Chapter XIX.- The Transformation of the Value (and Respectively the Price) of Labour Power into Wages
On the surface of bourgeois society the wage of the labourer appears as the price of labour, a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain quantity of labour. Thus people speak of the value of labour and call its expression in money its necessary or natural price. On the other hand they speak of the market-prices of labour, i.e., prices oscillating above or below its natural price.
But what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the social labour expended in its production. And how do we measure the quantity of this value? By the quantity of the labour contained in it. How then is the value, e. g., of a 12 hours' working day to be determined? By the 12 working hours contained in a working day of 12 hours, which is an absurd tautology.[1]'
In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labour must at all events exist before it is sold. But could the labourer give it an inde-
" "Mr. Ricardo, ingeniously enough, avoids a difficulty which, on a first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine, that value depends on the quantity oflabour employed in production. If this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows that the value of labour depends on the quantity oflabour employed in producing it — which is evidently absurd. By a dexterous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the value oflabour depend on the quantity oflabour required to produce wages; or, to give him the benefit of his own language, he maintains, that the value oflabour is to be estimated by the quantity of labour required to produce wages; by which he means the quantity of labour required to produce the money or commodities given to the labourer. This is similar to saying, that the value of cloth is estimated, not by the quantity of labour bestowed on its production, but by the quantity oflabour bestowed on the production of the silver, for which the cloth is exchanged" ([S. Bailey,] A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, &c, of Value, pp. 50, 51).
pendent objective existence, he would sell a commodity and not labour."
Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i. e., of realised labour, with living labour would either do away with the law of value which only begins to develop itself freely on the basis of capitalist production, or do away with capitalist production itself, which rests directly on wage labour. The working day of 12 hours embodies itself, e.g., in a money value of 6s. Either equivalents are exchanged, and then the labourer receives 6s., for 12 hours' labour; the price of his labour would be equal to the price of his product. In this case he produces no surplus value for the buyer of his labour, the 6s. are not transformed into capital, the basis of capitalist production vanishes. But it is on this very basis that he sells his labour and that his labour is wage labour. Or else he receives for 12 hours' labour less than 6s., i. e., less than 12 hours' labour. Twelve hours' labour are exchanged against 10, 6, &c, hours' labour. This equalisation of unequal quantities not merely does away with the determination of value. Such a self-destructive contradiction cannot be in any way even enunciated or formulated as a law.[2]'
It is of no avail to deduce the exchange of more labour against less, from their difference of form, the one being realised, the other living.[3]' This is the more absurd as the value of a commodity is determined not by the quantity of labour actually realised in it, but by the quantity of living labour necessary for its production. A commodity repre-
'' "If you call labour a commodity, it is not like a commodity which is first produced in order to exchange, and then brought to market where it must exchange with other commodities according to the respective quantities of each which there may be in the market at the time; labour is created the moment it is brought to market; nay, it is brought to market before it is created" [Observations on Certain Verbal Disputes, etc., pp. 75, 76).
[21] "Treating labour as a commodity, and capital, the produce of labour, as another, then, if the values of these two commodities were regulated by equal quantities of labour, a given amount of labour would ... exchange for that quantity of capital which had been produced by the same amount of labour; antecedent labour would ... exchange for the same amount as present labour. But the value of labour in relation to other commodities ... is determined not by equal quantities of labour" (E.G. Wakefield in his edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, vol. i, London, 1835, pp. 230-31, note).
[3] "It was necessary to agree" (a new edition of the contrat social**[9]'.) "that whenever labour already performed was exchanged for labour yet to be done, the latter" (the capitalist) "would have a higher value than the former" (the worker). Simonde (i.e., Sismondi), De la Richesse Commerciale, Genève, 1803, t. 1, p. 37.
sents, say 6 working hours. If an invention is made by which it can be produced in 3 hours, the value, even of the commodity already produced, falls by half. It represents now 3 hours of social labour instead of the 6 formerly necessary. It is the quantity of labour required for its production, not the realised form of that labour, by which the amount of the value of a commodity is determined.
That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no valued
In the expression "value of labour", the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions, arise, however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the phenomenal forms of essential relations. That in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except political economy.[2]'
Classical political economy borrowed from everyday life the category "price of labour" without further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? It soon recognised
,: "Labour the exclusive standard of value ... the creator of all wealth, no commodity." Th. Hodgskin, 1. c. [Popular Political Economy, London, 1927,] p. 186 [note].
[21] On the other hand, the attempt to explain such expressions as merely poetic li-cense only shows the impotence of the analysis. Hence, in answer to Proudhon's phrase; "Labour is said to have value not as a commodity itself, but in view of the values which it is supposed to contain potentially. The value of labour is a figurative expression", &c, I have remarked: "In labour-commodity, which is a grim reality, he" (Proudhon) "sees nothing but a grammatical ellipsis. Thus the whole of existing society, founded on labour-commodity, is henceforth founded on a poetic license, a figurative expression. If society wants to 'eliminate all the drawbacks' that assail it, well, let it eliminate all the ill-sounding terms, change the language; and to this end it has only to apply to the Academy for a new edition of its dictionary" (Karl Marx, Misère de la Philosophie, pp. 34, 35 [present edition, Vol. 6, p. 129]). It is naturally still more convenient to understand by value nothing at all. Then one can without difficulty subsume everything under this category. Thus, e. g., J.B. Say: what is "value"? Answer: "It is what a thing is worth," and what is "price"? Answer: "The value of a thing expressed in money." [4 5 0] And why has "labour on the land ... a value?" "Because a price is put upon it." [451] Therefore value is what a thing is worth, and the land has its "value", because its value is "expressed in money". This is anyhow, a very simple way of explaining the why and the wherefore of things.
that the change in the relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price of labour, as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes, i. e., the oscillations of the market-price above or below a certain mean. If demand and supply balance, the oscillation of prices ceases, all other conditions remaining the same. But then demand and supply also cease to explain anything. The price of labour, at the moment when demand and supply are in equilibrium, is its natural price, determined independently of the relation of demand and supply. And how this price is determined, is just the question. Or a larger period of oscillations in the market-price is taken, e.g., a year, and they are found to cancel one the other, leaving a mean average quantity, a relatively constant magnitude. This had naturally to be determined otherwise than by its own compensating variations. This price which always finally predominates over the accidental market-prices of labour and regulates them, this "necessary price" (Physiocrats) or "natural price" of labour (Adam Smith) can, as with all other commodities, be nothing else than its value expressed in money.[452] In this way political economy expected to penetrate athwart the accidental prices of labour, to the value of labour. As with other commodities, this value was determined by the cost of production. But what is the cost of production — of the labourer, i. e., the cost of producing or reproducing the labourer himself? This question unconsciously substituted itself in political economy for the original one; for the search after the cost of production of labour as such turned in a circle and never left the spot. What economists therefore call value of labour, is in fact the value of labour power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer, which is as different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the work it performs. Occupied with the difference between the market-price of labour and its so-called value, with the relation of this value to the rate of profit, and to the values of the commodities produced by means of labour, &c, they never discovered that the course of the analysis had led not only from the market-prices of labour to its presumed value, but had led to the resolution of this value of labour itself into the value of labour power. Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of the results of its own analysis; it accepted uncritically the categories "value of labour", "natural price of labour", &c, as final and as adequate expressions for the value relation under consideration, and was thus led, as will be seen later, into inextricable confusion and contradiction, while it offered to the vulgar economists a secure basis of operations for their shallowness, which on principle worships appearances only.
Let us next see how value (and price) of labour power, present themselves in this transformed condition as wages.
We know that the daily value of labour power is calculated upon a certain length of the labourer's life, to which, again, corresponds a certain length of working day. Assume the habitual working day as 12 hours, the daily value of labour power as 3s., the expression in money of a value that embodies 6 hours of labour. If the labourer receives 3s., then he receives the value of his labour power functioning through 12 hours. If, now, this value of a day's labour power is expressed as the value of a day's labour itself, we have the formula: Twelve hours' labour has a value of 3s. The value of labour power thus determines the value of labour, or, expressed in money, its necessary price. If, on the other hand, the price of labour power differs from its value, in like manner the price of labour differs from its so-called value.
As the value of labour is only an irrational expression for the value of labour power, it follows, of course, that the value of labour must always be less than the value it produces, for the capitalist always makes labour power work longer than is necessary for the reproduction of its own value. In the above example, the value of the labour power that functions through 12 hours is 3s., a value for the reproduction of which 6 hours are required. The value which the labour power produces is, on the other hand, 6s., because it, in fact, functions during 12 hours, and the value it produces depends, not on its own value, but on the length of time it is in action. Thus, we have a result absurd at first sight— that labour which creates a value of 6s. possesses a value of 3s."
We see, further: The value of 3s. by which a part only of the working day — i. e., 6 hours' labour — is paid for, appears as the value or price of the whole working day of 12 hours, which thus includes 6 hours unpaid for. The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. In the corvée, the labour of the worker for himself, and his com-
'! Cf. Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie, p. 40, where I state that, in the portion of that work that deals with Capital, this problem will be solved: "How does production, on the basis of exchange value determined simply by labour time, lead to the result that the exchange value of labour is less than the exchange value of its product?"
pulsory labour for his lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour, even that part of the working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, in which, therefore, in fact, he works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All the slave's labour appears as unpaid labour.[1]' In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.
Hence, we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labour power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists.
If history took a long time to get at the bottom of the mystery of wages, nothing, on the other hand, is more easy to understand than the necessity, the raison d'être, of this phenomenon.
The exchange between capital and labour at first presents itself to the mind in the same guise as the buying and selling of all other commodities. The buyer gives a certain sum of money, the seller an article of a nature different from money. The jurist's consciousness recognises in this, at most, a material difference, expressed in the juridically equivalent formulae: "Do ut des, do ut facias, facio ut des, facio ut fa-cias." [4 5 3]
Further. Exchange value and use value, being intrinsically incommensurable magnitudes, the expressions "value of labour", "price of labour", do not seem more irrational than the expressions "value of cotton", "price of cotton". Moreover, the labourer is paid after he has given his labour. In its function of means of payment, money realises subsequently the value or price of the article supplied — i. e., in this particular case, the value or price of the labour supplied. Finally, the use value supplied by the labourer to the capitalist is not, in fact,
1; The Morning Star, a London Free-trade organ, naif to silliness, protested again and again during the American Civil War,[7] with all the moral indignation of which man is capable, that the negro in the "Confederate States" worked absolutely for nothing. It should have compared the daily cost of such a negro with that of the free workman in the East End of London.
his labour power, but its function, some definite useful labour, the work of tailoring, shoemaking, spinning, &c. That this same labour is, on the other hand, the universal value-creating element, and thus possesses a property by which it differs from all other commodities, is beyond the cognisance of the ordinary mind.
Let us put ourselves in the place of the labourer who receives for 12 hours' labour, say the value produced by 6 hours' labour, say 3s. For him, in fact, his 12 hours' labour is the means of buying the 3s. The value of his labour power may vary, with the value of his usual means of subsistence, from 3 to 4 shillings, or from 3 to 2 shillings; or, if the value of his labour power remains constant, its price may, in consequence of changing relations of demand and supply, rise to 4s. or fall to 2s. He always gives 12 hours of labour. Every change in the amount of the equivalent that he receives appears to him, therefore, necessarily as a change in the value or price of his 12 hours' work. This circumstance misled Adam Smith, who treated the working day as a constant quantity,[11] to the assertion that the value of labour is constant, although the value of the means of subsistence may vary, and the same working day, therefore, may represent itself in more or less money for the labourer.
Let us consider, on the other hand, the capitalist. He wishes to receive as much labour as possible for as little money as possible. Practically, therefore, the only thing that interests him is the difference between the price of labour power and the value which its function creates. But, then, he tries to buy all commodities as cheaply as possible, and always accounts for his profit by simple cheating, by buying under, and selling over the value. Hence, he never comes to see that, if such a thing as the value of labour really existed, and he really paid this value, no capital would exist, his money would not be turned into capital.
Moreover, the actual movement of wages presents phenomena which seem to prove that not the value of labour power is paid, but the value of its function, of labour itself. We may reduce these phenomena to two great classes: (1.) Change of wages with the changing length of the working day. One might as well conclude that not the value of a machine is paid, but that of its working, because it costs more to hire a machine for a week than for a day. (2.) The individual
[1] Adam Smith only accidentally alludes to the variation of the working day when he is referring to piece wages.[454] difference in the wages of different labourers who do the same kind of work. We find this individual difference, but are not deceived by it, in the system of slavery, where, frankly and openly, without any circum-locution, labour power itself is sold. Only, in the slave system, the advantage of a labour power above the average, and the disadvantage of a labour power below the average, affects the slave-owner; in the wage-labour system it affects the labourer himself, because his labour power is, in the one case, sold by himself, in the other, by a third person.
For the rest, in respect to the phenomenal form, "value and price of labour", or "wages", as contrasted with the essential relation manifested therein, viz., the value and price of labour power, the same difference holds that holds in respect to all phenomena and their hidden substratum. The former appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought; the latter must first be discovered by science. Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however, consciously formulating it. This it cannot so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin.
Endnotes
[9] Blue-Books — periodical collections of documents of the British Parliament and Foreign Office, thus called because of the colour of the paper and the cover. The first were published in the 17th century.—10, 29, 30, 260, 498, 670
[4 5 0] J.B. Say, Traité d'économie politique..., t. II, Paris, 1817, pp. 484, 464.-537
[451] [H.] Colins, L'économie politique..., t. 3, Paris, 1857, p. 376.-537
[452] Fr. Quesnay, "Dialogues sur le commerce et sur les travaux des artisans". In: Physiocrates, Part I, Paris, 1846, p. XXXVI; A. Smith, Recherches sur la nature..., t. 1, Paris, 1802, p. 127.—538
[4 5 3] I give that you may give; I give that you may make; I make that you may give; I make that you may make. These are the four contractual formulas in Roman law. See Corpus iuris civilis, Digesta XIX, 5.5.—540
[7] The Civil War in America broke out in April 1861 and ended in April 1865. It was a war of the North against the Confederacy of the Southern States. The decisive role in the victory of the North in April 1865 was played by the workers and farmers. The international democratic public and the international working-class movement sympathised with and gave all possible support to the position of the Northern States.—9, 207, 262, 398, 540, 720, 760
[11] 1 ' The plan outlined here was not realised by Marx. The work referred to here as Book II, was published by Engels as Volume II of Capital (1885) after Marx's death, and Book III as Volume III of Capital (1894). Book IV was not published in Marx's or Engels' lifetime. See also Note 2.— 11, 565
[454] See A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature..., Vol. I, London, 1776, Ch. 8.— 541
[1] Capital—Marx's major work to which he devoted four decades (from the early 1840s till the end of his life). Marx started studying political economy at the end of 1843 in Paris. His aim was to write a treatise containing a critical analysis of political economy. As a result of his research in this field appeared such works as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, Wage Labour and Capital, Manifesto of the Communist Party and others. After an interval caused by the 1848-49 revolution, Marx continued his economic studies in London, where he lived as a refugee from August 1849. Here he studied the works of different economists, the history of economic development and the economics of his time in various countries, especially in England which was then a classic example of a capitalist country. He investigated theories of money, credit and the causes of economic crises, the history of landownership and the theory of ground rent, the socio-economic condition of the working class and questions of population, the history of technology and other problems. -By 1857 he had completed his enormous preparatory work and then proceeded to the final stage — the systématisation and generalisation of the collected material. From January 1857 to June 1858, Marx wrote a manuscript containing 50 signatures, which was, in fact, the first rough draft of Capital. In the present edition it was published in vols 28 and 29. At first Marx intended to publish his work in separate instalments, and the first instalment, as he wrote, "should form a relative whole" (see present edition, Vol. 40, p. 287), which embraces only the first section of Book I — the section consisting of 3 chapters: 1) The Commodity; 2) Money or Simple Circulation and 3) Capital. However, the final variant of the first instalment — A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy — does not contain the third chapter. Marx wrote the chapter on commodity especially. He wrote the chapter on money for "the first instalment" on the basis of the manuscript of 1857-58. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One was published in 1859 (present edition, Vol. 29). It was to be followed by "the second instalment", i. e. by the chapter on capital. However, soon afterwards, Marx had to postpone this work for a year and a half as he was occupied in writing the pamphlet Herr Vogt (present edition, Vol. 17) and in other urgent matters. Only in August 1861, did he begin work on "the second instalment". By the middle of 1863, he had written a new rough draft which was considerably longer than the manuscript of 1857-58 — 23 notebooks, having a total volume of about 200 signatures. The complete manuscript of 1861-63, which is considered to be the second rough draft of Capital, is reproduced in vols 30-34 of the present edition. Later on Marx decided to divide the theoretical part of the work on capital into 3 parts. The historico-critical section was to be the fourth and concluding part, and was to be based on the part of the 1861-63 manuscript entitled "Theories of Surplus Value". In his letter to Kugelmann dated October 13, 1866, Marx writes, "The whole work is thus divided into the following parts: Book I. The Process of Production of Capital. Book II. The Process of Circulation of Capital. Book III. Structure of the Process as a Whole. Book IV. On the History of the Theory" (see present edition, Vol. 42, p. 328). Marx also gave up his plan to publish the work in separate instalments and decided first to complete the whole work and then to publish it. Marx continued his work, concentrating mainly on those parts that were not sufficiently elaborated in the 1861-63 manuscript. He studied an enormous quantity of economic and technical literature, including books on agriculture, on credit and money and turnover. He also studied statistical material, various parliamentary documents, official reports on child labour in industry, on housing conditions of the British working class, etc. Marx then wrote a new manuscript (from August 1863 to the end of 1865), which constituted a more detailed variant of the three theoretical volumes of Capital. Only after the whole work was completed (January 1866), did Marx begin preparing it for the press, having decided, on Engels' advice, not to prepare the whole work but only Volume I of Capital. The final touches were made by Marx with great thoroughness and, in fact, became yet another recasting of Volume I of Capital as a whole. To ensure the integrity, completeness and clarity of the exposition, Marx thought it necessary to reproduce in a comparatively short form the major problems dealt with in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (published in 1859) at the beginning of Volume I of Capital—they now constitute the whole of the first part "Commodities and Money" (in the first edition which was not yet subdivided into parts the first chapter bore this title). After the publication of Volume I of Capital (September 1867), Marx continued work on it in preparation for publication in German and translation into foreign lan-guages. For the second edition (1872) he made more subdivisions and also a lot of changes in the text (see this volume, pp. 12-13), gave important instructions for the Russian edition, published in Petersburg in 1872 and the first foreign translation of Capital, once more changed the book's structure and thoroughly edited the French edition (1872-75). Marx intended to take into consideration most of the changes made in the French edition when preparing the third German edition of Volume I. At the same time, after the publication of Volume I of Capital Marx continued his work on the subsequent volumes, intending to finish the whole edition as soon as possible. However, he was unable to do so. A lot of time was taken up by his activities in the General Council of the First International, and his work was increasingly hampered by poor health. After Marx's death, Engels finished preparing the third (1883) German edition of Volume I of Capital for press, which was taken as the basis for the translation into English made by Samuel Moore and Eduard Aveling and edited by Engels (1887).— 1,311
[2] Marx is referring to the sections "Historical Notes on the Analysis of Commodities" and "Theories of the Medium of Circulation and of Money" in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One (present edition, Vol. 29, pp. 292-302, 389-417), which he later abandoned as he intended to prepare a special historico-critical concluding volume of Capital (see Note 1).— 7, 532
[3] A reference to Lassalle's work Herr Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch der ökonomische Julian, oder: Capital und Arbeit, Berlin, 1864, Drittes Kapitel: "III. Tausch, Werth und freie Concurrenz", especially p. 149.— 8
[21] The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in 1838 by the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright. Defending the interests of manufacturers, the League secured the repeal of the Corn Laws which provided for the limitation and prohibition of grain imports, which served the interests of the landed aristocracy. The Corn Law adopted in 1815 prohibited the import of corn while the price of bread in England itself remained less than 80 sh. per quarter. In 1822 this law was slightly altered, and in 1828 a sliding scale was introduced, according to which there was a rise in import duties on corn when its price fell on the home market and vice versa. Trying to achieve the repeal of corn laws and to establish trade in corn, the League aimed at reducing domestic prices for corn and thus at reducing wages for wage-workers.The slogan of free trade was widely used by the League in its advocacy of the unity of interests of workers and manufacturers. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846.'— 15, 296, 458, 462, 667, 703