Karl Marx

Wage Labour and Capital

Preliminary

From various quarters we have been reproached for neglecting to portray the
economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles
between classes and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched upon
these conditions only when they forced themselves upon the surface of the
political conflicts.

It was necessary, beyond everything else, to follow the development of the
class struggle in the history of our own day, and to prove empirically, by the
actual and daily newly created historical material, that with the subjugation
of the working class, accomplished in the days of February and March, 1848, the
opponents of that class – the bourgeois republicans in France, and the
bourgeois and peasant classes who were fighting feudal absolutism throughout
the whole continent of Europe – were simultaneously conquered; that the
victory of the "moderate republic" in France sounded at the same time the fall
of the nations which had responded to the February revolution with heroic wars
of independence; and finally that, by the victory over the revolutionary
workingmen, Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the
English-Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the
tragi-comedy in Berlin in November 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland,
Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland into submission – these
were the chief events in which the European class struggle between the
bourgeoisie and the working class was summed up, and from which we proved that
every revolutionary uprising, however remote from the class struggle its object
might appear, must of necessity fail until the revolutionary working class
shall have conquered; – that every social reform must remain a Utopia
until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic counter-revolution have
been pitted against each other in a world-wide war. In our presentation, as in
reality, Belgium and Switzerland were tragicomic caricaturish genre pictures in
the great historic tableau; the one the model State of the bourgeois monarchy,
the other the model State of the bourgeois republic; both of them, States that
flatter themselves to be just as free from the class struggle as from the
European revolution.

But now, after our readers have seen the class struggle of the year 1848
develop into colossal political proportions, it is time to examine more closely
the economic conditions themselves upon which is founded the existence of the
capitalist class and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers.

We shall present the subject in three great divisions:

The Relation of Wage-labour to Capital, the Slavery of the
Worker, the Rule of the Capitalist.

The Inevitable Ruin of the Middle Classes [petty-bourgeois]
and the so-called Commons [peasants] under the present system.

The Commercial Subjugation and Exploitation of the Bourgeois
classes of the various European nations by the Despot of the World Market
– England.

We shall seek to portray this as simply and popularly as possible, and shall
not presuppose a knowledge of even the most elementary notions of political
economy. We wish to be understood by the workers. And, moreover, there prevails
in Germany the most remarkable ignorance and confusion of ideas in regard to
the simplest economic relations, from the patented defenders of existing
conditions, down to the socialist wonder-workers and the unrecognized political
geniuses, in which divided Germany is even richer than in duodecimo
princelings. We therefore proceed to the consideration of the first problem.

What are Wages?

Wage Labour and Capital Index