Wage Labour and Capital¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: Wage Labour and Capital¶
Engels’s 1891 edition of Marx’s 1849 pamphlet is no mere reprint; it is a theoretical correction. The central revision—replacing ‘labour’ with ‘labour-power’—resolves a contradiction that had stumped classical political economy. Borrowing from industrial practice, the classical economists treated the worker as selling labour. This led to an absurd circularity: if labour creates value and is itself a commodity, its value must be determined by the labour embodied in it. Economists could only escape by substituting the cost of producing the labourer for the cost of producing labour. Engels demonstrates the solution with a worked example: the worker receives 3 shillings for 12 hours’ work but creates 6 shillings of new value. The capitalist pockets the surplus. This contradiction dissolves only when we recognise that the worker sells labour-power, not labour. Labour-power is a peculiar commodity: it produces more value than it costs. The worker labours part of the day to reproduce his wages, and the rest unpaid for the capitalist. This surplus value, increasing with technical progress, is the basis of capitalist society.
Wages, then, are not a share of the worker’s product but the price of labour-power, a commodity sold by the free worker to the capitalist by fractions. Labour-power becomes a commodity only under capitalism: the slave is himself a commodity, the serf pays tribute, but the free worker sells himself piecemeal to the capitalist class. Wages follow the same laws as any commodity’s price, determined by competition between buyers and sellers. The ultimate regulator is the cost of production: the cost of maintaining and training the worker, including propagation to replace worn-out workers, calculated like machine wear. This sets a minimum wage for the working class as a whole, not for individuals.
Capital is not a thing but a social relation of production specific to bourgeois society. It is accumulated labour that becomes an independent social power only by exchanging with living labour-power. Wage-labour and capital mutually presuppose each other. The claimed identity of interests means only that they are two sides of the same relation. In reality, wages and profit are inverse proportions: as one rises, the other falls. Even when real wages rise, relative wages—labour’s share of newly created value versus capital’s share—may fall if profit rises faster. Social pleasures are relative: a worker’s improved condition can feel like deterioration if the capitalist’s luxury grows more.
The interests of capital and wage-labour are diametrically opposed. Rapid growth of capital means rapid growth of profit, requiring relative wages to fall. The most favourable condition for wage-labour—fastest growth of productive capital—merely means the worker forges the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it. Growth of productive capital increases competition among capitalists, forcing greater division of labour and machinery. This cheapens production but forces ever greater output at lower prices. Greater division of labour increases competition among workers, simplifies labour, and makes special skill worthless. Machinery supplants skilled with unskilled labour, men with women, adults with children, and periodically throws workers out of employment. Capitalist competition is won less by recruiting than by discharging workers.
The capitalists’ claim that displaced workers find new employment is a lie: the same workers do not find jobs, only new generations enter different branches. Even if new employment is found, it pays worse wages, since modern industry replaces complex labour with simpler, subordinate roles. Where one man was dismissed, a factory may employ three children and one woman, using up four times as many workers’ lives for one family’s subsistence. The working class is further swollen by ruined small manufacturers and rentiers. Capitalists, compelled to expand production and credit, trigger more frequent and violent crises, in which capital sacrifices masses of workers. Rapid capital growth is the most favourable condition for wage-labour, yet it makes competition among workers grow even more rapidly.