fixed. We pass over the ingenuity which first assumes a capitalist 
on the one side and a worker on the other, tn order afterwards to 
derive, from the agreement between the two, the relationship 
between capital and wage labour. 

The form of association in which the worker is exposed to all 
the risks of business—in which all producers are equally exposed 
to these risks—and which immediately precedes the wage system, 
in which the remuneration of labour attains fixity and becomes 
stable, precedes it as thesis precedes antithesis—is, as Bastiat 
informs us, the state in which fishing, hunting and pastoralism are 
the dominant forms of production and society. First the nomadic 
fisherman, the hunter and the herdsman—and then the wage 
labourer. Where and when did this historical transition from the 
half-savage to the modern condition take place? If at all, in the 
columns of Charivart. 

In real history, wage labour arises from the disintegration of 
slavery and serfdom—or from the decay of communal property as 
among the Oriental and Slav peoples—and, in its adequate, 
epoch-making form affecting the entire social existence of labour, 
from the decline of the guild economy, of the feudal estates 
system, of labour services and income in kind, of industry carried 
on as a rural sideline, of small-scale feudal agriculture, etc. In all 
these really historical transitions, wage labour appears as the 
dissolution, as the destruction of relations in which labour was 
fixed in all respects, in respect of income, content, locality, scope, 
etc. Hence as negation of the fixity of labour and its remuneration. The 
direct transition from the fetish of the African to Voltaire’s étre 
supréme, or from the hunting gear of a North American savage 
to the capital of the Bank of England, is not as absurdly 
anti-historical as is Bastiat’s transition from the fisherman to the 
wage labourer. 

(In all these developments, moreover, there is no evidence of 
changes coming about as a result of voluntary mutual agreements.) 

On a level with this historical construction—in which Bastiat 
deceives himself by imagining his shallow abstraction in the 


a Supreme being.— Ed. 


14 Bastiat and Carey 


form of an event—is the synthesis in which the English rrienpiy 
societies and the savings banks are presented as the last word in 
the wage system and as the transcendence of all social contra- 
dictions. 

Historically, as we have seen, non-fixity is the character of the 
wage system: the opposite of Bastiat’s construction. But how could 
he possibly have arrived at the construction of fixity as the 
all-compensating characteristic of wages? And what prompted 
him to attempt an historical presentation of the wage system 
in this specific form as a higher form of the remuneration 
of labour, higher than that in other forms of society or asso- 
ciation? 

All the economists, whenever they discuss the prevailing 
relationship of capital and wage labour, of profit and wages, and 
wish to prove to the worker that he has no right to share in the 
opportunities of gain and in general to reconcile him to his 
subordinate role vis-a-vis the capitalist, put great stress on the fact 
that the worker, in contrast to the capitalist, enjoys a certain fixity 
of income more or less independent of the great adventures of 
capital. Just as Don Quixote comforts Sancho Panza with the 
thought that while he does indeed get all the stick, there is at least 
no need for him to be brave. In other words, Bastiat transforms a 
quality which the economists attribute to wages as opposed to 
profit, into a quality of wage labour as opposed to earlier forms of 
labour and as a progressive development from the remuneration 
of labour in these earlier relations. A commonplace put into the 
prevailing relationship which consoles one side of the relationship 
relative to the other, is taken out of this relationship by Mr. Bastiat 
and made into the historical basis of its origin. 

The economists declare that in the relationship of wages to 
profit, of wage labour to capital, wages have the advantage of 
fixity. 

Mr. Bastiat declares that fixity, i.e. one of the aspects of the 
relationship of wages to profit, is the historical foundation from 
which wage labour emerged (or that fixity is the advantage of 
wages, not as opposed to profit, but as opposed to the earlier 
forms of the remuneration of labour), hence also the historical 
foundation of profit, hence that of the whole relation. 

In this way, a commonplace concerning one aspect of the 
relationship of wages to profit is magically transformed in Bastiat’s 
treatment into the historical foundation of this entire relation. 
This happens because he is constantly preoccupied with the 
thought of socialism, which is then everywhere dreamed up as the 


Bastiat and Carey 15 


first form of association. This an example of how important a 
form the apologetic commonplaces which accompany the argu- 
ments in economic writings assume in Bastiat’s hands. 

(I1I-7] To return to the economists. In what does this fixity of 
wages consist? Are wages unalterably fixed? This would completely 
contradict the law of demand and supply, which is the basis of 
wage determination. No economist denies the fluctuation of wages, 
their rise and fall. Or are wages independent of crises? Or of the 
machines which render wage labour superfluous? Or of the 
divisions of labour which displace it? It would be heterodox to 
assert all this, and no one does so. 

What is meant is that, over a period of time, wages roughly keep 
to an average level, i.e. there is a minimum wage for the whole 
[working] class, despite Bastiat’s great detestation of the idea, and 
there is a certain average continuity of labour, e.g. wages may 
continue to be paid even in cases where profit declines or 
completely disappears for a time. Now, what does this mean other 
than that, assuming wage labour as the dominant form of labour 
and the basis of production, the working class exists by wages and 
the individual worker possesses on average the fixity of working 
for wages? In other words, a tautology. Where capital and wage 
labour is the dominant relation of production, average continuity 
of wage labour exists; to that extent there is fixity of wages for the 
worker. Where wage labour exists, it exists. And this is what 
Bastiat regards as the attribute of wage labour which compensates 
for everything else. 

To state, moreover, that in the form of society in which capital 
has developed, social production is generally more regular, more 
continuous, more varied —hence also the income of those engaged 
in production “more fixed” —than where capital, i.e. production, 
has not been developed to this level, is another tautology which is 
inherent in the very concept of capital and of production based on 
capital. In other words: who denies that the general existence 
of wage labour presupposes a higher development of the produc- 
tive forces than that which existed in the stages preceding 
wage labour? And how could it occur to the socialists to put 
forward greater demands, if they did not assume this higher 
development of the social productive forces brought about by 
wage labour? The latter is indeed the presupposition of their 
demands. 

Note. The first form in which wages generally appear is military 
pay, which emerges with the decline of national armies and civic 
militias. First the citizens themselves are paid [for military service]. 


16 Bastiat and Carey 


This is soon followed by mercenaries taking their place, who are 
no longer citizens. 

2) (It is impossible to pursue this nonsense any further. We, THEREFORE, 
prop Mr. Bastiat.) [ILI-7]