In our series of revolutionary pamphlets we look at Marx's Wage Labour and Capital.
This little pamphlet first appeared as a series of articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the paper Karl Marx edited in Germany in 1848 and 1849, when revolution swept Europe. The articles are based on lectures Marx had given while in exile in Brussels in 1847 which he planned to write up. But in February 1848 revolution broke out in France and Marx was expelled from Belgium, so having to abandon the project.
In the pamphlet he set out to show why the two classes that had fought together in the revolution against the old feudal order the bourgeoisie and the working class had fundamentally opposed interests.
Marx's starting point was wages, the sum of money we get when we sell our capacity to work, our labour power, to the boss. Under capitalism labour power is a commodity like any other. Yet it is a very peculiar one. It comes attached to human beings who find little if any satisfaction in their work and whose 'real' life, stunted though it is, begins outside work at home or in leisure activities.
Another peculiarity is that we do not sell ourselves once and for all (like slaves). We sell the boss part of our time which is why the wage bargain looks like a contract between freely consenting adults.
However, this freedom conceals a different kind of slavery. We have no choice but to sell our labour power to the boss class, unless we are prepared to rot on the dole and often we don't even have that 'choice'.
Furthermore, the wages we receive do not begin to represent the full value of what we produce for the boss. What determines the value of every commodity is the amount of socially necessary labour required to produce it. The value of wages is calculated in exactly the same way. It equals the amount of labour time needed to produce what it takes to keep us and our children alive. But we work several more hours a day. The value of what we produce in these extra hours is appropriated by the boss as his property.
So the apparently equal bargain of wages being exchanged for a given quantity of work turns out to be a totally unequal bargain: wages are the means whereby the boss makes workers work for nothing for most of the time.
This was the basis of Marx's argument as to why boss and worker do not share a common interest. The inevitability of conflict between the two is matched by the system that is also inevitably prone to conflict.
This runs counter to conventional wisdom. The defenders of the system claim that the market always brings discrepancies between supply and demand into equilibrium. If commodities are in short supply, prices rise and other capitalists rush in to meet demand (and make a profit). Eventually prices fall. If the market becomes glutted and prices then fall below what the commodities cost to produce, capitalists move into sectors where they can make a profit and the whole cycle begins again.
Wages, too, have to obey the market: any attempt to keep wages 'artificially' high will only lead to the costs of production being too high and workers pricing themselves out of a job.
Yet, as Marx pointed out, these fluctuations show the fundamentally anarchic nature of the system, not its harmoniousness. 'Like earthquakes, they cause bourgeois society to tremble to its foundations', and have produced in the last 150 years mass unemployment, famine, wars and ecological disaster.
The tendency of capitalism, he argues, is to drive wages down to a minimum. Some have objected that this must be false: a worker today, with a mortgage, car and holiday in Spain, is not living on the poverty wages of Marx's day.
Marx does not deny that wages can rise. He makes the point that when capital grows so do wages. But the wealth of capital grows incomparably greater than the wealth of workers. So the tendency to keep wages to a minimum is relative to what is produced.
And in modern capitalism, the costs of reproduction are much higher than they were in Marx's time. Workers need to travel to work, to stay healthy, to remain literate.
The more workers sell their labour power, the more the power of capital grows at the expense of the workers, even if wages increase. Compared with the resources that can send human beings into space or multibillionaires whose wealth outstrips that of half the world, wages today are as much a minimum as they ever were.
The conclusion is obvious: only when workers take control of the means of production can they begin to live other than in the cramped conditions to which capitalism condemns them.
Unfinished though this pamphlet is, there exists no better or clearer introduction to Marx's economic ideas. The commitment to the struggle our struggle shines through every page he wrote.