more in the same hour. But since their wage is reduced precisely because demand has fallen, they thus increase supply at the unfavourable moment. Consequence: their wage sinks still lower, and then the bourgeois come along and say: “If only the people would work.”

3. Universal law in general, that there cannot be
two market prices
, and indeed the
lower
market price dominates (with equal quality).

Suppose 1,000 workers of equal skill; 50 out of work; then the price is determined not by the 950 employed, but by the 50 unemployed.

But this law of the
market price
weighs more heavily on the commodity labour than on other commodities, because the worker cannot put his commodity into storage, but must sell his life-activity or, deprived of the means of subsistence, die.

The vendible commodity labour is distinguished from other commodities especially by its
perishable nature
, by the impossibility of
accumulating
it, and by the fact that
supply
cannot be increased or diminished with the same ease as with other products.

4. The humanity of the capitalists consists in buying as much labour as possible at the cheapest price. Agricultural workers receive more in summer than in winter, although in winter they require more food, fuel, and warmer clothing.

5. For example, the abolition of
Sunday
would be a pure loss for the workers. The masters seek to reduce wages by leaving them nominally what they are, but, e.g., making them work a quarter of an hour more, shortening meal times and the like.

6. Wages determined by fashions, change of seasons, and commercial fluctuations.

7. If the worker, displaced by machinery, goes over into another branch of labour, it is regularly into a
worse
one. He never returns to his former position.

Machinery and the division of labour put cheap labour in place of dear.

The workers have been proposed:

1. savings banks;

2. learning all possible branches of labour (so that, if there were an over-supply of workers in one branch, it would be immediately in all).

8. In times of stagnation:

a) Cessation of work;

b) Reduction of wages;

c) The same wage; fewer days in the week employed.

9. In the case of combinations of trade <Berufsvereinigungen> it should be noted:

1. The expenditure of the workers (the costs). Invention of machinery as a result of the coalitions. Different division of labour. Forcing down of wages. Displacement of factories to other localities.

2. Should they all succeed in keeping wages so high that profit fell considerably below the average profit of other countries, or that capital grew more slowly, the industry of a country would be ruined and the workers along with the masters, and even more so.

Although the reduction of a tax avails the workers nothing, the increase of it, on the other hand, harms them. The good thing about the increase of taxes in countries of developed bourgeois society is that the small peasant and proprietor class (handicraftsmen, etc.) is thereby ruined and thrown into the working class.

Influence of the Irish in England, of the Germans in Alsace, upon wages.

V. Babbage

Truck system.

VI. Andrew Ure

General principle of modern industry: to replace adults by children, the skilled workers by the unskilled, men by women.

Levelling of wages
. Main characteristic of modern industry.

VII. Rossi

Monsieur
Rossi
opines:

The manufacturer only discounts for the worker his share of the product, because the latter cannot await its sale. This is a speculation which has nothing directly to do with the production process. If the worker could maintain himself until the product is sold, he would subsequently, as associé <Teilhaber>, assert his share in it.

Wages are therefore not a constitutive element of the product <(Old MEGA) of production>, like capital and land. It is only an accident, a form of our social condition. Wages do not belong to capital.

Wages are not a factor indispensable to production. They may disappear in another organisation of labour.

VIII. Cherbuliez

1. “The increase of productive capital does not necessarily bring with it an increase of the approvisionnement for the workers. Raw material and machinery may be increased, the approvisionnement reduced.

The price of labour depends a) on the absolute quantity of productive capital, b) on the proportion between the various elements of capital, two social facts upon which the will of the workers can exercise no influence.

2. It is less the absolute consumption of the worker than his
relative
consumption which makes his condition happy or unhappy. Beyond the necessary consumption, the
value
of our enjoyments is
essentially relative
.”

When one speaks of the fall or rise of wages, one must never lose sight of the whole world market and the condition of the workers in the various regions.

Egalitarian and other attempts to determine wages justly.

The minimum of wages itself changes and falls ever lower. Example with brandy.

IX. Bray

Savings banks

Threefold machine in the hands of despotism and of capital.

1. The money flows back into the national bank; this makes profits by lending it back to the capitalists.

2. Golden chain by which the government holds a large part of the working class.

3. In this way, moreover, a new weapon is given into the hands of the capitalist as such.

Once wages have fallen, they never rise again to their former height, absolute and relative wages.

[C]

I. How does the growth of the productive forces affect wages? (cf. VI. 3) <See pp. 547-551>

Machinery: division of labour.

Labour is simplified. Its costs of production become smaller. It becomes cheaper. Competition among the workers becomes greater.

The transition from one branch of labour to another. On this Dr. Bowring himself, in relation to the hand cotton weavers of the Dacca district in India, in Parliament 1835. <See p. 536>

The new labour into which the worker is hurled is worse than the earlier; more subordinate. Labour of adults replaced by that of children, that of men by that of women, the more skilled workers by unskilled ones.

Either hours of labour increased or wages reduced.

Competition among the workers, not only that one sells himself more cheaply than another, but that one does the work of two.

The growth of the productive forces in general has the consequences:

a) That relatively the condition of the worker worsens vis-à-vis that of the capitalist, and the value of enjoyments relatively. Enjoyments themselves are after all nothing but social enjoyments, relations, relationships.

b) The worker becomes an ever more one-sided productive force, which produces as much as possible in the least possible time. Skilled labour is ever more transformed into simple labour.

c) Wages become ever more dependent on the world market, the condition of the worker a matter of chance.

d) In productive capital, the part for machinery and raw material grows much faster than that for approvisionnement. The increase of productive capital is therefore not accompanied by an equal increase in the demand for labour.

Wages depend:

a)
on the mass of productive capital as a whole;

b)
on the proportion of its component parts.

On both, the worker has no influence.

(Were it not for the fluctuations of wages, the worker would take no part at all in the development of civilisation; he would remain stationary.)

In the competition of the workers with the machine it should be noted that the hand workers (e.g. the hand cotton weavers) suffer still more than the machine workers directly employed in the factory.

Every development of a new productive force is at the same time a weapon against the workers. E.g. all improvements in the means of communication facilitate the competition of workers in different places and turn local competition into national competition, etc.

The cheapening of all commodities, which moreover is not the case with the most immediate means of subsistence, means that the worker wears composite rags and his misery bears the colours of civilisation.

II. Competition between workers and employers

a) To determine the relative wage, it must be observed that a taler for a worker and a taler for an employer do not have equal value. The worker has to buy everything worse and more expensively. His taler commands neither as much nor as good a commodity as that of the employer. The worker must be a spendthrift and buy and sell contrary to all economic principles. In general we must remark here that we are keeping in view only one aspect, the wage itself. But the exploitation of the worker begins afresh as soon as he exchanges the price <(Old MEGA) the fruit> for his labour again for other commodities – grocer, pawnbroker, landlord, tout le monde l’exploite encore une fois [everyone exploits him yet another time].

b) By commanding the means of employment, the employer commands the worker’s means of subsistence, i.e., his life depends on him; just as the worker himself reduces his life-activity to a mere means of his existence.

g) The commodity labour has great disadvantages compared with other commodities. For the capitalist, competition with the workers is merely a matter of profit; for the workers, of existence.
Labour is of a more perishable nature than other commodities. It cannot be accumulated. The supply cannot be increased or diminished with the same ease as with other commodities.

d) Factory regime. Domestic legislation. Truck system, where the employer cheats the worker by raising the price of the commodities while leaving his nominal wage the same.

III. Competition among workers themselves

a) According to a general economic law, there cannot be two market prices. Out of 1,000 workers of equal skill, the wage is determined not by the 950 employed, but by the 50 unemployed. Influence of the Irish on the situation of the English workers and of the Germans on the situation of the Alsatian workers.

b) The workers compete with one another, not only by one offering himself more cheaply than another, but by one working for two.
Advantages of the unmarried worker over the married, etc. Competition between workers from the country and the towns.

IV. Fluctuations of wages

They are brought about:
1. By changes in fashion.
2. Change of seasons.
3. Commercial fluctuations.

In the event of a crisis
a) the worker will restrict his expenditure or, [in order] to increase his productivity, either work longer hours or produce more in the same hour. Since their wage, however, is reduced because the demand for their product has fallen, they further worsen the unfavourable relation of supply to demand, and then the bourgeois says: If only the people would work. Their wage then sinks still lower through their over-exertion.

b) In times of crisis:
Total lack of employment. Reduction of the wage. Continuation of the wage and reduction of working days.

g) In all crises the following circular movement in relation to the workers:
The employer cannot employ the workers because he cannot sell his product. He cannot sell his product because he has no purchasers. He has no purchasers because the workers have nothing to exchange but their labour, and for that very reason they cannot exchange their labour.

d) When the rise of wages is spoken of, it must be borne in mind that one must always keep the world market in view and that the rise of wages is nullified <(Old MEGA) first bought> by the fact that workers in other countries are thrown out of bread.

V. Minimum of the wage

1. The day’s wage that the worker receives is the profit which his machine, his body, yields to its owner. Included in this is the sum required to replace the wear and tear <den Verschleiß> of the machine, or, what is the same thing, to replace old, worn-out workers by new ones.

2. It lies in the minimum of the wage that, e.g., the abolition of Sunday would be a pure loss for the worker. He would have to earn his wage under more difficult conditions. This is the meaning of the worthy philanthropists who zealously oppose Sunday observance.

3. Although the minimum of the wage is on average determined by the price of the most indispensable means of subsistence, it must be remarked:
Firstly: that the minimum varies in different countries, e.g. the potato in Ireland.
Secondly: not only that. The minimum itself has a historical movement and sinks ever more to the absolutely lowest level <Niveau>. Example with brandy. First distilled from wine lees, then from grain, then from spirits.

To bring about the really lowest level of the minimum, there contribute not only
1. the general development of the production machinery, division of labour, increasing competition among the workers themselves, freed from local fetters, but also
2. the growth of taxes and the greater costliness of the state budget, for although, as we have seen, the abolition of a tax is of no use to the worker, the imposition of each new one harms him, so long as the minimum of the wage has not yet sunk to its lowest possible expression, and this is the case with all perturbations and impediments of bourgeois intercourse. The growth of taxes, this incidentally, ruins the small peasants, burghers and handicraftsmen.

Example after the War of Liberation. The progress of industry, which brings forth cheaper products and substitutes.

3. This minimum tends to equalise itself in the different countries.

4. Once the wage has fallen and later rises again, it never rises, however, to its former height.
In the course of development the wage thus falls doubly:
Firstly: relatively, in proportion to the development of general wealth.
Secondly: absolutely, as the quantity of commodities which the worker receives in exchange becomes ever smaller.

5. In the course of large-scale industry time becomes ever more the measure of the value of commodities, hence also the measure of the wage. At the same time the production of the commodity labour becomes ever cheaper and costs ever less labour time in the course of civilisation.
The peasant still has free time and can earn something on the side. But large-scale industry (not manufacturing industry) abolishes this patriarchal [situation]. Every moment of the life, of the existence of the worker is thus drawn ever more into the huckstering.

(Now the following sections still to come:
1. Proposals for the improvement of the condition of the workers. Malthus. Rossi etc. Proudhon. Weitling.
2. Workers’ associations.
3. Positive significance of wage-labour.)

VI. Proposals for remedy

1. One of the most popular proposals is the system of savings banks.
We will not speak at all of the impossibility in which the greater part of the working class finds itself of saving.
The purpose – at least the strictly economic meaning of savings banks – is supposed to be: that the workers by their own foresight and prudence balance the good working time with the bad, i.e., distribute their wage in the cycle which the industrial movement runs through in such a way that they really never expend more than the minimum of the wage, the indispensable means of subsistence.
But we have seen that not only do the fluctuations of wages revolutionise the worker, but that without the momentary rise of the wage above the minimum he would remain excluded from all advances of production, of public wealth, of civilisation, hence from all possibility of emancipation.
He is thus to transform himself into a bourgeois calculating machine, reduce penny-pinching to a system and give to shabbiness a stationary, conservative character.
Apart from this, the savings bank system is a threefold machine of despotism:
a) The savings bank is the golden chain with which the government holds a large part of the working class. They thus not only acquire an interest in the maintenance of the existing conditions. Not only does a split arise between that part of the working class which takes part in the savings banks and that part which does not. The workers thus themselves place weapons in the hands of their enemies for the maintenance of the existing organisation of society which subjugates them.
b) The money flows back into the national bank, this in turn lends it to the capitalists, and the two share the profit and thereby increase, with the money lent to them by the people at beggarly interest – which first becomes a powerful industrial lever precisely through this centralisation – their capital, their direct power of rule over the people.

2. Another proposal very popular with the bourgeois is education, especially all-round industrial education.
a) We will not draw attention to the insipid contradiction that modern industry increasingly replaces complicated labour with simple labour for which no education is required; we will not draw attention to the fact that it increasingly throws children from the seventh year on behind the machine and makes them into sources of income not only for the bourgeois class but for their own proletarian parents; the factory system frustrates the school laws – example Prussia; we will also not draw attention to the fact that intellectual education, if the worker had it, in no way directly affects his wage, that education in general depends upon the conditions of life and that by moral education the bourgeois understands the inculcation of bourgeois principles, and that finally the bourgeois class has neither the means nor, if it had them, would it employ them to offer the people a real education.
We confine ourselves to highlighting a purely economic point of view.

b) The actual meaning which education has with the philanthropic economists is this: that every worker should become acquainted with as many branches of labour as possible, so that if he is thrown out of one branch by the introduction of new machines or by a changed division of labour, he can find a place in another as easily as possible.
Assuming this to be possible:
The consequence would be that if there were a surplus of hands in one branch of labour, this surplus would at once exist in all other branches of labour, and even more than hitherto a reduction of the wage in one trade would directly entail a general reduction of the wage.
Already, since modern industry everywhere greatly simplifies labour and makes it easy to learn, a rise of the wage in one branch of industry would immediately cause an influx of workers into this branch and the reduction of the wage would more or less directly assume a general character.

We cannot, of course, go into the many small palliatives which are brought forward on the bourgeois side. <(inserted later by Marx) Pauperism>

3. We must, however, come to a third proposal which has had practically very momentous consequences and daily entails them – the Malthusian theory.
This whole theory, so far as we have to consider it here, comes down to the following:
a) The level of the wage depends on the relation of the labouring hands offering themselves to the labouring hands demanded.
The wage can rise in a twofold manner.

Either, when the capital that sets labour in motion increases so rapidly that the demand for workers increases more rapidly – in a faster progression – than their supply.

Or secondly, when the population grows so slowly that competition among the workers remains weak, although the productive capital does not grow rapidly.

On the one side of the relationship, the growth of productive capital, you workers can exert no influence.

On the other side, however, you can.

You can reduce the supply among the workers, i.e. the competition among the workers, by having as few children as possible.

To reveal the complete stupidity, baseness and hypocrisy of this doctrine, the following will suffice:

b)

(This is to be placed ad I: How does the growth of the productive forces affect wages?)

Wages rise when the demand for labour rises. This demand rises when the capital that sets labour in motion grows, i.e. when productive capital increases.

Two main observations must be made here:

Firstly: A principal condition for the rise of wages is the growth of productive capital and its most rapid growth possible. The principal condition for the worker to be in a tolerable situation is therefore to depress his position vis-à-vis the bourgeois class more and more, to increase the power of his adversary – capital – as much as possible. That is, he can only be in a tolerable situation under the condition that he produces and strengthens the power hostile to him, his own opposite. Under this condition, by creating this hostile power, means of employment flow to him from it, which anew make him a part of productive capital and a lever that multiplies it and hurls it into an accelerated movement of growth.

Incidentally, once one has grasped this relationship of capital and labour, all Fourierist and other attempts at mediation appear in their complete ridiculousness.

Secondly: After having thus in general explained this mad relationship, a second, even more important element is added.

Namely, what does growth of productive capital mean, and under what conditions does it take place?

Growth of capital = accumulation and concentration of capital. To the same extent that capital accumulates and concentrates, it leads:

to labour on a larger scale and hence to a new division of labour, which simplifies labour still further;

then to the introduction of machinery on a larger scale and to the introduction of new machines.

That means, therefore, to the same extent that productive capital grows:

competition among the workers grows, because the division of labour becomes simplified and every branch of labour is more accessible to everyone.

Competition further grows among them, because they have to compete with the machines to the same degree and are thrown out of bread by them. The concentration and accumulation of productive capital, by making the scale on which production is carried on ever larger; moreover, because through competition among the offered capitals the rate of interest falls more and more,

thus brings about:

The small industrial establishments go under and cannot hold their own against the competition of the large ones. Whole sections of the bourgeoisie are thrown down into the working class. Competition among the workers is thus increased by the ruin of the small industrialists, which is fatally linked with the growth of productive capital.

And at the same time, because the rate of interest falls, the small capitalists previously not directly involved in industry are compelled to become industrialists, i.e. to supply yet new victims to large-scale industry. Thus from this side too the working class is enlarged and competition among the workers increased.

While the growth of the productive forces entails working on a larger scale, momentary overproduction becomes ever more necessary, the world market ever more extended, with competition becoming more universal. Hence crises become ever more violent. Thus a sudden means of encouragement given to the workers to marry and to multiply, they are agglomerated and concentrated in large masses and their wages become ever more fluctuating. Every new crisis therefore directly calls forth a much greater competition among the workers.

In general: The growth of the productive forces, with their more rapid means of communication, accelerated circulation, feverish turnover of capital, consists in the fact that more can be produced in the same time, hence according to the law of competition more must be produced. That means that production takes place under ever more difficult conditions, and in order that competition can be sustained under these conditions, work must be carried on on an ever larger scale, capital must be concentrated more and more in a few hands. And so that this production on a larger scale may be profitable, the division of labour and machinery must be constantly and disproportionately extended.

This production under ever more difficult conditions extends also to the worker as a part of capital. He must produce more under ever more difficult conditions, i.e. for ever less wages and more labour, for ever cheaper costs of production. Thus the minimum itself is reduced more and more to a greater exertion of strength with the minimum of enjoyment of life.

Disproportion increases geometrically, not arithmetically. <This sentence was written by Marx in the margin of the manuscript.>

The growth of the productive forces thus entails increased domination of large capital, increased simplification and simplification of the machine called the worker, increased direct competition among the workers through expanded division of labour and application of machinery, through the premium which is formally placed on the production of men <(Old MEGA) on the production of machinery>, through the competition of the ruined fractions of the bourgeoisie, etc.

We can formulate the matter still more simply:

Productive capital consists of three component parts:

1. the raw material which is worked up;

2. the machines and materials, such as coal, etc., which are necessary to drive the machines, buildings and the like;

3. the part of capital which is destined for the maintenance of the workers.

How do these three component parts of productive capital relate to one another when it grows?

With the growth of productive capital its concentration is bound up, and with this, that it can be profitably exploited only on an ever larger scale.

A large part of capital will therefore be directly converted into instruments of labour and will be active as such, and the more the productive forces

grow, the greater will be this part of capital directly converted into machinery.

The enlargement of machinery as well as that of the division of labour entails that disproportionately more can be produced in a shorter time. Hence the stock of raw material must grow in the same proportion. In the course of the growth of productive capital the part of capital converted into raw material necessarily increases.

There now remains the third part of productive capital, that which is destined for the maintenance of the workers, i.e. which is converted into wages.

How does the growth of this part of productive capital relate to the other two?

The greater division of labour means that one worker produces as much as three, four, five did previously. Machinery has the same effect on an incomparably larger scale.

It is thus self-evident, in the first place, that the growth of the parts of productive capital converted into machinery and raw material is not accompanied by a similar growth of the part of capital destined for wages. In that case the purpose of applying machinery and an enlarged division of labour would be missed. It therefore follows of itself that the part of productive capital destined for wages does not grow to the same extent as the part destined for machinery and raw material. Even more: to the same extent that productive capital grows, i.e. the power of capital as such, to that extent the disproportion between the capital laid out in raw material and machines and the capital laid out in wages grows. That means, therefore, that the part of productive capital destined for wages becomes ever smaller in proportion to the part of capital functioning as machinery and raw material.

After the capitalist has put a larger capital in machines, he is compelled to spend a larger capital on the purchase of raw material and of the raw material needed to drive the machines. If, however, he previously employed 100 workers, he will now perhaps need only 50. Otherwise he might have to double the other parts of capital once again, i.e. to make the disproportion even greater. He will therefore dismiss 50, or the 100 must work for the same price as previously 50 did. Thus there are surplus workers on the market.

With improved division of labour, only the capital for raw material will have to be increased. Perhaps one worker will step into the place of three.

Let us assume, however, the most favourable case. The capitalist extends his undertaking to such an extent that he can not only retain the previous number of his workers – and naturally he does not care a louse about waiting until he can do so – but even increase them, then production must have been increased in an enormous way in order to keep the same number of workers or even to increase them, and the ratio of the number of workers to the productive forces has become relatively infinitely more disproportionate. Overproduction is thereby accelerated, and in the next crisis more workers are unemployed than ever before.

It is thus a general law, arising necessarily from the nature of the relation of capital and labour, that in the course of the growth of the productive forces the part of productive capital that is converted into machinery and raw material, i.e. capital as such, grows disproportionately against the part that is destined for wages; in other words: the workers have to share a relatively ever smaller portion of productive capital in relation to its total mass. Their competition therefore becomes ever more intense. In other words: the more productive capital grows, the more the means of employment or means of subsistence for the workers relatively diminish, the more rapidly, in other words, the working population grows in relation to its means of employment. And this increases to the same degree in which productive capital grows in general.

To balance out the disproportion indicated above, it must be enlarged in geometrical proportion, and to afterwards re-adjust it in times of crisis, it is enlarged still more.

This law, which arises purely from the relation of the worker to capital and thus turns even the most favourable condition for him, the rapid growth of productive capital, into an unfavourable one, the bourgeois have transformed from a social into a natural law, by saying that the population grows by a natural law more rapidly than the means of employment or subsistence.

They have not grasped that the growth of this contradiction is included in the growth of productive capital.

We shall return to this later.

Productive force, particularly the social force of the workers themselves, not paid to them, indeed turned against them.

g) First absurdity:

We have seen that, when productive capital grows – the most favourable case, which the economists presuppose – i.e., when the demand for labour grows relatively, it lies in the character of modern industry and in the nature of capital that the means of employment for the workers do not grow to the same extent, that the same circumstances which make productive capital grow cause the disproportion between the supply of and the demand for labour to grow even more rapidly, in a word, that the growth of the productive forces simultaneously makes the disproportion between the workers and their means of employment grow. This depends neither on the increase of means of subsistence nor on the increase of population considered in isolation. It follows necessarily from the nature of large-scale industry and the relation of labour and capital.

If, however, the growth of productive capital proceeds only slowly, if it remains stationary or even declines, then the number of workers is always too large in relation to the demand for labour.

In both cases, the most favourable and the most unfavourable, it follows from the relation of labour to capital, from the nature of capital itself, that the supply of workers will always be too large in proportion to the demand for labour.

d) Apart from the nonsense that the whole working class cannot possibly reach the resolution to produce no children, the opposite is the case: their situation makes the sexual instinct their chief pleasure and develops it one-sidedly.

After the bourgeoisie has forced the worker’s existence down to a minimum, it also wants to restrict his reproductive acts to a minimum.

e) How little seriousness, moreover, the bourgeoisie can and does attach to these phrases and counsels is evident from the following:

Firstly: Modern industry, by displacing adults with children, distributes a veritable premium on child-making.

Secondly: Large-scale industry constantly requires a reserve army of unemployed workers for the periods of overproduction. The main purpose of the bourgeois vis-à-vis the worker is, after all, to have the commodity labour as cheap as possible, which is only possible if the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it, i.e., if as much overpopulation as possible exists.

Overpopulation is thus in the interest of the bourgeoisie, and it gives the worker good advice which it knows to be impossible to carry out.

z) Since capital increases only when it employs workers, the increase of capital includes an increase of the proletariat, and, as we have seen, in accordance with the nature of the relation of capital and labour, the increase of the proletariat must proceed relatively even more rapidly.

h) Meanwhile, the above-mentioned theory, which also likes to express itself as a natural law to the effect that population grows more rapidly than the means of subsistence, is all the more welcome to the bourgeois in that it silences his conscience, turns hard-heartedness into a moral duty, makes the consequences of society into consequences of nature, and finally gives him an opportunity quietly to watch the ruin of the proletariat through famine just as he watches other natural events, without stirring, and, on the other hand, to regard the misery of the proletariat as its own fault and to punish it. The proletarian can, after all, restrain the natural instinct through reason, and thus, through moral supervision, check the natural law in its harmful course of development.

j) The poor-law legislation can be regarded as an application of this theory. Rat extermination. Arsenic. Workhouses <Arbeitshäuser>. Pauperism in general. The treadmill again within civilisation. Barbarism reappears, but engendered from the womb of civilisation itself and belonging to it; therefore leprous barbarism, barbarism as the leprosy of civilisation. The workhouses the Bastilles of the worker. Separation of wife and husband.

4. We now come briefly to speak of those who want to improve the worker’s situation by a different determination of wages.

Proudhon.

5. Finally, among the remarks that philanthropic economists have made about wages, one further view is still to be mentioned.

a) Among other economists,
Rossi
in particular has set forth the following:

The manufacturer merely discounts to the worker his share of the product, because the worker cannot wait for its sale. If the worker could maintain himself until the sale of the product, he would then, as an associé, assert his share of it, as between the industrial capitalist and the propertied capitalist. That the worker’s share therefore has precisely the form of the wage is an accident; it is the result of a speculation, a particular act which takes place alongside the production process as a side issue and forms no necessary constitutive element of it. The wage is only an accidental form of our social condition. It does not belong necessarily to capital. It is not an indispensable fact of production. It can disappear in another social organisation.

b) This whole piece of wit amounts to this: If the workers possessed enough accumulated labour, i.e., enough capital, not to have to live directly from the sale of their labour, the form of the wage would fall away. That is to say, if all workers were simultaneously capitalists; i.e., presupposing capital and retaining it without the antithesis of wage labour, without which it cannot exist.

g) Nevertheless, this concession is to be noted. The wage is not an accidental form of bourgeois production, but all bourgeois production is a transient historical form of production. All its relations, capital as well as wage as well as ground rent, etc., are transient and can be abolished at a certain point of development.

VII. The Workers’ Associations

One element in the population theory was that it wants to reduce competition among the workers. The associations, by contrast, have the purpose of abolishing it and putting in its place the union of the workers.

What the economists remark against the associations is correct:

1. The costs they cause the workers are mostly greater than the increase in earnings they want to obtain. In the long run they cannot resist the laws of competition. These coalitions call forth new machinery, new division of labour, displacement from one place of production to another. As a result of all this, a reduction of wages.

2. If the coalitions succeeded in keeping the price of labour in one country so high that profit fell significantly compared with the average profit in other countries, or that the growth of capital were checked, industry would stagnate and decline as a result, and the workers would be ruined along with their masters. For that, as we have seen, is the worker’s situation. His situation worsens by leaps and bounds when productive capital grows, and he is ruined from the outset when it declines or remains stationary.

3. All these objections of the bourgeois economists are, as stated, correct, but correct only from their point of view. If the associations really involved only what they seem to involve, namely the determination of wages, if the relation of labour and capital were eternal, then these coalitions would inevitably fail against the necessity of things. But they are the means for uniting the working class, for preparing the overthrow of the whole old society with its class antagonisms. And from this standpoint the workers rightly laugh at the clever bourgeois schoolmasters who reckon up for them what this civil war costs them in dead, wounded and monetary sacrifices. Whoever wants to beat the enemy will not discuss the costs of the war with him. And how little the workers are so narrow-minded is proved to the economists themselves by the fact that the best-paid factory workers form the most coalitions and that the workers spend everything they can pinch off their wages on forming political and industrial associations and covering the costs of this movement. And if Messrs. the bourgeois and their economists, in philanthropic moments, are gracious enough to allow a little tea or rum or sugar and meat to be included in the minimum of wages, i.e., of life, it must, on the other hand, appear to them just as shameful as incomprehensible that the workers include in this minimum a little of the costs of war against the bourgeoisie and that they even make the maximum enjoyment of their life out of their revolutionary activity.

VIII. Positive Side of the Wage System

Before we conclude, we must yet draw attention to the positive side of the wage system.

a) If one speaks of the positive side of the wage system, one speaks of the positive side of capital, of large-scale industry, of free competition, of the world market, and I do not need to explain to you how, without these relations of production, neither the means of production – the material means for the emancipation of the proletariat and the founding of a new society – would have been created, nor would the proletariat itself have taken on that unification and development through which it is really capable of revolutionising the old society and itself.
Equalisation
of wages.

b) Let us even take the wage in the kernel of its contemptibility, that my activity becomes a commodity, that I become through and through saleable.

Firstly: as a result, everything patriarchal has fallen away, since only trafficking, purchase and sale remains the sole bond, the money relation the only relation between employer and worker.

Secondly
: The halo has, in general, fallen from all the relations of the old society, since they have dissolved into pure money relations.

Equally, all so-called higher kinds of labour – intellectual, artistic, etc. – have been transformed into articles of commerce and have thereby lost their old consecration. What a great advance it was that the whole regiment of priests, physicians, jurists, etc., hence religion, jurisprudence, etc., have been determined only according to their commercial value. <(inserted by Marx) National class struggle, property relations>

(
Thirdly
: Since labour became a commodity and as such was subjected to free competition, the effort was made to produce it as cheaply as possible, i.e., at the lowest possible production costs. Thereby all bodily labour has become infinitely easy and simple for a future organisation of society. – To be put in general terms.)

Thirdly: Since, through universal venality, the workers have established everything as separable from themselves, as discardable, they have become free for the first time from subordination to a definite relation. The advantage that the worker can do what he likes with his money, as against deliveries in kind and as against the mode of life prescribed purely by estate (feudal status).

Written at the end of December 1847.

From the manuscript.