Articles by Engels in the Labour Standard 1881

The Wages System


In a previous article we examined the time-honoured
motto, "A fair day's wages for a fair day's work", and came to the conclusion
that the fairest day's wages under present social conditions is necessarily
tantamount to the very unfairest division of the workman's produce, the
greater portion of that produce going into the capitalist's pocket, and
the workman having to put up with just as much as will enable him to keep
himself in working order and to propagate his race.

This is a law of political economy, or, in other words, a law
of the present economical organisation of society, which is more powerful
than all the Common and Statute Law of England put together, the Court
of Chancery [1] included. While society is divided into
two opposing classes -- on the one hand, the capitalists, monopolisers
of the whole of the means of production, land, raw materials, machinery;
on the other hand, labourers, working people deprived of all property in
the means of production, owners of nothing but their own working power;
while this social organisation exists the law of wages will remain all-powerful,
and will every day afresh rivet the chains by which the working man is
made the slave of his own produce -- monopolised by the capitalist.

The Trades Unions of this country have now for nearly sixty years
fought against this law -- with what result? Have they succeeded in freeing
the working class from the bondage in which capital -- the produce of its
own hands -- holds it? Have they enabled a single section of the working
class to rise above the situation of wages-slaves, to become owners of
their own means of production, of the raw materials, tools, machinery required
in their trade, and thus to become the owners of the produce of their own
labour? It is well known that not only they have not done so but that they
never tried.

Far be it from us to say that Trades Unions are of no use because
they have not done that. On the contrary, Trades Unions in England, as
well as in every other manufacturing country, are a necessity for the working
classes in their struggle against capital. The average rate of wages is
equal to the sum of necessaries sufficient to keep up the race of workmen
in a certain country according to the standard of life habitual in that
country. That standard of life may be very different for different classes
of workmen. The great merit of Trades Unions, in their struggle to keep
up the rate of wages and to reduce working hours, is that they tend to
keep up and to raise the standard of life. There are many trades in the
East-end of London whose labour is not more skilled and quite as hard as
that of bricklayers and bricklayers' labourers, yet they hardly earn half
the wages of these. Why? Simply because a powerful organisation enables
the one set to maintain a comparatively high standard of life as the rule
by which their wages are measured; while the other set, disorganised and
powerless, have to submit not only to unavoidable but also to arbitrary
encroachments of their employers: their standard of life is gradually reduced,
they learn how to live on less and less wages, and their wages naturally
fall to that level which they themselves have learnt to accept as sufficient.

The law of wages, then, is not one which draws a hard and fast
line. It is not inexorable with certain limits. There is at every time
(great depression excepted) for every trade a certain latitude within which
the rate of wages may be modified by the results of the struggle between
the two contending parties. Wages in every case are fixed by a bargain,
and in a bargain he who resists longest and best has the greatest chance
of getting more than his due. If the isolated workman tries to drive his
bargain with the capitalist he is easily beaten and has to surrender at
discretion, but if a whole trade of workmen form a powerful organisation,
collect among themselves a fund to enable them to defy their employers
if need be, and thus become enabled to treat with these employers as a
power, then, and then only, have they a chance to get even that pittance
which, according to the economical constitution of present society, may
be called a fair day's wages for a fair day's work.

The law of wages is not upset by the struggles of Trades Unions.
On the contrary, it is enforced by them. Without the means of resistance
of the Trades Unions the labourer does not receive even what is his due
according to the rules of the wages system. It is only with the fear of
the Trades Union before his eyes that the capitalist can be made to part
with the full market value of his labourer's working power. Do you want
a proof? Look at the wages paid to the members of the large Trades Unions,
and at the wages paid to the numberless small trades in that pool of stagnant
misery, the East-end of London.

Thus the Trades Unions do not attack the wages system. But it
is not the highness or lowness of wages which constitutes the economical
degradation of the working class: this degradation is comprised in the
fact that, instead of receiving for its labour the full produce of this
labour, the working class has to be satisfied with a portion of its own
produce called wages. The capitalist pockets the whole produce (paying
the labourer out of it) because he is the owner of the means of labour.
And, therefore, there is no real redemption for the working class until
it becomes owner of all the means of work -- land, raw material, machinery,
etc. -- and thereby also the owner of THE WHOLE OF THE PRODUCE OF ITS OWN
LABOUR.