Preface
Wage-Labour and Capital is a relatively short essay based on a series of lectures Marx gave in 1847. This work consolidates Marx’s early economic thought into a coherent system that he would refine for the rest of his life, culminating in Capital. The only missing element is the distinction between labor and labor-power, but this will be addressed below.
Engels’ Comments
According to this, labour has not one but two values, and, moreover, two very different values!
This quote is highlighting the distinction between how much we get paid and how much our labour actually generates. This is an important argument Marxists use to claim that the capitalist system is unfair and immoral, letting one group of people attach themselves to another group and make money off their labour without producing any labour themselves.
What the economists had considered as the cost of production or “labour” was really the cost of production, not of “labour”, but of the living labourer himself.
He hires our or sells his labour-power. But this labour-power has grown up with his person and is inseparable from it.
That’s the core of the labour vs labour-power distinction that came to fruition a bit later, so Engels felt it was necessary to highlight that “labour” in early works of Marx often means “labour-power”.
Quotes
Since the essay itself is rather short, I’m only going to post a few interesting quotes with my thoughts on them.
The commercial subjugation and the exploitation of the borgeois classes of the various European nations by the despot of the world market - England.
This is a really interesting quote, because Marx never expands on it. It’s still a mystery what he meant by that, but if you ask me, I’d say he probably meant that free trade is always benefiting the most competitive power. Britain was such a power for quite some time, then Americans started selling their industrial dominance as exported freedom. Ironically, the United States cut down on free market promotion recently, mostly because China is outcompeting them on “free trade”.
Life for him begins where this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed.
This is a strong emotional argument rooted in the feelings most people are familiar with. Work is a means to an end. Most people have boring or silly jobs they otherwise wouldn’t do, but you need to find a capitalist to sell your labour to if you want to survive.
He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class
This is an important argument which Marx makes while comparing slaves, serfs, and workers within a capitalist system. While it’s undeniable that workers are free to switch their employers, all this plurality of employers represent a single class with the same incentive structure, so that freedom is a mirage and there is no freedom to really exit or change the system in any meaningful way.
In the same manner, the cost or production of simple labour-power must include the cost or propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself
This is a rather cynical take, but to add my own cynicism, I wonder what Marx would say of mass migration and outsourcing to Asia. It looks like capitalists found a way to cut even more corners and facilitate full population replacement to avoid paying for local reproduction.
Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labour serves living labour as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that living labour serves accumulated labour as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value.
Another cynical and chilling observation. That’s the direct opposite of the Austrian model, where capital is seen as delayed consumption allowing some “R&D” which is necessary to stop the grind and improve efficiency by prototyping different tools.
For Marx, things are more black and white. There is little attention to the fact that the line between a capitalist and a worker is sometimes blurry. Anyone can invest their savings nowadays, or leverage their accumulated labour to start a small business, etc. It’s not a serious refutation of Marx though, since the majority of people don’t do that or fail, and he wasn’t that interested in edge cases.
The fastest possible growth of productive capital is, therefore the indispensable condition for a tolerable life to the labourer.
This is one of those nuanced places where Marx argues that some seemingly good and even objectively good things might in fact bear the seeds of the future destruction of the system as a whole. The faster capital grows, the faster wages grow, but inequality grows even faster, causing discontent.
Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification.
Obviously, Marx was aware of the universal human tendency to “keep up with the Joneses”, and this argument is really hard to refute. People defending the status quo use absolute gains to mask relative losses.
If capital grows rapidly, wages may rise, but the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position.
That conveys a similar message as the last quote, which also hints at how important it was for Marx to present this idea as clearly as possible. To Marx, “rising tides lift all boats” arguments are pure nonsense.
Conclusion
Wage-Labour and Capital is a clearly written essay. The core ideas are bold, testable, and well defined. Given the age of this work, I expected to find some “gotchas” that would look absurd nowadays, but most of the issues presented in this essay are still with us, sometimes in a much worse form, as predicted by the author.