“It is correct, on the other hand, that, if the surplus product is large and the greater part of it is to be employed as capital, then there must be an increase in the demand for labour and therefore also in that part of the surplus product which is exchanged for wages (provided large numbers of workers did not have to be thrown out of work in order to obtain a surplus product of this size). At all events, it is not the absolute size of the surplus product (in whatever form it may exist, even that of necessaries) which necessarily requires it to be expended as variable capital and which consequently causes an increase in wages, but it is the desire to capitalise which results in a large part of the surplus product being laid out in variable capital and this would consequently make wages grow with the accumulation of capital if machinery did not constantly make [a section of] the population redundant and if an ever greater portion of capital (in particular as a result of foreign trade) were not exchanged for capital, not for labour.” (p 243-4)
But, this simply reflects the contradiction alluded to earlier. The condition required for rising wages is that labour-power is in high demand. A high demand for labour-power is a consequence of an increased rate of capital accumulation, but the highest rate of accumulation is facilitated by the maximisation of the rate of profit, and the rate of profit is maximised when wages are kept to the minimum. In reality, this contradiction is resolved via crises, and assumes its phenomenal expression in the continual distributional struggle between capital and labour. At times, periods of extensive accumulation, the demand for labour-power relatively exceeds the supply. Competition between firms pushes up wages. Workers become more confident, they rebuild their organisations, reformist and syndicalist ideas, built on the possibility of improving the workers' condition, by bargaining within the system, are strengthened. This takes the phenomenal form of a growth of trades union membership, increased militancy, strikes etc., of a growth in support for reformist social-democratic parties, so that alongside the strikes for better pay and conditions also goes demands for a redistribution of income, at a national level, via taxation and benefits, and an expansion of the welfare state.
Eventually, this reaches a point where the rise in wages, and the social wage, squeezes profits. As workers' consumption rises, any increase in production of the existing range of wage goods becomes harder and harder to sell, at prices that realise a profit, due to the process Marx described previously in relation to knives, i.e. the effect of the elasticity of demand. Workers begin to diversify their consumption into what was previously luxury goods, but their ability to consume them, depends upon the price of these luxuries having fallen sufficiently that the workers, even with their higher wages, can buy them. It becomes harder and harder for the accumulated capital to act as capital, because, the increased demand for labour-power has pushed up wages, squeezing profit margins. It represents an overproduction of capital, as Marx described in Capital III, Chapter 15. Workers could make production more profitable, if they accepted lower wages, but a) if they accepted lower wages they could consume less, thereby transferring the problem from being one of the production of surplus value, to being one of the realisation of surplus value as profit; b) the higher wages are actually a function of the demand for labour-power outstripping the supply, not simply of workers subjectively demanding higher wages, which is why, in the end, all prices and wages policies, such as the Social Contract, of the 1970's, fall apart, and attempts to limit wages, such as the Tories' 1% public sector pay cap, simply result in anomalies, distortions and dislocations in the labour market.
No comments:
Post a Comment