[ B] Additions
I. Aktinson
[ B] Additions
I. ATKINSON3
1. Hand-loom weavers** (working 15 hours per day). (Half a million of them.) 221
"Their distress a ... an inevitable condition of a species of labour easily learned, and constantly intruded on and superseded by cheaper means of production. A very short cessation of demand, where the competition for work is so great..., produces a crisis. ...improvements, which, by superseding manual labour more and more, infallibly bring with them in the transition much of temporary suffering. Example of the hand-loom cotton weavers of the Dacca district of India; either starved or were thrown back into agricultural labour by the competition of English machinery." (Excerpt from the speech of Dr. Bowring in the House of Commons, July 1835.)b
(This example on the passing from one trade to another to be used in respect of the debate on free trade.[222])
2. Something to be said on population theory. 3. Influence of changed and expanded division of labour on the fixing of wages.
Il. Carlyle
1. Not only the quantity of wages[3] is to be considered. They vary in quality, depending on the play of circumstances.
2. The advantage of wages: that from now on necessity, interest, haggling, alone link the worker to the employer. No longer anything patriarchal, as in the Middle Ages.
Poor laws, extirpation of vermin, chargeable labourers.[223]
3. The greater part of labour is not skilled labour.[3]
4. The entire theory of Malthus and the economists amounts to saying that it lies with the workers to reduce the demand by not making any children.
III. M'Culloch
"The wages earned by the labourer are. only the common and ordinary rate of profit to the proprietors of the machine called man, thereto [dazu]e a sum to replace the wear and tear of the machines, or, which is the same thing, to supply the place of the old and decayed labourers with new ones" fp. 319J.f
IV. John Wade(1)
1. "If the object sought be to render an operative a machine, whereby the greatest quantity of work in a given occupation may be extracted from him, no way so effective as division of labour" [p. 125].
2. A reduction of wages drives the workers either to reduce their spending or to increase their productivity, in factories operated by machines, for instance (and in general), by working longer hours; or, with handicraftsmen, hand-loom weavers, etc., by working harder in the same hour. But since their wages have been reduced precisely because the demand has slackened, they thereby increase the supply at the unfavourable moment. The consequence is that their wages drop still lower, and then the bourgeois come along and say "If the people would only work".
3. Altogether, the general law is that there cannot be two market prices, and that the lower market price prevails (given equal quality).
Take 1,000 workers of equal skill; 50 are without work; the price is then determined not by the 950 who are employed but by the 50 who are unemployed.
But this law of the market price weighs more heavily on the commodity labour than on other commodities, because the worker cannot lay up his commodity in store but must sell his life activity or, deprived of the means of subsistence, must die.
The saleable commodity labour differs from other commodities in particular by its evanescent nature, by the impossibility of accumulating it, and by the fact that the supply cannot be increased or reduced with the same facility as with other products.
4. The humanity of the capitalists consists in buying as much labour as possible at the cheapest price. Agricultural labourers earn more in summer than in winter, although in winter they need more food, fuel and warmer clothing.
5. The abolition of Sunday, for example, would be a sheer loss to the workers. The masters seek to reduce wages by leaving them nominally the same but making the workers work a quarter of an hour more, for example, shortening meal times, etc.
6. Wages affected by fashions, the changing seasons, and commercial fluctuations.224
7. If the worker, supplanted by the machine, goes into another industry, that is as a rule a worse one. He never gets back into his former position.
V. Babbage
The machine and the division of labour replace dear by cheap labour.
One has suggested to the workers:
1) savings banks; 2) to learn all possible trades (so that when there is a surplus of workers in one industry the same occurs at once in all industries).
8. In times of stagnation: a) cessation of work; b) reduction of wages; c) the same wage, but employment for fewer days in the week.[225]
9. Concerning the combinations of trade,3 it is to be remarked:
1. The expenses of the workers (the costs). Invention of machines in consequence of the combinations. Other division of labour. Depression of wages. Deplacementb of factories to other localities.
2. If they were all to succeed in keeping wages so high that profits were significantly reduced below the average profits of other countries, or so that capital would grow more slowly, the industry of a country would be ruined, and the workers together with the masters even more so.
Although a reduction in taxes does not benefit the workers, a rise in taxation, on the other hand, harms them. The good thing in the rise in taxation in countries with a developed bourgeoisie is that the estate of small farmers and proprietors (craftsmen, etc.) is thereby ruined and thrown into the working class.
Influence of the Irish in England, the Germans in Alsace, on wages.
V. CABBAGE'
Truck system.?[26]
VI. Andrew Ure ,
General principle of modern industry: to replace adults by children, skilled workers by unskilled, men by women.
Equalisation of wages: Main feature of modern industry [see pp. 34, 35].
VII. Rossi
Mr. Rossi thinks: The manufacturer only advances to the worker his share in the product because the latter cannot wait for its sale. This is a speculation which has no direct bearing on the production process. If the worker can maintain himself until the product is sold he will, as an associé, claim his share in it afterwards.
Hence, wages are not a constituent element of the product as are capital and the land. They are a mere accident, a form of our social condition. Wages do not belong to capital.
Wages are not a factor indispensable to production. In a different organisation of labour they may disappear [see pp. 369, 370].
[ VIII]. Cherbuliez
1. "...The increase of the productive capital does not necessarily entail an increase of the approvisionnement for the workers. Raw materials and machinery can be increased while approvisionnement is reduced.
"The price of labour depends on a) the absolute quantity of the productive capital; b) on the proportions of the various elements of capital, two social facts on which the will of the workers cannot exert any influence.
2. "It is not so much the absolute consumption of the worker as his relative consumption which makes his position either happy or unhappy. Beyond the necessary consumption ... the value of what we enjoy is essentially relative" [pp. 103-04, 105, 109].
When one speaks of the fall or rise of wages one must never lose sight of the whole world market or of the position of the workers in the various countries.
Egalitarian and other attempts to fix wages justly.
The minimum wage itself changes and constantly falls. Example of spirits.
[ lX]. Bray. Savings Banks
Triple machine in the hands of despotism and capital. 1. The money flows back into the national bank, which makes profits by lending it back to the capitalists.
2. The golden chain by which the government holds a large part of the working class.
3. By this means a new weapon is given into the hands of the capitalists as such [pp. 152, 153].
Once wages have fallen, they never rise to their previous height; absolute and relative wages.
Endnotes
[222] An excerpt from Bowring's speech in the House of Commons was used by Marx in his "Speech on the Question of Free Trade" (see this volume, pp. 460-61). p. 416
[223] Marx had in mind Carlyle's words about the English Poor Laws: "If paupers are made miserable, paupers will needs decline in multitude. It is a secret known to all rat-catchers: stop up the granary-crevices, afflict with continual mewing, alarm, and going off of traps, your 'chargeable labourers' disappear, and cease from the establishment. A still briefer method is that of arsenic; perhaps even a milder..." (Th. Carlyle, Chartism, p. 17). The words "chargeable labourers" are in English in the manuscript.
[225] The reference is to piece-rate wages (see J. Wade, op. cit., p. 267).
[26] The Fundamental Federative Act (Bundesakte) — a part of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna held by European monarchs and their ministers in 1814-15, which established the political organisation of Europe after the Napoleonic wars. This Act was signed on June 8, 1815 and proclaimed a German Confederation consisting initially of 34 independent states and four free cities. The Act virtually sanctioned the political dismemberment of Germany and the maintenance of the monarchical-estate system in the German states. From 1815 to 1866 the central organ of the German Confederation was the Federal Diet consisting of representatives of the German states. The promise to introduce constitutions in all the states of the German Confederation, which was stated in Article 13 of the Bundesakte, was never fulfilled. Article 18 of the Act, which vaguely mentioned a forthcoming drafting of uniform instructions providing for "freedom of the press" in the states of the German Confederation, also remained on paper.
[3] The Jacobin revolutionary government headed by Robespierre fell as a result of the coup of 9-10 Thermidor (July 27-28), 1794. 5 8 12 ing an armed uprising of the plebeian masses against the bourgeois regime of the Directory and establishing a revolutionary dictatorship as a transitional stage to "pure democracy" and "egalitarian communism". The conspiracy was disclosed in May 1796. At the end of May 1797 its leaders were executed.