From Marxists Internet Archive
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Part VI: Wages
Chapter Nineteen: 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, &tc., 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]
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, &tc., 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,”
&tc.,. as final and as adequate expressions for the value-relation under
consideration, and was thus led, as will be seen later, into inextricable
confusion and contradiction, while it offered to the vulgar economists a secure
basis of operations for their shallowness, which on principle worships
appearances only.
Let us next see how value (and price) of labour-power, present themselves in
this transformed condition as wages.
We know that the daily value of labour-power is calculated upon a certain
length of the labourer’s life, to which, again, corresponds a certain length
of working-day. Assume the habitual working-day as 12 hours, the daily value of
labour-power as 3s., the expression in money of a value that embodies 6 hours of
labour. If the labourer receives 3s., then he receives the value of his labour-power
functioning through 12 hours. If, now, this value of a day’s labour-power is
expressed as the value of a day’s labour itself, we have the formula: Twelve
hours’ labour has a value of 3s. The value of labour-power thus determines the
value of labour, or, expressed in money, its necessary price. If, on the other
hand, the price of labour-power differs from its value, in like manner the price
of labour differs from its so-called value.
As the value of labour is only an irrational expression for the value of
labour-power, it follows, of course, that the value of labour must always be
less than the value it produces, for the capitalist always makes labour-power
work longer than is necessary for the reproduction of its own value. In the
above example, the value of the labour-power that functions through 12 hours is
3s., a value for the reproduction of which 6 hours are required. The value which
the labour-power produces is, on the other hand, 6s., because it, in fact,
functions during 12 hours, and the value it produces depends, not on its own
value, but on the length of time it is in action. Thus, we have a result absurd
at first sight that labour which creates a value of 6s. possesses a value of 3s.
[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 corvée, 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, &tc. 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, 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.
Footnotes
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, &tc., 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 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,” &tc., 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. The value
of labour is a figurative expression,” &tc. I have remarked: “In labour,
commodity, which is a frightful reality, he (Proudhon) sees nothing but a
grammatical ellipsis. The whole of existing society, then, based upon labour
commodity, is henceforth based upon a poetic license, on a figurative
expression. Does society desire to eliminate all the inconveniences which
trouble it, it has only to eliminate all the ill-sounding terms. Let it change
the language, and for that it has only to address itself to the Academy and ask
it for a new edition of its dictionary.” (Karl Marx, “Misère de la
Philosophie,” pp. 34, 35.) It is naturally still more convenient to understand
by value nothing at all. Then one can without difficulty subsume everything
under this category. Thus, e.g., J. B. Say: “What is value?” Answer: “That
which a thing is worth"; and what is “price"? Answer: “The value
of a thing expressed in money.” And why has agriculture a value? Answer:
“Because one sets a price on it.” Therefore value is what a thing is worth,
and the land has its “value,” because its value is “expressed in money.”
This is, anyhow, a very simple way of explaining the why and the wherefore of
things.
7.
Cf. “Zur Kritik &tc.,” p. 40, where I state that, in the portion of that
work that deals with Capital, this problem will be solved: “How does
production, on the basis of exchange-value determined simply by labour-time,
lead to the result that the exchange-value of labour is less than the
exchange-value of its product?”
8.
The “Morning Star,” a London Free-trade organ, naif to silliness, protested
again and again during the American Civil War, with all the moral indignation of
which man is capable, that the Negro in the “Confederate States” worked
absolutely for nothing. It should have compared the daily cost of such a Negro
with that of the free workman in the East-end of London.
9.
I give in order that you may give; I give in order that you may produce; I
produce so that you may give; I produce so that you may produce.
10.
Adam Smith only accidentally alludes to the variation of the working-day when he
is referring to piece-wages.
Transcribed by Bill McDorman
Html Markup by Stephen Baird (1999)
|
