13) MAIN CASES OF ATTEMPTS AT RAISING WAGES 
OR RESISTING THEIR FALL 

Let us now seriously consider the main cases in which a rise of 
wages is attempted or a reduction of wages resisted. 

1. We have seen that the value of the labouring power, or in more 
popular parlance, the value of labour, is determined by the value of 

necessaries, or the quantity of labour required to produce them. 
If, then, in a given country the value of the daily average 
necessaries of the labourer represented six hours of labour 
expressed in three shillings, the labourer would have to work six 
hours daily to produce an equivalent for his daily maintenance. If 
the whole working day was twelve hours, the capitalist would pay 
him the value of his labour by paying him three shillings. Half the 
working day would be unpaid labour, and the rate of profit would 
amount to 100 per cent. But now suppose that, consequent upon a 
decrease of productivity, more labour should be wanted to 
produce, say, the same amount of agricultural produce, so that the 
price of the average daily necessaries should rise from three to 
four shillings. In that case the value of labour would rise by 
one-third, or 33'/; per cent. Eight hours of the working day would 
be required to produce an equivalent for the daily maintenance of 
the labourer, according: to his old standard of living. The 
surplus-labour would therefore sink from six hours to four, and 
the rate of profit from 100 to 50 per cent. But in insisting upon a 
rise of wages, the labourer would only insist upon getting the 
increased value of his labour, like every other seller of a commodity, 
who, the costs of his commodities having increased, tries to get its 
increased value paid. If wages did not rise, or not sufficiently rise, 
to compensate for the increased values of necessaries, the price of 
labour would sink below the value of labour, and the labourer’s 
standard of life would deteriorate. 

But a change might also take place in an opposite direction. By 
virtue of the increased productivity of labour, the same amount of 
the average daily necessaries might sink from three to two 
shillings, or only four hours out of the working day, instead of six, 
be wanted to reproduce an equivalent for the value of the daily 
necessaries. The working man would now be able to buy with two 
shillings as many necessaries as he did before with three shillings. 
Indeed, the value of labour would have sunk, but that diminished 
value would command the same amount of commodities as before. 
Then profits would rise from three to four shillings, and, the rate 
of profit from 100 to 200 per cent. Although the labourer’s 
absolute standard of life would have remained the same, his 
relative wages, and therewith his relative social position, as compared 
with that of the capitalist, would have been lowered. If the 
working man should resist that reduction of relative wages, he 
would only try to get some share in the increased productive 
powers of his own labour, and to maintain his former relative 
position in the social scale. Thus, after the abolition of the Corn 

Laws, and in flagrant violation of the most solemn pledges given 
during the anti-corn law agitation, the English factory lords 
generally reduced wages ten per cent. The resistance of the 
workmen was at first baffled, but, consequent upon circumstances 
I cannot now enter ss a the ten per cent. lost were afterwards 
regained. 

2. The values of necessaries, and consequently the value of 
labour, might remain the same, but a change might occur in their 
money prices, consequent upon a previous change in the value of 
money. 

By the discovery of more fertile mines and so forth, two ounces 
of gold. might, for example, cost no more labour to produce than 
one ounce did before. The value of gold would then be 
depreciated by one half, or fifty per cent. As the values of all 
other commodities would then be expressed in twice their former 
money prices, so also the same with the value of labour. Twelve hours 
of labour, formerly expressed in six shillings, would now be 
expressed in twelve shillings. If the working man’s wages should 
remain three shillings, instead of rising to six shillings, the money 
price of his labour would only be equal to half the value of his labour, 
and his standard of life would fearfully deteriorate. This would 
also happen in a greater or lesser degree if his wages should rise, 
-but not proportionately to the fall in the value of gold. In such a 
case nothing would have been changed, either in the productive 
powers of labour, or in supply and demand, or in values. Nothing 
could have changed except the money names of those values. To - 
say that in such a case the workman ought not to insist upon a 
proportionate rise of wages, is to say that he must be content to be 
paid with names, instead of with things. All past history proves 
that whenever such a depreciation of money occurs the capitalists 
are on the alert to seize this opportunity for defrauding the 
workman. A very large school of political economists assert that, 
consequent upon the new discoveries of gold lands, the better 
working of silver mines, and the cheaper supply of quicksilver, the 
value of precious metals has been again depreciated. This would 
explain the general and simultaneous attempts on the Continent at 
a rise of wages. 

3. We have till now supposed that the working day has given 
limits. The working day, however, has, by itself, no constant limits. 
It is the constant tendency of capital to stretch it to its utmost 
physically possible length, because in the same degree surplus- 
labour, and consequently the profit resulting therefrom, will be 
increased. The more capital succeeds in prolonging the working 

day, the greater the amount of other people’s labour it will 
appropriate. During the seventeenth and even the first two-thirds 
of the eighteenth century a ten hours’ working day was the normal 
working day all over England. During the anti-Jacobin war, which 
was in fact a war waged by the British barons against the British 
working masses”* capital celebrated its bacchanalia, and prolonged 
the working day from ten to twelve, fourteen, eighteen hours. 
Malthus, by no means a man whom you would suspect of a 
maudlin sentimentalism, declared in a pamphlet, published about 
1815, that if this sort of things was to go on the life of the nation 
would be attacked at its very source.* A few years before the 
general introduction of the newly-invented machinery, about 1765, 
a pamphlet appeared in England under the title, An Essay on 
Trade.” The anonymous author, an avowed enemy of the working 
classes, declaims on the necessity of expanding the limits of the 
working day. Amongst other means to this end, he proposes 
working houses, which, he says, ought to be “Houses of Terror”. 
And what is the length of the working day he prescribes for these 
“Houses of Terror’? Twelve hours, the very same time which in 1832 
was declared by capitalists, political economists, and ministers to be 
not only the existing but the necessary time of labour for a child 
under twelve years.” 

By selling his labouring power, and he must do so under the 
present system, the working man makes over to the capitalist the 
consumption of that power, but within certain rational limits. He 
sells his labouring power in order to maintain it, apart from its 
natural wear and tear, but not to destroy it. In selling his 
labouring power at its daily or weekly value, it is understood that 
in one day or one week that labouring power shall not be 
submitted to two days’ or two weeks’ waste or wear and tear. Take 
a machine worth £1,000. If it is used up in ten years it will add to 
the value of the commodities in whose production it assists £100 
yearly. If it be used up in five years it would add £200 yearly, or 
the value of its annual wear and tear is in inverse ratio to the 
quickness with which it is consumed. But this distinguishes the 
working man from the machine. Machinery does not wear out 
exactly in the same ratio in which it is used. Man, on the contrary, 
decays in a greater ratio than would be visible from the mere 
numerical addition of work. 

In their attempts at reducing the working day to its former 
rational dimensions, or, where they cannot enforce a legal fixation 
of a normal working day, at checking overwork by a rise of wages, 
a rise not only in proportion to the surplus-time exacted, but in a 
greater proportion, working men fulfil only a duty to themselves 
and their race. They only set limits to the tyrannical usurpations 
of capital. Time is the room of human development. A man who 
has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from 
the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is 
absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of 
burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, 
broken in body and brutalised in mind. Yet the whole history of 
modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly 
and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to the 
utmost state of degradation. 

In prolonging the working day the capitalist may pay higher 
wages and still lower the value of labour, if the rise of wages does 
not correspond to the greater amount of labour extracted, and the 
quicker decay of the labouring power thus caused. This may be 
done in another way. Your middle-class statisticians will tell you, 
for instance, that the average wages of factory families in 
Lancashire have risen. They forget that instead of the labour of 
the man, the head of the family, his wife and perhaps three or 
four children are now thrown under the Juggernaut wheels '°° of 
capital, and that the rise of the aggregate wages does not 
correspond to the aggregate surplus-labour extracted from the 
family. 

Even with given limits of the working day, such as now exist in 
all branches of industry subjected to the factory laws, a rise of 
wages may become necessary, if only to keep up the old standard 
value of labour. By increasing the intensity of labour, a man may be 
made to expend as much vital force in one hour as he formerly 
did in two. This has, to a certain degree, been effected in the 
trades, placed under the Factory Acts, by the acceleration of 
machinery, and the greater number of working machines which a 
single individual has now to superintend. If the increase in the 
intensity of labour or the mass of labour spent in an hour keeps 
some fair proportion to the decrease in the extent of the working 
day, the working man will still be the winner. If this limit is 
overshot, he loses in one form what he has gained in another, and 
ten hours of labour may then become as ruinous as twelve hours 
were before. In checking this tendency of capital, by struggling for 
a rise of wages corresponding to the rising intensity of labour, the 

working man only resists the depreciation of his labour and the 
deterioration of his race. 

4. All of you know that, from reasons I have not now to 
explain, capitalistic production moves through certain periodical 
cycles. It moves through a state of quiescence, growing animation, 
prosperity, overtrade, crisis, and stagnation. The market prices of 
commodities, and the market rates of profit, follow these phases, 
now sinking below their averages, now rising above them. 
Considering the whole cycle, you will find that one deviation of 
the market price is being compensated by the other, and that, 
taking the average of the cycle, the market prices of commodities 
are regulated by their values. Well! During the phase of sinking 
market prices and the phases of crisis and stagnation, the working 
man, if not thrown out of employment altogether, is sure to have 
his wages lowered. Not to be defrauded, he must, even with such a 
fall of market prices, debate with the capitalist in what proportion- 
al degree a fall of wages has become necessary. If, during the 
phases of prosperity, when extra profits are made, he did not 
battle for a rise of wages, he would, taking the average of one 
industrial cycle, not even receive his average wages, or the value of 
his labour. It is the utmost height of folly to demand that while his 
‘wages are necessarily affected by the adverse phases of the cycle, 
he should exclude himself from compensation during the prosper- 
ous phases of the cycle. Generally, the values of all commodities 
are only realised by the compensation of the continuously 
changing market prices, springing from the continuous fluctua- 
tions of demand and supply. On the basis of the present system 
labour is only a commodity like others. It must, therefore, pass 
through the same fluctuations to fetch an average price corres- 
ponding to its value. It would be absurd to treat it on the one 
hand as a commodity, and to want on the other hand to exempt it 
from the laws which regulate the prices of commodities. The slave 
receives a permanent and fixed amount of maintenance; the wages 
labourer does not. He must try to get a rise of wages in the one 
instance, if only to compensate for a fall of wages in the other. If 
he resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist 
as a permanent economical law, he would share in all the miseries 
of the slave, without the security of the slave. 

5. In all the cases I have considered, and they form ninety-nine 
out of a hundred, you have seen that a struggle for a rise of wages 
follows only in the track of previous changes, and is the necessary 
offspring of previous changes in the amount of production, the 
productive powers of labour, the value of labour, the value of 

money, the extent or the intensity of labour extracted, the 
fluctuations of market prices, dependent upon the fluctuations of 
demand and supply, and consistent with the different phases of 
the industrial cycle; in one word, as reactions of labour against the 
previous action of capital. By treating the struggle for a rise of 
wages independently of all these circumstances, by looking only 
upon the change of wages, and overlooking all the other changes 
from which they emanate, you proceed from a false premise in 
order to arrive at false conclusions. 

14) THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN CAPITAL AND LABOUR 
AND ITS RESULTS 

1. Having shown that the periodical resistance on the part of 
the working men against a reduction of wages, and their 
periodical attempts at getting a rise of wages, are inseparable from 
the wages system, and dictated by the very fact of labour being 
assimilated to commodities, and therefore subject to the laws 
regulating the general movement of prices; having, furthermore, 
shown that a general rise of wages would result in a fall in the 
general rate of profit, but not affect the average prices of 
commodities, or their values, the question now ultimately arises, 
how far, in this incessant struggle between capital and labour, the 
latter is likely to prove successful. 

I might answer by a generalisation, and say that, as with all 
other commodities, so with labour, its market price will, in the long 
run, adapt itself to its value; that, therefore, despite all the ups 
and downs, and do what he may, the working man will, on an 
average, only receive the value of his labour, which resolves into 
the value of his labouring power, which is determined by the value 
of the necessaries required for its maintenance and reproduction, 
which value of necessaries finally is regulated by the quantity of 
labour wanted to produce them. 

But there are some peculiar features which distinguish the value 
of the labouring power, or the value of labour, from the values of all 
other commodities. The valué of the labouring power is formed by 
two elements—the one merely physical, the other historical or 
social. Its ultzmate limit is determined by the physical element, that 
is to say, to maintain and reproduce itself, to perpetuate its 
physical existence, the working class must receive the necessaries 
absolutely indispensable for living and multiplying. The value of 

those indispensable necessaries forms, therefore, the ultimate limit 
of the value of labour. On the other hand, the length of the 
working day is also limited by ultimate, although very elastic 
boundaries. Its ultimate limit is given by the physical force of the 
labouring man. If the daily exhaustion of his vital forces exceeds a 
certain degree, it cannot be exerted anew, day by day. However, as 
I said, this limit is very elastic. A quick succession of unhealthy 
and short-lived generations will keep the labour market as well 
supplied as a series of vigorous and long-lived generations. 

Besides this mere physical element, the value of labour is in 
every country determined by a traditional standard of life. It is not 
mere physical life, but it is the satisfaction of certain wants 
springing from the social conditions in which people are placed 
and reared up. The English standard of life may be reduced to 
the Irish standard; the standard of life of a German peasant to 
that of a Livonian peasant. The important part which historical 
tradition and social habitude play in this respect, you may learn 
from Mr. Thornton’s work on Over-population, where he shows 
that the average wages in different agricultural districts of 
England still nowadays differ more or less according to the more 
or less favourable circumstances under which the districts have 
emerged from the state of serfdom. 

This historical or social element, entering into the value of 
labour, may be expanded, or contracted, or altogether extin- 
guished, so that nothing remains but the physical limit. During 
the time of the anti-Jacobin war, undertaken, as the incorrigible 
tax-eater and sinecurist, old George Rose, used to say, to save the 
comforts of our holy religion from the inroads of the French 
infidels, the honest English farmers, so tenderly handled in a 
former chapter of ours, depressed the wages of the agricultural 
labourers even beneath that mere physical minimum, but made up 
by Poor Laws'*' the remainder necessary for the physical perpetua- 
tion of the race. This was a glorious way to convert the wages 
labourer into a slave, and Shakespeare’s proud yeoman into a 
pauper. 

By comparing the standard wages or values of labour in 
different countries, and by comparing them in different historical 
epochs of the same country, you will find that the value of labour 
itself is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, even supposing the 
values of all other commodities to remain constant. 

A similar comparison would prove that not only the market rates 
of profit change but its average rates. 

But as to profits, there exists no law which determines their 

minimum. We cannot say what is the ultimate limit of their 
decrease. And why cannot we fix that limit? Because, although we 
can fix the minimum of wages, we cannot fix their maximum. We 
can only say that, the limits of the working day being given, the 
maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages; 
and that wages being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to 
such a prolongation of the working day as is compatible with the 
physical forces of the labourer. The maximum of profit is, 
therefore, limited by the physical minimum of wages and the 
physical maximum of the working day. It is evident that between 
the two limits of this maximum rate of profit an immense scale of 
variations is possible. The fixation of its actual degree is only 
settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the 
capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical 
minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical 
maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the 
opposite direction. 

The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective 
powers of the combatants. 

2. As to the limitation of the working day in England, as in all 
other countries, it has never been settled except by legislative 
interference. Without the working men’s continuous pressure from 
without that interference would never have taken place. But at all 
events, 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 
economic action capital is the stronger side. 

As to the limits of the value of labour, its actual settlement always 
depends upon supply and demand. I mean the demand for labour 
on the part of capital, and the supply of labour by the working 
men. In colonial countries the law of supply and demand favours 
the working man. Hence the relatively high standard of wages in 
the United States. Capital may there try its utmost. It cannot 
prevent the labour market from being continuously emptied by 
the continuous conversion of wages labourers into independent, 
self-sustaining peasants. The position of a wages labourer is for a 
very large part of the American people but a probational state, 
which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term. To 
mend this colonial state of things, the paternal British Government 
accepted for some time what is called the modern colonisation 
theory, which consists in putting an artificial high price upon 
colonial land, in order to prevent the too quick conversion of the 
wages labourer into the independent peasant.'” 

But let us now come to old civilised countries, in which capital 
domineers over the whole process of production. Take, for 
example, the rise in England of agricultural wages from 1849 to 
1859. What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our 
friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, 
nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit 
to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced 
machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted 
part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and 
with this the scale. of production, and by these and other 
processes, diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its 
productive power, made the agricultural population again relative- 
ly redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, 
quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in 
old, settled countries. Ricardo has justly remarked that machinery 
is in constant competition with labour, and can often be only 
introduced when the price of labour has reached a certain height, 
but the appliance of machinery is but one of the many methods 
for increasing the productive powers of labour.* This very same 
development which makes common labour relatively redundant 
simplifies on the other hand skilled labour, and thus depreciates it. 

The same law obtains in another form. With the development of 
the productive powers of labour the accumulation of capital will be 
accelerated, even despite a relatively high rate of wages. Hence, 
one might infer, as Adam Smith, in whose days modern industry 
was still in its infancy, did infer, that the accelerated accumulation 
of capital must turn the balance in favour of the working man, by 
securing a growing demand for his labour. From this same 
standpoint many contemporary writers have wondered that 
English capital having grown in the last twenty years so much 
quicker than English population, wages should not have been 
more enhanced. But simultaneously with the progress of accumu- 
lation there takes place a progressive change in the composition of 
capital. That part of the aggregate capital which consists of fixed 
capital, machinery, raw materials, means of production in all 
possible forms, progressively increases as compared with the other 
part of capital, which is laid out in wages or in the purchase of 
labour. This law has been stated in a more or less accurate manner 
by Mr. Barton, Ricardo, Sismondi, Professor Richard Jones, 
Professor Ramsay, Cherbuliez, and others. 

If the proportion of these two elements of capital was originally 
one to one, it will, in the progress of industry, become five to one, 
and so forth. If of a total capital of 600, 300 is laid out in 
instruments, raw materials, and so forth, and 300 in wages, the 
total capital wants only to be doubled to create a demand for 600 
working men instead of for 300. But if of a capital of 600, 500 is 
laid out in machinery, materials, and so forth, and 100 only in 
wages, the same capital must increase from 600 to 3,600 in order 
to create a demand for 600 workmen instead of 300. In the 
progress of industry the demand for labour keeps, therefore, no 
pace with, accumulation of capital. It will still increase, but increase 
in a constantly diminishing ratio as compared with the increase of 
capital. 

These few hints will suffice to show that the very development 
of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of 
the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the 
general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to 
sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour 
more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of 
things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to 
renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, 
and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional 
chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would 
be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I 
think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages 
are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 
cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at 
maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of 
debating their price with the capitalist is inherent in their 
condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly 
giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would 
certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger 
movement. 

At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude 
involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to 
exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday 
struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with 
effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are 
retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; 
that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They 
ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoid- 
able guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing 
encroachments of capital or changes of the market. 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!”’ 

After this very long and, I fear, tedious exposition which I was 
obliged to enter into to do some justice to the subject-matter, I 
shall conclude by proposing the following resolutions: 

Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall 
of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the 
prices of commodities. 

Secondly. The general tendency of capitalist production is not to 
raise, but to sink the average standard of wages. 

Thirdly. Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance 
against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an 
injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting 
themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing 
system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of 
using their organised forees as a lever for the final emancipation 
of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the 
wages system. 

Karl Marx 

[RESOLUTION