Explained already:
1. Wages = price of the commodity. Hence, generally speaking, wages are determined in the same way as prices.
Human activity=commodity. Manifestation of life, life activity, appears as mere means; existence divorced from this activity as purpose.
2. As commodity wages depend on competition, demand and supply.
3. The supply itself depends on the cost of production, i.e., on the labour time required for the production of a commodity.
4. Inverse proportion of profits and wages. Opposition of the two classes whose economic existence are profits and wages.[220]
5. Fight for increase or reduction of wages. Workers' associations. 6. Average or normal price of labour; the minimum is valid only for the class of workers, not for the individual. Combinations of workers to maintain wages.
7. Influence on wages of the removal of taxes, protective tariffs, reduction of armies, etc. The minimum is given on average as = the price of the necessary means of subsistence.
[B]
Endnotes
[219] In the latter half of December 1847 Marx delivered several lectures on political economy in the German Workers' Society in Brussels and intended to prepare them for publication in pamphlet form. However, as he later pointed out in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), he did not manage to publish his work Wage-Labour, written on the basis of these lectures, because of the February 1848 revolution and his subsequent expulsion from Belgium. Marx's intention to publish these lectures in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung did not materialise either, though on January 6, 1848 the newspaper carried the following note: "At one of the previous meetings of the German Workers' Society Karl Marx made a report on an important subject, 'What Are Wages?' in which the question was presented so clearly, pertinently and comprehensibly, the present situation so sharply criticised and practical arguments cited that we intend soon to make it known to our readers." Marx's lectures appeared in their final form only in April 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as the series of articles Wage-Labour and Capital (see present edition, Vol. 9). This series was not finished and did not embrace the whole content of Marx's lectures. Published below is a draft outline of the concluding lectures which Marx had no time to prepare for the press. The manuscript, whose cover bears the words: "Brussels, December 1847", completes Wage-Labour and Capital. The quotations cited in the original in German are either a free translation or paraphrase of writings by various economists and are taken by Marx, as a rule, from his notebooks of 1845-47. For the use of terms "commodity labour", "value of labour" and "price of labour", see Note 70.
[220] The first four points refer to those of Marx's lectures which were published in the articles entitled Wage-Labour and Capital.