I.1. Wages

[I] Wages are determined by the hostile struggle between capitalist and worker. Victory necessarily goes to the capitalist. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker without him. Combination among the capitalists is customary and effective; combination among the workers is forbidden and has bad consequences for them. Besides, the landowner and the capitalist can add industrial advantages to their revenues, while the worker can add neither ground-rent nor interest on capital to his industrial income. Hence the competition among the workers is so great. So for the worker alone the separation of capital, landed property and labour is a necessary, essential and harmful separation. Capital and landed property need not remain within this abstraction; but the labour of the worker must.

For the worker, then, the separation of capital, ground-rent and labour is fatal.

The lowest and the only necessary rate for wages is the subsistence of the worker during work, and as much more as will enable him to support a family so that the race of workers does not die out. According to Smith the ordinary wage is the lowest compatible with common humanity, that is, with a brutish existence.

The demand for men necessarily regulates the production of men, as of any other commodity. If the supply is much greater than the demand, a part of the workers sinks into beggary or starvation. The existence of the worker is thus reduced to the condition of existence of any other commodity. The worker has become a commodity, and it is a stroke of luck for him if he can find a buyer. And the demand on which the life of the worker depends depends on the whim of the rich and the capitalists. If the quantity of supply [exceeds the] demand, then one of the components that make up the price (profit, ground-rent, wages) is paid below the price; [a part of th]ese services is therefore withdrawn from this use, and so the market price gravitates [towards the] natural price as its centre. But (1) where there is a great division of labour it is hardest of all for the worker to turn his labour in another direction, and (2) because of his subordinate relation to the capitalist, he is the first to suffer the loss.

In the gravitation of the market price towards the natural price, therefore, it is the worker who loses most, and loses unconditionally. And it is precisely the capitalist’s ability to turn his capital in another direction that either leaves the ouvrier, confined to a particular branch of labour, without bread, or forces him to submit to every demand of this capitalist.

[II] The accidental and sudden fluctuations of the market price hit ground-rent less than the part of the price that resolves into profit and wages, and profit less than wages. For one wage that rises there are mostly one that stays stationary and one that falls.

The worker need not necessarily gain when the capitalist gains, but he necessarily loses with him. Thus the worker does not gain when the capitalist keeps the market price above the natural price by a manufacturing or trade secret, by monopoly or by the favourable situation of his land.

Further: the prices of labour are much more constant than the prices of provisions. They often move in opposite directions. In a dear year wages fall because demand falls, and rise because provisions rise. So they balance. In any case a number of workers are put out of bread. In cheap years wages rise because demand rises, and fall because of the prices of provisions. So they balance.

Another disadvantage of the worker:

The prices of labour of the different kinds of workers differ much more than the profits of the different branches in which capital is invested. In labour the whole natural, mental and social variety of individual activity comes out and is rewarded differently, while dead capital always keeps the same pace and is indifferent to real individual activity.

In general it should be noted that where worker and capitalist suffer alike, the worker suffers in his existence, the capitalist in the profit on his dead mammon.

The worker has to struggle not only for his physical means of subsistence; he has to struggle to get work, that is, for the possibility, for the means, of realising his activity.

Let us take the three main conditions in which society can find itself, and consider the situation of the worker in each.

(1) If the wealth of society is declining, the worker suffers most; for although the working class cannot gain as much as the class of owners when society is prosperous, none suffers so cruelly from its decline as the working class.

[III] (2) Let us now take a society in which wealth is increasing. This condition is the only one favourable to the worker. Here competition among the capitalists sets in. The demand for workers exceeds the supply. But:

First, the rise in wages leads to overwork among the workers. The more they want to earn, the more of their time they must sacrifice and, alienating all their freedom, perform slave labour in the service of greed. In doing so they shorten their lives. This shortening of their lifespan is a favourable circumstance for the working class as a whole, because it makes ever new supply necessary. This class must always sacrifice a part of itself so as not to perish entirely.

Further: when is a society in a state of advancing wealth? When the capitals and revenues of a country grow. But this is possible only

(α) through much labour being piled up, for capital is accumulated labour; that is, through more and more of his products being taken out of the worker’s hands, through his own labour confronting him more and more as the property of another, and the means of his existence and his activity being concentrated more and more in the hands of the capitalist.

(β) The accumulation of capital increases the division of labour, and the division of labour increases the number of workers; conversely, the number of workers increases the division of labour, as the division of labour increases the accumulation of capitals. With this division of labour on the one hand and the accumulation of capitals on the other, the worker becomes more and more purely dependent on labour, and on a particular, very one-sided, machine-like labour. Just as he is thus depressed in mind and body to a machine, and from a man becomes an abstract activity and a belly, so he also becomes more and more dependent on every fluctuation in the market price, in the employment of capitals and in the whims of the rich. Equally, the increase of the class of people who do nothing [IV] but work increases the competition among the workers, and so lowers their price. In the factory system this position of the worker reaches its peak.

(γ) In a society that is in a state of increasing prosperity only the very richest can still live on the interest of money. All the rest must carry on a business with their capital or put it into trade. As a result the competition between capitals grows, the concentration of capitals grows, the big capitalists ruin the small ones, and a part of the former capitalists sinks into the working class, which, through this addition to its supply, partly suffers a further depression of wages and falls into still greater dependence on the few big capitalists. Because the number of capitalists has fallen, their competition for workers hardly exists any more; and because the number of workers has risen, their competition among themselves has become all the greater, more unnatural and more violent. A part of the working class therefore falls into beggary or starvation just as necessarily as a part of the middle capitalists falls into the working class.

So even in the condition of society most favourable to the worker, the necessary result for the worker is overwork and early death, reduction to a machine, servitude to capital, which piles up dangerously against him, new competition, starvation or beggary for a part of the workers.

[V] The rise of wages arouses in the worker the capitalist’s mania for getting rich, which he can satisfy only by sacrificing his mind and body. The rise of wages presupposes and brings about the accumulation of capital, and so sets the product of labour ever more alien against the worker. In the same way the division of labour makes him ever more one-sided and dependent, as it brings in the competition not only of men but also of machines. Since the worker has sunk to the level of a machine, the machine can confront him as a competitor. Finally, just as the accumulation of capital increases the quantity of industry, and so the number of workers, through this accumulation the same quantity of industry brings forth a greater quantity of manufactured goods, which becomes overproduction and ends either by putting a large part of the workers out of work or by reducing their wages to the most miserable minimum.

These are the consequences of the condition of society most favourable to the worker, namely the condition of growing, advancing wealth.

Eventually, however, this state of growth must reach its peak. What then is the worker’s position?

(3) “In a country that had reached the last possible stage of its wealth, both wages and the interest on capital would be very low. The competition among the workers for employment would be so great that wages would be reduced to what suffices to maintain the same number of workers, and since the country would already be sufficiently populated, that number could not increase.”

The surplus would have to die.

So in a declining state of society, progressive misery of the worker; in an advancing state, complicated misery; in the completed state, stationary misery.

[VI] But since, according to Smith, a society is not happy in which the majority suffers; since the wealthiest state of society leads to this suffering of the majority; and since political economy (in general, the society of private interest) leads to this wealthiest state, the unhappiness of society is the aim of political economy.

As regards the relation between worker and capitalist it should further be noted that the capitalist is more than compensated for the rise in wages by the reduction in the amount of labour time, and that a rise in wages and a rise in the interest on capital act on the price of commodities like simple and compound interest.

Let us now put ourselves entirely at the standpoint of the political economist, and compare, as he does, the theoretical and practical claims of the worker.

He tells us that originally, and in concept, the whole product of labour belongs to the worker. But he tells us at the same time that in reality the worker gets the smallest and most indispensable part of the product: only as much as is necessary for him to exist, not as a man but as a worker, and to propagate not humanity but the slave class of workers.

The political economist tells us that everything is bought with labour and that capital is nothing but accumulated labour; but he tells us at the same time that the worker, far from being able to buy everything, must sell himself and his humanity.

While the ground-rent of the idle landowner mostly amounts to a third of the produce of the soil, and the profit of the busy capitalist to as much as twice the interest on money, the surplus that the worker earns at best amounts to so much that of four children two must starve and die.

[VII] While according to the political economist labour is the only means by which man increases the value of the products of nature, while labour is his active property, according to the same political economy the landowner and the capitalist, who as landowner and capitalist are merely privileged and idle gods, are everywhere superior to the worker and lay down the law to him.

While according to the political economist labour is the only unchanging price of things, nothing is more accidental than the price of labour, nothing subject to greater fluctuations.

While the division of labour raises the productive power of labour, the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker to the point of making him a machine. While labour brings about the accumulation of capitals and with it the increasing prosperity of society, it makes the worker ever more dependent on the capitalist, puts him into greater competition, drives him into the frantic rush of overproduction, which is followed by an equally deep slump.

While according to the political economist the interest of the worker never stands opposed to the interest of society, society always and necessarily stands opposed to the interest of the worker.

According to the political economist the interest of the worker never stands opposed to that of society, (1) because the rise in wages is more than made good by the reduction in the amount of labour time, together with the other consequences developed above; and (2) because in relation to society the whole gross product is net product, and only in relation to the private individual does the net have any meaning.

But that labour itself, not only under present conditions but in general in so far as its aim is the mere increase of wealth, that labour itself, I say, is harmful and pernicious, follows from the political economist’s own arguments without his knowing it.

According to the concept, ground-rent and the profit of capital are deductions suffered by wages. But in reality wages are a deduction that land and capital allow the worker to have, a concession of the product of labour to the worker, to labour.

In the declining state of society the worker suffers most severely. He owes the specific weight of his burden to his position as worker, but the burden as such to the position of society.

But in the advancing state of society the ruin and impoverishment of the worker are the product of his labour and of the wealth he has produced. Misery, that is, which arises from the nature of present-day labour itself.

The wealthiest state of society, an ideal which is nevertheless approximately attained, and which is at least the aim of political economy as of civil society, is stationary misery for the workers.

It goes without saying that political economy regards the proletarian, that is, the man who lives without capital and ground-rent, purely by labour, and by a one-sided, abstract labour, only as a worker. It can therefore lay down the proposition that he, like any horse, must earn enough to be able to work. It does not consider him in his time without work, as a man, but leaves that to criminal justice, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics and the beadle.

Let us now rise above the level of political economy, and try to answer two questions from the argument so far, given almost in the political economist’s own words.

(1) What meaning, in the development of mankind, has this reduction of the greater part of mankind to abstract labour?

(2) What mistakes are made by the piecemeal reformers, who either want to raise wages and so improve the situation of the working class, or (like Proudhon) regard equality of wages as the aim of the social revolution?

Labour occurs in political economy only in the form of activity for gain.

[VIII] “It can be asserted that occupations which presuppose specific aptitudes or a longer training have on the whole become more remunerative, while the relative wage for mechanically uniform activity, to which one person can be trained as quickly and easily as another, has fallen with growing competition and was bound to fall. And it is precisely this kind of labour that, in the present state of its organisation, is still by far the most numerous. If, then, a worker of the first category now earns seven times as much, and another of the second category just as much, as about fifty years ago, both earn on average four times as much, to be sure. But if in a country the first category of labour is filled by only 1,000 people and the second by a million, then 999,000 are no better off than fifty years ago, and they are worse off if the prices of the necessities of life have risen at the same time. And with such superficial calculations of averages people try to deceive themselves about the most numerous class of the population. Moreover, the size of wages is only one factor in estimating the income of the worker, because for measuring the latter the assured duration of that income must essentially be taken into account, and of that there is simply no question in the anarchy of so-called free competition with its ever-recurring fluctuations and stoppages. Finally, the working time customary formerly and now must be considered. For the English workers in cotton manufacture, however, it has been raised by the employers’ greed for gain [IX] to 12–16 hours a day over about the last 25 years, that is, precisely since the introduction of labour-saving machines; and the increase in one country and one branch of industry was bound to assert itself more or less elsewhere too, given the right, still everywhere recognised, of the rich to exploit the poor without limit.” Schulz, Bewegung der Production, p. 65. “But even if it were as true as it is false that the average income of all classes of society had increased, the differences and relative distances between incomes may nevertheless have grown, and the contrasts of wealth and poverty may accordingly stand out more sharply. For precisely because total production rises, and to the same extent as it does, needs, desires and claims also multiply, and so relative poverty can increase while absolute poverty diminishes. The Samoyed is not poor with train oil and rancid fish, because in his closed society everyone has the same needs. But in an advancing state which, say, increases its total production in proportion to society by a third in the course of a decade, the worker who earns the same before and after the ten years has not remained as well off, but has become a third more needy.” Ibid., pp. 65–66.

But political economy knows the worker only as a working animal, as a beast reduced to the strictest bodily needs.

“For a people to develop more freely in mind, it must no longer be in slavery to its bodily needs, no longer be the serf of the body. It must above all have time left to be able to create and enjoy intellectually as well. Progress in the organisation of labour gains this time. With new motive forces and improved machinery, a single worker in the cotton mills now often does the work of 100, indeed of 250–350 workers of former times. There are similar results in all branches of production, because external natural forces are more and more compelled to take part [X] in human labour. If, then, satisfying a given quantity of material needs formerly required an expenditure of time and human energy that has since been halved, the scope for intellectual creation and enjoyment has at the same time been widened by as much, without any loss of sensuous well-being. But the division of the booty that we win from old Kronos himself on his very own ground is still decided by the dice of blind, unjust chance. It has been calculated in France that at the present stage of production an average working time of five hours a day for everyone able to work would suffice to satisfy all the material interests of society.... Despite the saving of time through the perfection of machinery, the duration of slave labour in the factories has only increased for a large population.” Ibid., pp. 67–68. “The transition from compound handicraft labour presupposes its decomposition into its simple operations. At first, however, only a part of the uniformly recurring operations will fall to the machines, while another part will fall to men. From the nature of the case and by consistent experience, such continuously uniform activity is as harmful to the mind as to the body; and so in this combination of machinery with the mere division of labour among more numerous human hands, all the disadvantages of the latter are bound to appear as well. The disadvantages show themselves among other things in the greater mortality of factory [XI] workers.... This great difference, how far men work through machines and how far they work as machines, has not been ... taken into account.” Ibid., p. 69. “But for the future life of the peoples, the mindless natural forces working in machines will be our slaves and serfs.” Ibid., p. 74. “In the English spinning mills only 158,818 men and 196,818 women are employed. For every 100 workers in the cotton mills of the county of Lancaster there are 103 women workers, and in Scotland as many as 209. In the English flax mills of Leeds there were 147 female workers for every 100 male; in Dundee and on the east coast of Scotland as many as 280. In the English silk mills many women workers; in the woollen mills, which require greater strength, more men. In the North American cotton mills too, in 1833, no fewer than 38,927 women were employed alongside 18,593 men. Through the changes in the organisation of labour, then, a wider range of employment has fallen to the female sex ... women [have gained] an economically more independent position ... the two sexes [have been] brought closer to each other in their social relations.” Ibid., pp. 71–72. “In the English spinning mills driven by steam and water there were working in 1835: 20,558 children between 8 and 12 years old; 35,867 between 12 and 13; and finally 108,208 between 13 and 18.... Admittedly the further advances of mechanics, since they increasingly take all uniform occupations out of human hands, tend towards a gradual removal [XII] of this abuse. But these more rapid advances are themselves held back precisely by the fact that the capitalists can appropriate the powers of the lower classes, down to childhood, in the easiest and cheapest way, so as to use and use up these powers instead of the aids of mechanics.” Schulz, Bewegung der Production, pp. 70–71. “Lord Brougham’s call to the workers: ‘Become capitalists!’ ... The evil that millions can earn a bare living only by strenuous labour that wrecks the body and cripples them morally and mentally; that they must even regard the misfortune of having found such work as good fortune.” Ibid., p. 60. “In order to live, then, those without property are obliged to place themselves, directly or indirectly, in the service of those with property, that is, under their dependence.” Pecqueur, Théorie nouvelle d’économie sociale, etc., p. 409. Servants: wages; workers: pay; employees: salary or emoluments. Ibid., pp. 409–410. “To hire out one’s labour”, “to lend one’s labour at interest”, “to work in another’s place.” “To hire out the material of labour”, “to lend the material of labour at interest”, “to make another work in one’s place.” Ibid., [p. 411]. [XIII] “This economic constitution condemns men to occupations so abject, to a degradation so desolate and bitter, that savagery seems a royal condition by comparison.” Loc. cit., pp. 417–418. “The prostitution of the propertyless in all its forms.” P. 421 ff. Rag-pickers.

Ch. Loudon, in his work Solution du problème de la population, etc., Paris, 1842, puts the number of prostitutes in England at 60,000–70,000. The number of women of doubtful virtue, he says, is as large. P. 228.

“The average life of these unfortunate creatures on the streets, after they have entered on the career of vice, is about six or seven years. So that to maintain the number of 60,000 to 70,000 prostitutes there must be in the three kingdoms at least 8,000 to 9,000 women who give themselves to this infamous trade each year, or about twenty-four new victims a day, which is an average of one an hour; and consequently, if the same proportion holds over the whole surface of the globe, there must constantly be a million and a half of these unhappy women.” Ibid., p. 229. “The population of the wretched grows with their wretchedness, and it is at the extreme limit of destitution that human beings crowd together in the greatest numbers to dispute the right to suffer.... In 1821 the population of Ireland was 6,801,827. By 1831 it had risen to 7,764,010, an increase of 14 per cent in ten years. In Leinster, the most prosperous province, the population increased by only 8 per cent, while in Connaught, the most wretched province, the increase rose to 21 per cent. (Extracts from the Inquiries Published in England on Ireland, Vienna, 1840.)” Buret, De la misère, etc., vol. I, pp. [36,] 37.

Political economy considers labour abstractly as a thing; labour is a commodity; if the price is high, the commodity is much in demand; if it is low, it is much on offer; “as a commodity, labour must fall lower and lower in price” [loc. cit., p. 43]: partly the competition between capitalist and worker, partly the competition among the workers, forces this.

“... The working population, the seller of labour, is necessarily reduced to the smallest share of the product.... Is the theory of labour as a commodity anything other than a theory of disguised servitude?” Loc. cit., p. 43. “Why, then, has labour been seen as nothing but an exchange-value?” Ibid., p. 44.

The great workshops prefer to buy the labour of women and children, because it costs less than that of men. Loc. cit.

“The worker is in no way in the position of a free seller vis-à-vis the man who employs him.... The capitalist is always free to employ labour, and the worker is always forced to sell it. The value of labour is completely destroyed if it is not sold at every moment. Labour is capable neither of accumulation nor even of saving, unlike true [commodities]. [XIV] Labour is life, and if life is not exchanged every day for food, it suffers and soon perishes. For man’s life to be a commodity, therefore, slavery must be admitted.” Loc. cit., pp. 49–50.

If labour is a commodity, then, it is a commodity with the most unfortunate properties. But even according to the principles of political economy it is not one, because it is not “the free result of a free bargain” [loc. cit., p. 50]. The present economic regime

“at once lowers the price and the remuneration of labour; it perfects the worker and degrades the man.” Loc. cit., pp. 52–53. “Industry has become a war and commerce a gamble.” Loc. cit., p. 62. “The cotton-working machines” (in England) “alone represent 84,000,000 craftsmen.” [Loc. cit., p. 193, note.]

Industry has so far been in a state of war of conquest:

“It has squandered the lives of the men who made up its army with as much indifference as the great conquerors. Its aim was the possession of wealth, not the happiness of men.” Buret, loc. cit., p. 20. “These interests” (that is, economic interests), “freely left to themselves ... must necessarily come into conflict; they have no arbiter but war, and the decisions of war give defeat and death to some so as to give victory to others.... It is in the conflict of opposing forces that science seeks order and equilibrium: perpetual war is in its view the only means of obtaining peace; this war is called competition.” Loc. cit., p. 23. The industrial war, to be waged successfully, requires numerous armies that it can concentrate at one point and decimate freely. And the soldiers of this army endure the exertions imposed on them neither out of devotion nor out of duty, but only to escape the harsh necessity of hunger. They have neither attachment nor gratitude for their chiefs; these are bound to their subordinates by no feeling of goodwill; they know them not as men but only as instruments of production, which must bring in as much and cost as little as possible. These populations of workers, ever more crowded together, do not even have the assurance of being always employed; the industry that has called them together lets them live only when it needs them, and as soon as it can do without them it abandons them without the least scruple; and the workers are forced to offer their persons and their strength for whatever price one is willing to grant them. The longer, more painful and more disgusting the work they are given, the less they are paid; one sees some who, with sixteen hours’ work a day under unbroken strain, barely buy the right not to die. Loc. cit., pp. [68,] 69. [XV] “We are convinced ... and the commissioners charged with the inquiry into the condition of the hand-loom weavers share the conviction, that the great industrial towns would lose their working population in a short time if they did not receive, at every moment, continual recruits of healthy men, of new blood, from the neighbouring countryside.” Loc. cit., p. 362. [XV]