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6 Wages The level of the necessaries of life whose total value constitutes the value of labour-power can itself rise or fall. The analysis of those variations, however, belongs not here but in the theory of wages. Marx (1977: 1068–9) The political economy of wage-labour discussed in our last chapter stipulates that, just as capital benefits directly from the competition of workers, in turn the ability of workers to capture the gains from social production depends upon their success in reducing the separation and division in social relations among themselves. By forming trade unions and by attempting to turn the state ‘into their own agency’ (Marx, 1866: 344–5), workers struggle to satisfy unrealized social needs and to ‘achieve a certain quantitative participation in the general growth of wealth’ (Marx: 1971: 312). They press in the opposite direction to capital in order to increase the level of their wages. Class struggle, it appears, is critical in the determination of wages. But, where does class struggle fit into Capital’s discussion of the value of labour-power? Chapter 1 introduced the concepts of necessary labour and the value of labour-power. There we noted that the hours of labour (w) necessary to produce the daily requirements (U) of the worker depend upon the productivity of labour (q): w ⫽ U/q (1.1). In value-terms, ‘the value of labour-power [the value-form of necessary labour] can be resolved into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of the means of subsistence, i.e. with the quantity of labour-time required to produce them’ (Marx, 1977: 276). 101 102 Beyond Capital As Chapter 3 demonstrated, however, Marx assumed in Capital that this ‘definite quantity of the means of subsistence’ was given and fixed. Rather than explore the effects of class struggle on wages, he set aside anything to do with changes in real wages or in the level of needs that workers are able to satisfy as a subject for a later work: The problem of these movements in the level of the workers’ needs, as also that of the rise and fall of the market price of labour capacity above or below this level, do not belong here, where the general capitalrelation is to be developed, but in the doctrine of the wages of labour (Marx, 1988: 44–5). Accordingly, with respect to wages, Marx explicitly analysed in Capital only the effect of productivity increases upon the value of labour-power. ‘In our investigation’, he indicated in his notebooks, ‘we proceed from the assumption that the labour capacity is paid for at its value, hence wages are only reduced by the DEPRECIATION of that labour capacity, or what is the same thing, by the cheapening of the means of subsistence entering into the workers’ consumption.’ Beginning, in short, from that ‘definite quantity of means of subsistence’, Marx’s focus in Capital is upon changes in the quantity of labour required to produce that given set of necessaries. Of course, Marx knew that there were other reasons for a change in wages: In so far as machinery brings about a direct reduction of wages for the workers employed by it, by for example using the demand of those rendered unemployed to force down the wages of those in employment, it is not part of our task to deal with this CASE. It belongs to the theory of wages (Marx, 1994: 23). So, can we infer from these passages elements in the theory of wages? What is the link between the value of labour-power and changes in the price of labour-power? Does the introduction of machinery drive the price of labour-power below the value of labour-power, leading to a fall in the value of labour-power? As the following passages suggest, a prima facie case could be made for this line of reasoning: As to the limits of the value of labour, its actual settlement always depends upon supply and demand. I mean the demand for labour on the part of capital, and the supply of labour by the working men (Marx, 1865b: 146). Wages 103 however the standard of necessary labour may differ at various epochs and in various countries, or how much, in consequence of the demand and supply of labour, its amount and ratio may change, at any given epoch the standard is to be considered and acted upon as a fixed one by capital (Marx, 1973: 817; emphasis added). The standard of necessity (U ) may change; thus, labour market conditions may produce changes in the market price of labour-power, and these may lead to changes in the value of labour-power – once the assumption that the quantity of the means of subsistence is ‘definite’ is dropped. Recall our discussion in Chapter 3. There, we noted that Capital analyses the magnitude of the value of labour-power and surplus value by taking different factors and treating them in turn as constant and variable: A large number of combinations are possible here. Any two of the factors may vary and the third remain constant, or all three may vary at once … The effect of every possible combination may be found by treating each factor in turn as variable, and the other two constant for the time being (Marx, 1977: 664). Given that Marx did not complete this analysis (that is to say, he did not treat the standard of necessity as variable), let us continue Marx’s project by considering the combinations that he did not explore. This will allow us to take account of various sides of the matter.1 I Standard of necessity constant; productivity constant Begin with the case of both the standard of necessity and productivity constant. Following (1.1), accordingly, we commence with the assumption that necessary labour and the value of labour-power are given and fixed. From this starting point, we can examine the concept of the value of labour-power that Marx presents. The value of labour-power, Marx proposes, is determined by the ‘value of the necessaries required to produce, develop, maintain, and perpetuate the labouring power’ (Marx, 1865b: 130). Yet, as Bob Rowthorn observed, this definition ‘is really no different from that given by classical economists such as Ricardo’ (Rowthorn, 1980: 206). It is a view of the worker as working animal, as piece of machinery. Simply stated, the value of labour-power must be sufficient to maintain this particular machine, to compensate for its ‘wear and tear’ and to provide for its ultimate replacement (in the desired quality). 104 Beyond Capital Given that Capital looks upon the worker from the perspective of capital (that is, as an object for capital rather than as a subject for herself), it is not surprising that the concept of the value of labour-power focuses not upon the worker’s ability to satisfy her socially determined needs but, rather, upon the cost of a productive input for capital. However, the implications are significant: once you approach the value of labourpower as the cost to capital of securing this peculiar instrument of production with a voice, a particular logic seems to develop. If, for example, the length of the working day were to be extended, extended beyond its normal duration, then obviously there will be accelerated depreciation in this machine – ‘the amount of deterioration in labour-power, and therefore its value, increases with the duration of its functioning’ (Marx, 1977: 686). The increase in the workday leads to ‘premature exhaustion’ of this input; and the result is that: the forces used up have to be replaced more rapidly, and it will be more expensive to reproduce labour-power, just as in the case of a machine, where the part of its value that has to be reproduced daily grows greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out (Marx, 1977: 376–7). This is a perspective in which the side of workers and the struggle of workers to satisfy their needs have no place. Capital’s proposition that an increased workday leads to an increase in the value of labour-power directly contradicts Marx’s understanding in Value, Price and Profit that ‘the respective power of the combatants’ determines if wages fall and the workday increases. Rather than that inverse relation between wages and the workday (flowing from class struggle), Capital here posits a direct relation. While this might make sense to a neoclassical economist who links wages to the quantity of labour performed, this argument seems quite out of place for Marx; yet, it is totally consistent with treating workers as comparable to lifeless instruments of production.2 So, how does this perspective differ from the position of political economy which the Young Marx criticized – the position that the ‘wages of labour have thus exactly the same significance as the maintenance and servicing of any other productive instrument?’ The answer is – it does not differ; it is the same perspective, the one-sided perspective of capital! The individual consumption of the worker, Marx noted in Capital, ‘remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital, just as the cleaning of machinery does.’ Indeed, ‘from the standpoint of society’, Marx commented (in the one-sided language of political economy), the working Wages 105 class ‘is just as much an appendage of capital as the lifeless instruments of labour are’ (Marx, 1977: 718–19). Since this wonderful working machine unfortunately not only depreciates but has a limited life, it follows that the maintenance of its usevalue includes expenditures both to redress its daily wear and tear and also for those ‘means necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e., his children’ (Marx, 1977: 275). ‘The man, like the machine’, Marx proposes, ‘will wear out, and must be replaced by another man.’ Accordingly, there must be sufficient necessaries ‘to bring up a certain quota of children that are to replace him on the labour market and to perpetuate the race of labourers’ (Marx, 1865b: 129). The similarity between Marx’s position (with its focus on the need for a definite quantity of children) and that of classical political economy is underlined by his own citation and quotation of the authority of Robert Torrens, whose definition of the value of labour-power (‘natural price’ of labour) included the necessities which would enable the worker ‘to rear such a family as may preserve, in the market, an undiminished supply of labour.’ Marx’s only criticism of Torrens here was that he wrongly used the term, ‘labour’ instead of ‘labour-power’ (Marx, 1977: 275n). As Rowthorn points out, Marx’s view (like that of political economy) in this case was clearly ‘demographic in inspiration’ (Rowthorn, 1980: 206). Indeed, nowhere is Marx’s subjection to the premises of political economy more obvious than in his treatment of the relation between the value of labourpower and population theory.3 The idea that there is a natural price of labour that ensures that capital has the labour force it requires runs throughout classical political economy, and Marx’s emphasis upon the need ‘to perpetuate the race of labourers’ demonstrates that this is a place where his break with that political economy was not complete. Consider the relation between a variable price of labour-power and a constant value of labour-power. For classical political economy, the relationship between the market price and the natural price of labour as a commodity was perfectly symmetrical with its treatment of other commodities. If the market price for products of capital exceeds what we may (inaccurately) designate as ‘value’, then an increased profit rate in such sectors will stimulate flows of capital and thereby generate subsequent supply increases such that prices are brought back into accord with ‘values’. In short, via supply shifts, the tendency is for ‘value’ (natural value or natural price) to be the long-run average around which chance fluctuations of market price revolve; it is ‘law’ in relation to contingency. In the classical view of workers, the same mechanism applied: if the price of labour-power increased (due to a rise in the demand for labour), 106 Beyond Capital then a wage in excess of subsistence would lead to an increase in the supply of labour-power via population increases; the resulting tendency would be to bring the price of labour-power back to the level of the value of labour-power (subsistence). Thus, the value of labour-power (natural price of labour) was the wage that would maintain a constant labouring population for capital. Of course, this is familiar as the classical (Malthusian) population theory – the price of labour-power adjusts to the value of labour-power via supply shifts. Like the classicals, Marx understood quite well that market prices are determined by supply and demand and that the price of labour-power is determined in the market. His chapter on ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’ describes how wages rise as the demand for workers increases – how relative to the rate of accumulation, ‘the rate of wages is the dependent, not the independent variable’ (Marx, 1977: 763, 770). Similarly, he understood that ‘relatively high wages’ in North America were the result of the supply and demand for workers there (Marx, 1865b: 146; Marx, 1977: 935–6). Also consistent with the classicals is the fact that Marx acknowledged the relationship between higher wages and a real increase in population: ‘Periods of prosperity facilitate marriage among the workers and reduce the decimation of their offspring.’ The effect was the same ‘as if the number of workers actually active had increased’ (Marx, 1981b: 363). Where Marx broke with classical theorists, however, was over the efficacy of population increases for capital. He argued that capital could not be content with what the natural increase in population yielded: ‘It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits’ (Marx, 1977: 788). Thus, Marx criticized the proposition that increased wages will generate a ‘more rapid multiplication’ of population and will thereby lead to a reduction of wages to their normal level primarily because the gestation period for production of this particular input, ‘the population really fit to work’, is too long. Capital cannot and will not wait for an absolute surplus population.4 Accordingly, capital substitutes a different productive input, machinery, and thereby produces unemployment – a relative surplus population that lowers wages because of increased competition among workers. Thus, ‘the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army’ (Marx, 1977: 790). The scenario that Marx offered in place of the classical emphasis upon population movements, consequently, is one where, in response to rising wages, the increase in the technical composition of capital (that is, the Wages 107 use of machinery) releases workers and drives down the price of labourpower as required. This is ‘the great beauty of capitalist production’: Thus the law of supply and demand as applied to labour is kept on the right lines, the oscillation of wages is confined within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured (Marx, 1977: 935). This is a better theory – but one still from the side of capital. Marx’s emphasis upon the role of machinery in restoring the price of labourpower to its customary level remains entirely within the bounds of classical political economy (especially Ricardo). Supply shifts continue to bring about the adjustment of price to value, with the difference only that the surplus population is relative rather than absolute. Significantly, too, this modification did not lead Marx to reject the formulation of the value of labour-power as containing provision for the generational replacement of labour-power because capital requires that ‘certain quota of children’ for future recruits.5 Given the assumption of fixed real wages and productivity, despite the introduction of machinery, neither the values of commodities nor the value of labour power changes; all we can talk about here, accordingly, is an oscillation of prices around values. II Standard of necessity constant; productivity variable Let us return to the basic case that Marx examines in Capital. By assuming the standard of necessity constant, Marx was able to focus specifically upon the effect of increases in productivity upon the value of labour-power and surplus value. Capital’s story of relative surplus value and of the drive of capital to revolutionize the process of production revolves around the tendency of the value of labour-power to fall as the result of increases in productivity. How plausible, however, is this story? Increases in productivity in the production of wage goods mean that the quantity of social labour necessary to produce the average worker (that is, the value of that given wage bundle) falls. Society, in short, now purchases that definite quantity of the means of subsistence with less of its labour; less money – the representative of that social labour – is required by workers to purchase that given set of necessities. Doesn’t this mean, all other things equal, that workers have additional money at their disposal? Unless we can demonstrate that this increase in 108 Beyond Capital productivity means that the money wage that workers receive has also fallen, don’t we have to conclude that workers are the immediate beneficiaries of this increase in productivity? After all, the exchange of labour-power for means of subsistence has two quite separate and distinct moments: the exchange of labour-power for money (Lp-M) and the exchange of money for articles of consumption (M-Ac). At any given point, we may assume that labour-power has been sold at its value – that is, the worker receives the equivalent in money of the value of that definite quantity of means of subsistence; in other words, the price of labour-power is equal to its value. Now, with the increase in productivity (q), the value of that set of means of subsistence has fallen; assuming the standard of necessity (U) constant, necessary labour (w) and its value-form, the value of labour-power, fall. ‘Although labour-power would be unchanged in price’, Marx (1977: 659) comments, ‘it would have risen above its value.’ So, why aren’t workers – rather than capitalists – the beneficiaries of productivity increases? To assume that the reduced quantity of money required to secure a definite quantity of means of subsistence translates into a reduced quantity of money which workers receive for the sale of their labour-power is to assume what must be demonstrated. Is it possible, in short, to construct a scenario in which the value of labour-power falls in accordance with increased productivity in the production of means of subsistence – that is, where workers do not benefit? (We explicitly abstract here from the effect of machinery on the labour market noted in the previous section in order to consider only the side of increased productivity.) These are the conditions of the problem: productivity increases (which can be assumed to drop from the sky), a fixed standard of necessity, falling value of labour-power and rising relative surplus value. As Marx (1977: 269) posed his challenge, ‘Hic Rhodus! Hic Salta!’ On their face, two scenarios appear to satisfy these stated conditions. Given the central assumption that the standard of necessity is fixed, the premise of these scenarios is that workers either do not purchase more means of subsistence or that any additional expenditures they may make are incidental and do not alter their conceptions of normal requirements. In both cases, a change in the labour market is required such that money wages fall in accordance with the values of means of subsistence. In the first scenario, insofar as a reduced value of articles of consumption leads to no additional consumption by workers, then by definition the effect of rising real income for workers will be the growth of their savings. (Rather than life-cycle savings, these funds would be set aside to Wages 109 permit workers to extract themselves from the status of wage-labourers.) As Marx pointed out, however, general savings by workers would be damaging to production (that is, to the demand for the output of those necessities) and ‘thus also to the amount and volume of the exchanges which they [workers] could make with capital, hence to themselves as workers.’ In short, the inability of capitalists to realize surplus value because of reduced consumption-spending by workers would lead to lower production, a reduced demand for labour, rising unemployment, and a falling price of labour-power: If they all save, then a general reduction of wages will bring them back to earth again; for general savings would show the capitalist that their wages are in general too high, that they receive more than its equivalent for their commodity, the capacity of disposing of their own labour; … (Marx, 1973: 285–6). Thus, in this scenario, the price of labour-power falls to the appropriate level because rather than spending what they get, the restriction on consumption expenditures means that workers get what they spend. The fall in the value of means of subsistence leads to a fall in the price of labour-power and, accordingly, a constant real wage. Yet, Marx would have been the first to point out that this is not a very realistic scenario. Workers spend what they get. Given their unsatisfied needs, when their income increases, they purchase more of the means of subsistence and satisfy needs previously unrealized: ‘if means of subsistence were cheaper, or money-wages higher, the workers would buy more of them’ (Marx, 1981b: 289–90). If this occurs, this first scenario could not work. In a second scenario, the combination of fixed commodity needs and reduced monetary requirements provides workers with the ability to marry earlier and maintain larger families. Thus, in this situation, rising population would bring about a falling price of labour-power (until such time that the fall in money-wages corresponds to the fall in the values of means of subsistence). This, of course, is a familiar scenario – classical political economy’s population theory, and we have already seen that Marx rejected the effectiveness of population growth in reducing the price of labour-power. These two scenarios based upon productivity increases combined with a standard of necessity fixed by definition, thus, don’t stand up. It leaves, though, an alternative scenario in which a given standard of necessity is enforced by class struggle; for example, with the decline in 110 Beyond Capital the value of wage-goods providing slack in the workers’ budget, capitalists could be emboldened to attempt to drive down money-wages to capture the gain for themselves in the form of surplus value. However, once we allow class struggle to determine the set of necessaries entering into the worker’s consumption, we are implicitly treating the latter as variable (which means that a fixed standard is only one of several possible outcomes). III Standard of necessity variable; productivity constant By specifying constant productivity and a variable standard of necessity, we can focus upon struggles over distribution of a given output.6 Given constant productivity, an increase in the standard of necessity, all other things equal, means an increase in necessary labour and thus a reduction in surplus labour. Similarly, capital may attempt to drive down real wages in order to increase surplus value; it is a zero-sum game. In short, class struggle in the labour market is the focus of this section. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, the prices of wage goods or of labour-power may oscillate as the result of shifts in supply and demand without this in itself producing a change in the standard of necessity. Under these conditions, despite changes in money-wages, necessary labour and the value of labour-power remain unchanged. Thus, if the price of labour-power exceeds its value, it means that workers are receiving more than the equivalent of their necessary labour; although still compelled to work longer than necessary (as defined with reference to a definite quantity of means of subsistence), the worker ‘appropriates a part of his surplus labour for himself’ (Marx, 1973: 579). The worker here ‘gains in enjoyment of life, what the capitalist loses in the rate of appropriating other people’s labour’: ‘an increase in wages over their normal average level is, on the part of the workers, a sharing in, an appropriation of, a part of his own surplus labour (similarly assuming the productive power of labour remains constant)’ (Marx, 1988: 235). With those higher wages, workers receive back ‘in the shape of means of payment’ a portion of their ‘own surplus product’. As a result, ‘they can extend the circle of their enjoyments, make additions to their consumption fund of clothes, furniture, etc., and lay by a small reserve fund of money’ (Marx, 1977: 769). Such occasions are an opportunity for the worker to widen ‘the sphere of his pleasures’: the worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending