XIV. Des Salaires
Bastiat and Carey are therefore equally unhistorical and anti-historical. But the unhistorical element in Carey is the contemporary historical principle of North America, while the unhistorical element in Bastiat is only a reminiscence of the 18th-century French mode of generalisation. Carey is therefore formless and diffuse, Bastiat affected and formally logical. The utmost that Bastiat achieves are commonplaces paradoxically expressed, polished en facettes. Carey's work is prefaced by a few general theses in axiomatic form. These are followed by his unshaped material — compilation serving as verifi-cation — which is not in any way worked up to sustain his theses. In Bastiat, the only material — apart from a few local examples or some ordinary English phenomena fantastically distorted— amounts to no more than the general theses of the economists. The chief counterpart to Carey is Ricardo, in short the modern English economists; to Bastiat, the French socialists.
XIV. Des Salaires[2]
The following are Bastiat's main propositions: All men strive for fixity of income, FIXED REVENUE. ^Truly French example: (1) Everyone wants to be an official or wants his son to become an official (see p. 371).^
Wages are a fixed form of remuneration (p. 376), and thus a highly perfected form of association, in the original form of which the "aleatory element" predominates in so far as "all members of the association" are subject "to all the chances of the enterprise"[3]
[p. 380].
,^1 f capital assumes the risks by itself, the remuneration of labour becomes fixed and is called wages. If labour chooses to assume the risks for better or worse, the remuneration of capital detaches itself and becomes fixed as interest (p. 382); see further on this juxtaposition pp. 382, 383. ^
However, if originally the aleatory element predominates in the worker's condition, wage stability is not yet sufficiently secured. There is an
"intermediate stage which separates the aleatory element from stability" [p. 384].
This final stage is reached by
"saving up, in days of work, the means to satisfy one's needs in days of old age and sickness" (p. 388).
The final stage develops through the "mutual aid societies" (I.e.) and in the last instance through "the workers' pension fund"[3]
(p. 393).
(Just as man began with the desire to become an official, he ends with the satisfaction of drawing a pension.)
ad 1. Suppose everything Bastiat says about the fixity of wages is correct. Then subsuming wages under FIXED REVENUES still would not
Here and further in this paragraph Marx quotes in French.— Ed.
reveal to us the real character of wages, their characteristic determinateness. One feature of wages — one which they have in common with other sources of income — would be emphasised; nothing more. True, this would be of some use for the advocate who wished to plead the advantages of the wage system. But it would still be of no use to the economist who wanted to understand the distinctive character of this relation in its totality. Establishing a one-sided definition of a relation, of an economic form, and exalting it in opposition to the converse definition— this common ploy of advocates and apologists is the hallmark of Bastiat's reasoning.
So let us assume instead of wages: fixity of income. Is not fixity of income a good thing? Does not everyone like to be able to count on an assured income? Especially every philistine, petty-minded Frenchman? L'homme toujours besogneux?[3] Serfdom has been defended on this ground, and perhaps with greater justification.
The contrary could also be asserted and has been asserted. Let us assume that wages mean non-fixity, i.e. advancement beyond a certain point. Who does not like to get ahead instead of standing still? Can a relationship be bad which makes possible a bourgeois progressus in infinitum? Of course, Bastiat himself argues elsewhere that wages are non-fixity. How else than by non-fixity, by fluctuations, could it become possible for the worker to stop working and to become a capitalist, as Bastiat wants him to?
Therefore wages are good because they are fixity; wages are also good because they are non-fixity. They are good because they are neither the one nor the other, but at the same time are both the one and the other. What, relationship is not good, when it is reduced to a one-sided definition, which is then treated as position, not as negation? All reasoning chatter, one way or another, all apologetics, all philistine sophistry is based on this type of abstraction.
After this general preliminary consideration, we come to Bastiat's actual construction.
(Let us note in passing just one more point. His metayer(1) of Landes [p. 388], the poor fellow for whom the misfortune of the wage labourer is compounded by the bad luck of the small capitalist, might indeed consider himself fortunate if he were put on fixed wages.)
Proudhon's histoire descriptive and philosophique[4] does not attain the level of that of his opponent Bastiat. The original form of association, in which all associés share in all the risks of chance, is succeeded by a higher [III-6] form of association freely entered into by both sides, in which the remuneration of the worker is fixed. We pass over the ingenuity which first assumes a capitalist on the one side and a worker on the other, in 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 Charivari.
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 être suprême?[5] 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 form of an event — is the synthesis in which the English FRIENDLY SOCIETIES and the savings banks are presented as the last word in the wage system and as the transcendence of all social contradictions.
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 association?
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-à-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 first form of association. This an example of how important a form the apologetic commonplaces which accompany the arguments in economic writings assume in Bastiat's hands.
[III-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 productive 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].
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, DROP MR. BASTIAT.) [III-7]
Endnotes
[2] This refers to Chapter XIV in the second edition of Bastiat's book Harmonies économiques (there are 25 chapters in that edition). Since this section of the draft "Bastiat and Carey" begins on page 5 of the manuscript, while half of page 4 was left blank, it may be assumed that Marx originally intended to discuss Bastiat's book in greater detail, giving, in particular, an account of the preceding 13 chapters.—11
[4] Marx means the philosophical and historical constructions in Proudhon's book Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (Paris, 1846). In 1847 Marx attacked them in The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the "Philosophy of Poverty" by M. Proudhon (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 105-212, particularly pp. 111-15 and 157-60).—13
[5] The "supreme being" {être suprême) was Voltaire's designation of God, whom he, in contrast to the positive religions, described as an impersonal rational creator, who, having, laid down the laws of the world and given it an initial impulse, has refrained from any further intervention in the natural course of events.—13
[3] According to Bastiat, "the workers' pension fund" was to be made up of contributions by the workers themselves, for thus alone the necessary degree of "stability" could be ensured (Fr. Bastiat, Harmonies économiques, 2nd edition, Paris, 1851, p. 395).—11