The following work appeared as a series of leading articles in 
the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from April 4, 1849 onwards. It is 
based on the lectures delivered by Marx in 1847 at the German 
Workers’ Society in Brussels.‘ The work as printed remained a 
fragment; the words at the end of No. 269: “To be continued,” 
remained unfulfilled in consequence of the events which just then 
came crowding one after another: the invasion of Hungary by the 
Russians, the insurrections in Dresden, Iserlohn, Elberfeld, the 
Palatinate and Baden,'”! which led to the suppression of the 
newspaper itself (May 19, 1849). The manuscript of the continua- 
tion was not found among Marx’s papers after his death.'” 

Wage Labour and Capital has appeared in a number of editions 
as a separate publication in pamphlet form, the last being in 1884, 
by the Swiss Co-operative Press, Hottingen-Zurich. The editions 
hitherto published retained the exact wording of the original. The 
present new edition, however, is to be circulated in not less than 
10,000 copies as a propaganda pamphlet, and so the question 
could not but force itself upon me whether under these 
circumstances Marx himself would have approved of an unaltered 
reproduction of the original. 

In the forties, Marx had not yet finished his critique of political 
economy. This took place only towards the end of the fifties. 
Consequently, his works which appeared before the first part of 
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)? differ in 
some points from those written after 1859, and contain expres- 
sions and whole sentences which, from the point of view of the 
later works, appear unfortunate and even incorrect. Now, it is 
self-evident that in ordinary editions intended for the general 
public this earlier point of view also has its place, as a part of the 
intellectual development of the author, and that both author and 
public have an indisputable right to the unaltered reproduction of 
these older works. And I should not have dreamed of altering a 
word of them. 

It is another thing when the new edition is intended practically 
exclusively for propaganda among workers. In such a case Marx 
would certainly have brought the old presentation dating from 
1849 into harmony with his new point of view. And I feel certain 
of acting as he would have done in undertaking for this edition the 
few alterations and additions which are required in order to attain 
this object in all essential points. I therefore tell the reader 
beforehand: this is not the pamphlet as Marx wrote it in 1849 but 
approximately as he would have written it in 1891. The actual 
text, moreover, is circulated in so many copies that this will suffice 
until I am able to reprint it again, unaltered, in a later complete 
edition. 

My alterations all turn on one point. According to the original, 
the worker sells his labour to the capitalist for wages; according to 
the present text he sells his labour power. And for this alteration I 
owe an explanation. I owe it to the workers in order that they may 
see it is not a case here of mere juggling with words, but rather of 
one of the most important points in the whole of political 
economy. I owe it to the bourgeois, so that they can convince 
themselves how vastly superior the uneducated workers, for whom 
one can easily make comprehensible the most difficult economic 
analyses, are to our supercilious “educated people” to whom such 
intricate questions remain insoluble their whole life long. 

Classical political economy took over from industrial practice the 
current conception of the manufacturer, that he buys and pays for 
the labour of his workers. This conception had been quite 
adequate for the business needs, the book-keeping and _ price 
calculations of the manufacturer. But, naively transferred to 
political economy, it produced there really wondrous errors and 
confusions. 

Political economy observes the fact that the prices of all 
commodities, among them also the price of the commodity that it 
calls “labour”, are continually changing; that they rise and fall as 
the result of the most varied circumstances, which often bear no 
relation whatever to the production of the commodities them- 
selves, so that prices seem, as a rule, to be determined by pure 
chance. As soon, then, as political economy made its appearance as 
a science, one of its first tasks was to seek the law which was 
concealed behind this chance apparently governing the prices of 
commodities, and which, in reality, governed this very chance. 
Within the prices of commodities, continually fluctuating and 

oscillating, now upwards and now downwards, political economy 
sought for the firm central point around which these fluctuations 
and oscillations turned. In a word, it started from the prices of 
commodities in order to look for the value of the commodities as 
the law controlling prices, the value by which all fluctuations in 
price are to be explained and to which finally they are all to be 
ascribed. 

Classical political economy then found that the value of a 
commodity is determined by the labour contained in it, requisite 
for its production. With this explanation it contented itself. And 
we also can pause here for the time being. I will only remind the 
reader, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that this explanation 
has nowadays become totally inadequate. Marx was the first 
thoroughly to investigate the value-creating quality of labour and he 
discovered in so doing that not all labour apparently, or even 
really, necessary for the production of a commodity adds to it 
under all circumstances a magnitude of value which corresponds 
to the quantity of labour expended. If therefore today we say 
offhandedly with economists like Ricardo that the value of a 
commodity is determined by the labour necessary for its produc- 
tion, we always in so doing imply the reservations made by Marx. 
This suffices here; more is to be found in Marx’s A Contribution to 
the Critique of Political Economy, 1859, and the first volume of 
Capital.’ 

But as soon as the economists applied this determination of 
value by labour to the commodity “labour”, they fell into one 
contradiction after another. How is the value of “labour” 
determined? By the necessary labour contained in it. But how 
much labour is contained in the labour of a worker for a day, a 
week, a month, a year? The labour of a day, a week, a month, a 
year. If labour is the measure of all values, then indeed we can 
express the “value of labour” only in labour. But we know 
absolutely nothing about the value of an hour of labour, if we only 
know that it is equal to an hour of labour. This brings us not a 
hair’s breadth nearer the goal; we keep on moving in a circle. 

Classical political economy, therefore, tried another tack. It said: 
The value of a commodity is equal to its cost of production. But 
what is the cost of production of labour? In order to answer this 
question, the economists have to tamper a little with logic. Instead 
of investigating the cost of production of labour itself, which 
unfortunately cannot be ascertained, they proceed to investigate 
the cost of production of the worker. And this can be ascertained. 
It varies with time and circumstance, but for a given state of 
society, a given locality and a given branch of production, it too is 
given, at least within fairly narrow limits. We live today under the 
domination of capitalist production, in which a large, ever- 
increasing class of the population can live only if it works for the 
owners of the means of production—the tools, machines, raw 
materials and means of subsistence—in return for wages. On the 
basis of this mode of production, the cost of production of the 
worker consists of that quantity of the means of subsistence—or 
their price in money—which, on the average, is necessary to make 
him capable of working, keep him capable of working, and to 
replace him, after his departure by reason of old age, sickness or 
death, with a new worker—that is to say, to propagate the 
working class in the necessary numbers. Let us assume that the 
money price of these means of subsistence averages three marks a 
day. 

Our worker, therefore, receives a wage of three marks a day 
from the capitalist who employs him. For this, the capitalist makes 
him work, say, twelve hours a day, calculating roughly as follows: 

Let us assume that our worker—a machinist—has to make a 
part of a machine which he can complete in one day. The raw 
material—iron and brass in the necessary previously prepared 
form—costs twenty marks. The consumption of coal by the steam 
engine, and the wear and tear of this same engine, of the lathe 
and the other tools which our worker uses represent for one day, 
and reckoned by his share of their use, a value of one mark. The 
wage for one day, according to our assumption, is three marks. 
This makes twenty-four marks in all for our machine part. But the 
capitalist calculates that he will obtain, on an average, twenty-seven 
marks from his customers in return, or three marks more than his 
outlay. 

Whence came the three marks pocketed by the capitalist? 
According to the assertion of classical political economy, com- 
modities are, on the average, sold at their values, that is, at prices 
corresponding to the amount of necessary labour contained in 
them. The average price of our machine part—twenty-seven 
marks—would thus be equal to its value, that is, equal to the 
labour embodied in it. But of these twenty-seven marks, twenty- 
one marks were values already present before our machinist began 
work. Twenty marks were contained in the raw materials, one 
mark in the coal consumed during the work, or in the machines 
and tools which were used in the process and which were 
diminished in their efficiency to the value of this sum. There 
remain six marks which have been added to the value of the raw 
material. But according to the assumption of our economists 
themselves, these six marks can only arise from the labour added 
to the raw material by our worker. His twelve hours’ labour has 
thus created a new value of six marks. The value of his twelve 
hours’ labour would, therefore, be equal to six marks. And thus 
we would at last have discovered what the “value of labour’’ is. 

“Hold on there!” cries our machinist. “Six marks? But I have 
received only three marks! My capitalist swears by all that is holy 
that the value of my twelve hours’ labour is only three marks, and 
if I demand six he laughs at me. How do you make that out?” 

If previously we got into a vicious circle with our value of 
labour, we are now properly caught in an insoluble contradiction. 
We looked for the value of labour and we have found more than 
we can use. For the worker, the value of the twelve hours’ labour 
is three marks, for the capitalist it is six marks, of which he pays 
three to the worker as wages and pockets three for himself. Thus 
labour would have not one but two values and very different 
values into the bargain! 

The contradiction becomes still more absurd as soon as we 
reduce to labour time the values expressed in money. During the 
twelve hours’ labour a new value of six marks is created. Hence, in 
six hours three marks—the sum which the worker receives for 
twelve hours’ labour. For twelve hours’ labour the worker receives 
as an equivalent value the product of six hours’ labour. Either, 
therefore, labour has two values, of which one is double the size of 
the other, or twelve equals six! In both cases we get pure 
nonsense. 

Turn and twist as we will, we cannot get out of this 
contradiction, as long as we speak of the purchase and sale of 
labour and of the value of labour. And this also happened to the 
economists. The last offshoot of classical political economy, the 
Ricardian school, was wrecked mainly by the insolubility of this 
contradiction. Classical political economy had got into a blind alley. 
The man who found the way out of this blind alley was Karl 
Marx. 

What the economists had regarded as the cost of production of 
“labour” was the cost of production not of labour but of the living 
worker himself. And what this worker sold to the capitalist was not 
his labour. “As soon as his labour actually begins,” says Marx, “it 
has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be 
sold by him.” * At the most, he might sell his future labour, that is, 
undertake to perform a certain amount of work in a definite time. 
In so doing, however, he does not sell labour (which would first 
have to be performed) but puts his labour power at the disposal of 
the capitalist for a definite time (in the case of time-work) or for 
the purpose of a definite output (in the case of piece-work) in 
return for a definite payment: he hires out, or sells, his labour 
power. But this labour power is intergrown with his person and is 
inseparable from it. Its cost of production, therefore, coincides 
with his cost of production; what the economists called the cost of 
production of labour is really the cost of production of the worker 
and therewith of his labour power. And so we can go back from 
the cost of production of labour power to the value of labour 
power and determine the amount of socially necessary labour 
requisite for the production of labour power of a particular 
quality, as Marx has done in the chapter on the buying and selling 
of labour power (Capital, Vol. I, Chapter IV, Section 3).° 

Now what happens after the worker has sold his labour power 
to the capitalist, that is, placed it at the disposal of the latter in 
return for a wage—day wage or piece wage—agreed upon 
beforehand? The capitalist takes the worker into his workshop or 
factory, where all the things necessary for work—raw materials, 
auxiliary materials (coal, dyes, etc.), tools, machines—are already 
to be found. Here the worker begins to drudge. His daily wage 
may be, as above, three marks—and in this connection it does not 
make any difference whether he earns it as day wage or piece 
wage. Here also we again assume that in the twelve hours the 
worker by his labour adds a new value of six marks to the raw 
materials used up, which new value the capitalist realises on the 
sale of the finished piece of work. Out of this he pays the worker 
his three marks; the other three marks he keeps for himself. If, 
now, the worker creates a value of six marks in twelve hours, then 
in six hours he creates a value of three marks. He has, therefore, 
already repaid the capitalist the counter-value of the three marks 
contained in his wages when he has worked six hours for him. 
After six hours’ labour they are both quits, neither owes the other 
a pfennig. 

“Hold on there!” the capitalist now cries. “I have hired the 
worker for a whole day, for twelve hours. Six hours, however, are 
only half a day. So go right on working until the other six hours 
are up—only then shall we be quits!”” And, in fact, the worker has 
to comply with his contract “voluntarily” entered into, according 
to which he has pledged himself to work twelve whole hours for a 
labour product which costs six hours of labour. 

It is just the same with piece wages. Let us assume that our 
worker makes twelve items of a commodity in twelve hours. Each 
of these costs two marks in raw materials and depreciation and is 
sold at two and a half marks. Then the capitalist, on the same 
assumptions as before, will give the worker twenty-five pfennigs 
per item; that makes three marks for twelve items, to earn which 
the worker needs twelve hours. The capitalist receives thirty marks 
for the twelve items; deduct twenty-four marks for raw materials 
and depreciation and there remain six marks, of which he pays 
three marks to the worker in wages and pockets three marks. It is 
just as above. Here, too, the worker works six hours for himself, 
that is, for replacement of his wages (half an hour in each of the 
twelve hours) and six hours for the capitalist. 

The difficulty over which the best economists came to grief, so 
long as they started out from the value of “labour”, vanishes as 
soon as we start out from the value of “labour power” instead. In 
our present-day capitalist society, labour power is a commodity, a 
commodity like any other, and yet quite a peculiar commodity. It 
has, namely, the peculiar property of being a value-creating 
power, a source of value and, indeed, with suitable treatment, a 
source of more value than it itself possesses. With the present state 
of production, human labour power not only produces in one day 
a greater value than it itself possesses and costs; with every new 
scientific discovery, with every new technical invention, this 
surplus of its daily product over its daily cost increases, and 
therefore that portion of the labour day in which the worker 
works to produce the replacement of his day’s wage decreases; 
consequently, on the other hand, that portion of the labour day in 
which he has to make a present of his labour to the capitalist 
without being paid for it increases. 

And this is the economic constitution of the whole of our 
present-day society: it is the working class alone which produces all 
values. For value is only another expression for labour, that 
expression whereby in our present-day capitalist society is desig- 
nated the amount of socially necessary labour contained in a 
particular commodity. These values produced by the workers do 
not, however, belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of 
the raw materials, machines, tools and the reserve funds which 
allow these owners to buy the labour power of the working class. 
From the whole mass of products produced by it, the working 
class, therefore, receives back only a part for itself. And as we 
have just seen, the other part, which the capitalist class keeps for 
itself and at most has to divide with the class of landowners, 
becomes larger with every new discovery and invention, while the 
part falling to the share of the working class (reckoned per head) 
either increases only very slowly and inconsiderably or not at all, 
and under certain circumstances may even fall. 

But these discoveries and inventions which supersede each other 
at an ever-increasing rate, this productivity of human labour which 
rises day by day to an extent previously unheard of, finally give 
rise to a conflict in which the present-day capitalist economy must 
perish. On the one hand are immeasurable riches and a 
superfluity of products which the purchasers cannot cope with; on 
the other hand, the great mass of society proletarianised, turned 
into wage-workers, and precisely for that reason made incapable 
of appropriating for themselves this superfluity of products. The 
division of society into a small, excessively rich class and a large, 
propertyless class of wage-workers results in a society suffocating 
from its own superfluity, while the great majority of its members 
is scarcely, or even not at all, protected from extreme want. This 
state of affairs becomes daily more absurd and—more unneces- 
sary. It must be abolished, it can be abolished. A new social order 
is possible in which the present class differences will have 
disappeared and in which—perhaps after a short transitional 
period involving some privation, but at any rate of great value 
morally—through the planned utilisation and extension of the 
already existing enormous productive forces of all members of 
society, and with uniform obligation to work, the means for 
existence, for enjoying life, for the development and employment 
of all bodily and mental faculties will be available in an equal 
measure and in ever-increasing fulness. And that the workers are 
becoming more and more determined to win this new social order 
will be demonstrated on both sides of the ocean by May the First, 
tomorrow, and by Sunday, May 3.'” 

London, April 30, 1891 
Frederick Engels