1
In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labour must at all events exist before it is sold.
In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labour must at all events exist before it is sold.
Marx - Capital-Volume-I
369 Chapter 17
4 --All things being equal, the English manufacturer can turn out a considerably larger amount of work in a given time than a foreign manufacturer, so much as to counterbalance the difference of the working days, between 60 hours a week here, and 72 or 80 elsewhere. ? (Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct. , 1855, p. 65. ) The most infallible means for reducing this qualitative difference between the English and Continental working hour would be a law shortening quantitatively the length of the working day in Continental factories.
5 --There are compensating circumstances . . . which the working of the Ten Hours' Act has brought to light. ? (Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct. 1848,? p. 7. )
6 --The amount of labour which a man had undergone in the course of 24 hours might be approximately arrived at by an examination of the chemical changes which had taken place in his body, changed forms in matter indicating the anterior exercise of dynamic force. ? (Grove: --On the Correlation of Physical Forces. ? )
7 --Corn and labour rarely march quite abreast; but there is an obvious limit, beyond which they cannot be separated. With regard to the unusual exertions made by the labouring classes in periods of dearness, which produce the fall of wages noticed in the evidence? (namely, before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry, 1814-15), --they are most meritorious in the individuals, and certainly favour the growth of capital. But no man of humanity could wish to see them constant and unremitted. They are most admirable as a temporary relief; but if they were constantly in action, effects of a similar kind would result from them, as from the population of a country being pushed to the very extreme limits of its food. ? (Malthus: --Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent,? Lond. , 1815, p. 48, note. ) All honour to Malthus that he lays stress on the lengthening of the hours of labour, a fact to which he elsewhere in his pamphlet draws attention, while Ricardo and others, in face of the most notorious facts, make invariability in the length of the working day the groundwork of all their investigations. But the conservative interests, which Malthus served, prevented him from seeing that an unlimited prolongation of the working day, combined with an extraordinary development of machinery, and the exploitation of women and children, must inevitably have made a great portion of the working-class --supernumerary,? particularly whenever the war should have ceased, and the monopoly of England in the markets of the world should have come to an end. It was, of course, far more convenient, and much more in conformity with the interests of the ruling classes, whom Malthus adored like a true priest, to explain this --over-population? by the eternal laws of Nature, rather than by the historical laws of capitalist production.
8 --A principal cause of the increase of capital, during the war, proceeded from the greater exertions, and perhaps the greater privations of the labouring classes, the most numerous in every society. More women and children were compelled by necessitous circumstances, to enter upon laborious occupations, and former workmen were, from the same cause, obliged to devote a greater portion of their time to increase production. ? (Essays on Pol. Econ. , in which are illustrated the principal causes of the present national distress. Lond. , 1830, p. 248. )
? ? Chapter 18: Various Formula for the rate of Surplus value
We have seen that the rate of surplus value is represented by the following formulae: I. Surplus value ( s ) = Surplus value = Surplus labour
Variable Capital v Value of labor-power Necessary labor
The two first of these formulae represent, as a ratio of values, that which, in the third, is represented as a ratio of the times during which those values are produced. These formulae, supplementary the one to the other, are rigorously definite and correct. We therefore find them substantially, but not consciously, worked out in classical Political Economy. There we meet with the following derivative formulae.
II. Surplus-labor = Surplus value = Surplus-product Working day Value of the Product Total Product
One and the same ratio is here expressed as a ratio of labor-times, of the values in which those labor-times are embodied, and of the products in which those values exist. It is of course understood that, by --Value of the Product,? is meant only the value newly created in a working day, the constant part of the value of the product being excluded.
In all of these formulae (II. ), the actual degree of exploitation of labor, or the rate of surplus value, is falsely expressed. Let the working day be 12 hours. Then, making the same assumptions as in former instances, the real degree of exploitation of labor will be represented in the following proportions.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 6 hours surplus-labor = Surplus value of 3 sh. 6 hours necessary labor Variable Capital of 3 sh.
From formulae II. we get very differently,
6 hours surplus-labor = Surplus value of 3 sh. Working day of 12 hours Value created of 6 sh.
= 100%
= 50%
? ? ? ? These derivative formulae express, in reality, only the proportion in which the working day, or the value produced by it, is divided between capitalist and laborer. If they are to be treated as direct expressions of the degree of self-expansion of capital, the following erroneous law would hold good: Surplus-labor or surplus value can never reach 100%. 1 Since the surplus-labor is only an aliquot part of the working day, or since surplus value is only an aliquot part of the value created, the surplus-labor must necessarily be always less than the working day, or the surplus value always less than the total value created. In order, however, to attain the ratio of 100:100 they must be equal. In order that the surplus-labor may absorb the whole day (i. e. , an average day of any week or year), the necessary labor must sink to zero. But if the necessary labor vanish, so too does the surplus-labor, since it is only a function of the former. The ratio
Surplus-labor or Surplus value Working day Value created
can therefore never reach the limit 100/100, still less rise to 100 + x/100. But not so the rate of surplus value, the real degree of exploitation of labor. Take, e. g. , the estimate of L. de Lavergne,
? ? ? 371 Chapter 18
according to which the English agricultural laborer gets only 1/4, the capitalist (farmer) on the other hand 3/4 of the product 2 or its value, apart from the question of how the booty is subsequently divided between the capitalist, the landlord, and others. According to this, this surplus-labor of the English agricultural laborer is to his necessary labor as 3:1, which gives a rate of exploitation of 300%.
The favorite method of treating the working day as constant in magnitude became, through the use of formulae II. , a fixed usage, because in them surplus-labor is always compared with a working day of given length. The same holds good when the repartition of the value produced is exclusively kept insight. The working day that has already been realized in given value, must necessarily be a day of given length.
The habit of representing surplus value and value of labor-power as fractions of the value created - a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will hereafter be disclosed - conceals the very transaction that characterizes capital, namely the exchange of variable capital for living labor-power, and the consequent exclusion of the laborer from the product. Instead of the real fact, we have false semblance of an association, in which laborer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively contribute towards its formation. 3
Moreover, the formulae II. can at any time be reconverted into formulae I. If, for instance, we have
Surplus-labor of 6 hours Working day of 12 hours
then the necessary labor-time being 12 hours less the surplus-labor of 6 hours, we get the following result,
Surplus-labor of 6 hours = 100
? ? ? Necessary labor of 6 hours
100
There is a third formula which I have occasionally already anticipated; it is
III. Surplus value = Surplus-labor = Unpaid labor
Value of labor-power Necessary labor Paid labor
After the investigations we have given above, it is no longer possible to be misled, by the formula
Unpaid labor, Paid labor
into concluding, that the capitalist pays for labor and not for labor-power. This formula is only a popular expression for
Surplus-labor, Necessary labor
The capitalist pays the value, so far as price coincides with value, of the labor-power, and receives in exchange the disposal of the living labor-power itself. His usufruct is spread over two periods. During one the laborer produces a value that is only equal to the value of his labor- power; he produces its equivalent. This the capitalist receives in return for his advance of the price of the labor-power, a product ready made in the market. During the other period, the period of surplus-labor, the usufruct of the labor-power creates a value for the capitalist, that costs him no equivalent. 4 This expenditure of labor-power comes to him gratis. In this sense it is that surplus-labor can be called unpaid labor.
? ? ? ? ? ? 372 Chapter 18
Capital, therefore, it not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over labor. It is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All surplus value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labor.
1 Thus, e. g. , in --Dritter Brief an v. Kirchmann von Rodbertus. Widerlegung der Ricardo'schen Lehre von der Grundrente und Begrundung einer neuen Rententheorie. ? Berlin, 1851. I shall return to this letter later on; in spite of its erroneous theory of rent, it sees through the nature of capitalist production.
NOTE ADDED IN THE 3RD GERMAN EDITION: It may be seen from this how favorably Marx judged his predecessors, whenever he found in them real progress, or new and sound ideas. The subsequent publications of Robertus' letters to Rud. Meyer has shown that the above acknowledgement by Marx wants restricting to some extent. In those letters this passage occurs:
--Capital must be rescued not only from labor, but from itself, and that will be best effected, by treating the acts of the industrial capitalist as economic and political functions, that have been delegated to him with his capital, and by treating his profit as a form of salary, because we still know no other social organization. But salaries may be regulated, and may also be reduced if they take too much from wages. The irruption of Marx into Society, as I may call his book, must be warded off. . . . Altogether, Marx's book is not so much an investigation into capital, as a polemic against the present form of capital, a form which he confounds with the concept itself of capital. ? ("Briefe, &c. , von Dr. Robertus-Jagetzow, herausgg. von Dr. Rud. Meyer,? Berlin, 1881, I, Bd. P. 111, 46. Brief von Rodbertus. ) To such ideological commonplaces did the bold attack by Robertus in his --social letters? finally dwindle down. -- F. E.
2 That part of the product which merely replaces the constant capital advanced is of course left out in this calculation. Mr. L. de Lavergne, a blind admirer of England, is inclined to estimate the share of the capitalist too low, rather than too high.
3 All well-developed forms of capitalist production being forms of cooperation, nothing is, of course, easier, than to make abstraction from their antagonistic character, and to transform them by a word into some form of free association, as is done by A. de Laborde in --De l'Esprit d'Association dans tous les inte? re^ts de la communaute? ". Paris 1818. H. Carey, the Yankee, occasionally performs this conjuring trick with like success, even with the relations resulting from slavery.
4 Although the Physiocrats could not penetrate the mystery of surplus value, yet this much was clear to them, viz. , that it is --une richesse inde? pendante et disponible qu'il (the possessor) n'a point achete? e et qu'il vend. ? [a wealth which is independent and disposable, which he . . . has not bought and which he sells] (Turgot: --Re? flexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses,? p. 11. )
? ? 373
Part 6: Wages
Chapter 19: The Transformation of the Value (and Respective 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 hour 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 independent objective existence, he would sell a commodity and not labour. 2
Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i. e. , of realized 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 equalization 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. 3
It is of no avail to deduce the exchange of more labour against less, from their difference of form, the one being realized, the other living. 4 This is the more absurd as the value of a commodity is determined not by the quantity of labour actually realized in it, but by the quantity of living labour necessary for its production. A commodity represents, 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 realized 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 value. 5
? 374 Chapter 19
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. 6
Classical Political Economy borrowed from every-day life the category --price of labour? without further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? It soon recognized 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. 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
? 375 Chapter 19
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. 7
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 corve? e, the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory 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. 8 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'etre, 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 recognizes in this, at most, a material difference, expressed in the juridically equivalent formula: --Do ut des, do ut facias, facio ut des, facio ut facias. ? 9
Furthermore, 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 realizes 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, 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 cognizance 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,
? 376 Chapter 19
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,10 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 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 circumlocution, 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.
1 --Mr. Ricardo ingeniously enough avoids a difficulty which, on a first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine -- that value depends on the quantity of labour employed in production. If this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows that the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it -- which is evidently absurd. By a dexterous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the value of labour depend on the quantity of labour required to produce wages; or, to give him the benefit of his own language, he maintains, that the value of labour 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 of labour bestowed on the production of the silver, for which the cloth is exchanged. ? -- --A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, &c. , of Value,? pp. 50, 51.
2 --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
? ? 377 Chapter 19
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,? &c. , pp. 75, 76.
3 --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, 1836, p. 231, note.
4 --There has to be a new agreement? (a new edition of the social contract! ) --that whenever there is an exchange of work done for work to be done, the latter? (the capitalist) --is to receive a higher value than the former? (the worker). -- Simonde (de Sismondi), --De la Richesse Commerciale,? Geneva, 1803, Vol I, p. 37.
5 --Labour the exclusive standard of value . . . the creator of all wealth, no commodity. ? Thomas Hodgskin, --Popul. Polit. Econ. ,? p. 186.
6 On the other hand, the attempt to explain such expressions as merely poetic license only shows the impotence of the analysis. Hence, in answer to Proudhon's phrase; --Labour is called value, not as being a commodity itself, but in view of the values supposed to be potentially embodied in it.
4 --All things being equal, the English manufacturer can turn out a considerably larger amount of work in a given time than a foreign manufacturer, so much as to counterbalance the difference of the working days, between 60 hours a week here, and 72 or 80 elsewhere. ? (Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct. , 1855, p. 65. ) The most infallible means for reducing this qualitative difference between the English and Continental working hour would be a law shortening quantitatively the length of the working day in Continental factories.
5 --There are compensating circumstances . . . which the working of the Ten Hours' Act has brought to light. ? (Rep. of Insp. of Fact. for 31st Oct. 1848,? p. 7. )
6 --The amount of labour which a man had undergone in the course of 24 hours might be approximately arrived at by an examination of the chemical changes which had taken place in his body, changed forms in matter indicating the anterior exercise of dynamic force. ? (Grove: --On the Correlation of Physical Forces. ? )
7 --Corn and labour rarely march quite abreast; but there is an obvious limit, beyond which they cannot be separated. With regard to the unusual exertions made by the labouring classes in periods of dearness, which produce the fall of wages noticed in the evidence? (namely, before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry, 1814-15), --they are most meritorious in the individuals, and certainly favour the growth of capital. But no man of humanity could wish to see them constant and unremitted. They are most admirable as a temporary relief; but if they were constantly in action, effects of a similar kind would result from them, as from the population of a country being pushed to the very extreme limits of its food. ? (Malthus: --Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent,? Lond. , 1815, p. 48, note. ) All honour to Malthus that he lays stress on the lengthening of the hours of labour, a fact to which he elsewhere in his pamphlet draws attention, while Ricardo and others, in face of the most notorious facts, make invariability in the length of the working day the groundwork of all their investigations. But the conservative interests, which Malthus served, prevented him from seeing that an unlimited prolongation of the working day, combined with an extraordinary development of machinery, and the exploitation of women and children, must inevitably have made a great portion of the working-class --supernumerary,? particularly whenever the war should have ceased, and the monopoly of England in the markets of the world should have come to an end. It was, of course, far more convenient, and much more in conformity with the interests of the ruling classes, whom Malthus adored like a true priest, to explain this --over-population? by the eternal laws of Nature, rather than by the historical laws of capitalist production.
8 --A principal cause of the increase of capital, during the war, proceeded from the greater exertions, and perhaps the greater privations of the labouring classes, the most numerous in every society. More women and children were compelled by necessitous circumstances, to enter upon laborious occupations, and former workmen were, from the same cause, obliged to devote a greater portion of their time to increase production. ? (Essays on Pol. Econ. , in which are illustrated the principal causes of the present national distress. Lond. , 1830, p. 248. )
? ? Chapter 18: Various Formula for the rate of Surplus value
We have seen that the rate of surplus value is represented by the following formulae: I. Surplus value ( s ) = Surplus value = Surplus labour
Variable Capital v Value of labor-power Necessary labor
The two first of these formulae represent, as a ratio of values, that which, in the third, is represented as a ratio of the times during which those values are produced. These formulae, supplementary the one to the other, are rigorously definite and correct. We therefore find them substantially, but not consciously, worked out in classical Political Economy. There we meet with the following derivative formulae.
II. Surplus-labor = Surplus value = Surplus-product Working day Value of the Product Total Product
One and the same ratio is here expressed as a ratio of labor-times, of the values in which those labor-times are embodied, and of the products in which those values exist. It is of course understood that, by --Value of the Product,? is meant only the value newly created in a working day, the constant part of the value of the product being excluded.
In all of these formulae (II. ), the actual degree of exploitation of labor, or the rate of surplus value, is falsely expressed. Let the working day be 12 hours. Then, making the same assumptions as in former instances, the real degree of exploitation of labor will be represented in the following proportions.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 6 hours surplus-labor = Surplus value of 3 sh. 6 hours necessary labor Variable Capital of 3 sh.
From formulae II. we get very differently,
6 hours surplus-labor = Surplus value of 3 sh. Working day of 12 hours Value created of 6 sh.
= 100%
= 50%
? ? ? ? These derivative formulae express, in reality, only the proportion in which the working day, or the value produced by it, is divided between capitalist and laborer. If they are to be treated as direct expressions of the degree of self-expansion of capital, the following erroneous law would hold good: Surplus-labor or surplus value can never reach 100%. 1 Since the surplus-labor is only an aliquot part of the working day, or since surplus value is only an aliquot part of the value created, the surplus-labor must necessarily be always less than the working day, or the surplus value always less than the total value created. In order, however, to attain the ratio of 100:100 they must be equal. In order that the surplus-labor may absorb the whole day (i. e. , an average day of any week or year), the necessary labor must sink to zero. But if the necessary labor vanish, so too does the surplus-labor, since it is only a function of the former. The ratio
Surplus-labor or Surplus value Working day Value created
can therefore never reach the limit 100/100, still less rise to 100 + x/100. But not so the rate of surplus value, the real degree of exploitation of labor. Take, e. g. , the estimate of L. de Lavergne,
? ? ? 371 Chapter 18
according to which the English agricultural laborer gets only 1/4, the capitalist (farmer) on the other hand 3/4 of the product 2 or its value, apart from the question of how the booty is subsequently divided between the capitalist, the landlord, and others. According to this, this surplus-labor of the English agricultural laborer is to his necessary labor as 3:1, which gives a rate of exploitation of 300%.
The favorite method of treating the working day as constant in magnitude became, through the use of formulae II. , a fixed usage, because in them surplus-labor is always compared with a working day of given length. The same holds good when the repartition of the value produced is exclusively kept insight. The working day that has already been realized in given value, must necessarily be a day of given length.
The habit of representing surplus value and value of labor-power as fractions of the value created - a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will hereafter be disclosed - conceals the very transaction that characterizes capital, namely the exchange of variable capital for living labor-power, and the consequent exclusion of the laborer from the product. Instead of the real fact, we have false semblance of an association, in which laborer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively contribute towards its formation. 3
Moreover, the formulae II. can at any time be reconverted into formulae I. If, for instance, we have
Surplus-labor of 6 hours Working day of 12 hours
then the necessary labor-time being 12 hours less the surplus-labor of 6 hours, we get the following result,
Surplus-labor of 6 hours = 100
? ? ? Necessary labor of 6 hours
100
There is a third formula which I have occasionally already anticipated; it is
III. Surplus value = Surplus-labor = Unpaid labor
Value of labor-power Necessary labor Paid labor
After the investigations we have given above, it is no longer possible to be misled, by the formula
Unpaid labor, Paid labor
into concluding, that the capitalist pays for labor and not for labor-power. This formula is only a popular expression for
Surplus-labor, Necessary labor
The capitalist pays the value, so far as price coincides with value, of the labor-power, and receives in exchange the disposal of the living labor-power itself. His usufruct is spread over two periods. During one the laborer produces a value that is only equal to the value of his labor- power; he produces its equivalent. This the capitalist receives in return for his advance of the price of the labor-power, a product ready made in the market. During the other period, the period of surplus-labor, the usufruct of the labor-power creates a value for the capitalist, that costs him no equivalent. 4 This expenditure of labor-power comes to him gratis. In this sense it is that surplus-labor can be called unpaid labor.
? ? ? ? ? ? 372 Chapter 18
Capital, therefore, it not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over labor. It is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All surplus value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labor.
1 Thus, e. g. , in --Dritter Brief an v. Kirchmann von Rodbertus. Widerlegung der Ricardo'schen Lehre von der Grundrente und Begrundung einer neuen Rententheorie. ? Berlin, 1851. I shall return to this letter later on; in spite of its erroneous theory of rent, it sees through the nature of capitalist production.
NOTE ADDED IN THE 3RD GERMAN EDITION: It may be seen from this how favorably Marx judged his predecessors, whenever he found in them real progress, or new and sound ideas. The subsequent publications of Robertus' letters to Rud. Meyer has shown that the above acknowledgement by Marx wants restricting to some extent. In those letters this passage occurs:
--Capital must be rescued not only from labor, but from itself, and that will be best effected, by treating the acts of the industrial capitalist as economic and political functions, that have been delegated to him with his capital, and by treating his profit as a form of salary, because we still know no other social organization. But salaries may be regulated, and may also be reduced if they take too much from wages. The irruption of Marx into Society, as I may call his book, must be warded off. . . . Altogether, Marx's book is not so much an investigation into capital, as a polemic against the present form of capital, a form which he confounds with the concept itself of capital. ? ("Briefe, &c. , von Dr. Robertus-Jagetzow, herausgg. von Dr. Rud. Meyer,? Berlin, 1881, I, Bd. P. 111, 46. Brief von Rodbertus. ) To such ideological commonplaces did the bold attack by Robertus in his --social letters? finally dwindle down. -- F. E.
2 That part of the product which merely replaces the constant capital advanced is of course left out in this calculation. Mr. L. de Lavergne, a blind admirer of England, is inclined to estimate the share of the capitalist too low, rather than too high.
3 All well-developed forms of capitalist production being forms of cooperation, nothing is, of course, easier, than to make abstraction from their antagonistic character, and to transform them by a word into some form of free association, as is done by A. de Laborde in --De l'Esprit d'Association dans tous les inte? re^ts de la communaute? ". Paris 1818. H. Carey, the Yankee, occasionally performs this conjuring trick with like success, even with the relations resulting from slavery.
4 Although the Physiocrats could not penetrate the mystery of surplus value, yet this much was clear to them, viz. , that it is --une richesse inde? pendante et disponible qu'il (the possessor) n'a point achete? e et qu'il vend. ? [a wealth which is independent and disposable, which he . . . has not bought and which he sells] (Turgot: --Re? flexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses,? p. 11. )
? ? 373
Part 6: Wages
Chapter 19: The Transformation of the Value (and Respective 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 hour 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 independent objective existence, he would sell a commodity and not labour. 2
Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i. e. , of realized 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 equalization 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. 3
It is of no avail to deduce the exchange of more labour against less, from their difference of form, the one being realized, the other living. 4 This is the more absurd as the value of a commodity is determined not by the quantity of labour actually realized in it, but by the quantity of living labour necessary for its production. A commodity represents, 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 realized 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 value. 5
? 374 Chapter 19
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. 6
Classical Political Economy borrowed from every-day life the category --price of labour? without further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? It soon recognized 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. 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
? 375 Chapter 19
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. 7
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 corve? e, the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory 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. 8 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'etre, 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 recognizes in this, at most, a material difference, expressed in the juridically equivalent formula: --Do ut des, do ut facias, facio ut des, facio ut facias. ? 9
Furthermore, 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 realizes 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, 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 cognizance 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,
? 376 Chapter 19
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,10 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 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 circumlocution, 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.
1 --Mr. Ricardo ingeniously enough avoids a difficulty which, on a first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine -- that value depends on the quantity of labour employed in production. If this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows that the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it -- which is evidently absurd. By a dexterous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the value of labour depend on the quantity of labour required to produce wages; or, to give him the benefit of his own language, he maintains, that the value of labour 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 of labour bestowed on the production of the silver, for which the cloth is exchanged. ? -- --A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, &c. , of Value,? pp. 50, 51.
2 --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
? ? 377 Chapter 19
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,? &c. , pp. 75, 76.
3 --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, 1836, p. 231, note.
4 --There has to be a new agreement? (a new edition of the social contract! ) --that whenever there is an exchange of work done for work to be done, the latter? (the capitalist) --is to receive a higher value than the former? (the worker). -- Simonde (de Sismondi), --De la Richesse Commerciale,? Geneva, 1803, Vol I, p. 37.
5 --Labour the exclusive standard of value . . . the creator of all wealth, no commodity. ? Thomas Hodgskin, --Popul. Polit. Econ. ,? p. 186.
6 On the other hand, the attempt to explain such expressions as merely poetic license only shows the impotence of the analysis. Hence, in answer to Proudhon's phrase; --Labour is called value, not as being a commodity itself, but in view of the values supposed to be potentially embodied in it.
