Workers do not become immiserated by this process, quite the contrary, but their exploitation, in the Marxist sense, of the amount of unpaid labour they must provide, continually rises, and, for the reasons Marx sets out, this exploitation is all the greater in those developed capitalist economies where social productivity is highest. Again, this is the exact opposite to the arguments put forward by the Sismondists, Stalinists and Third Worldists, who talk about super-exploitation, in the least developed economies, and on the basis of it, justify their hostility to the very capitalist development that would be the basis of lifting the living standards of workers in these economies.
When Marx talks about poverty, in this context, he does not mean lack of income or standard of living, i.e. affluence. The terms wealth and poverty refer to stock not flows. What Marx means by wealth is a large stock of assets, in particular of capital. Poverty is its opposite. Labourers are poor not as a result of low wages, but because of non-ownership of capital, or other assets. A worker may be very affluent, in terms of a high money wage, and the range of wage goods they can buy with it that constitutes their standard of living. But, that does not make them rich, because they do not own capital, and, in such a developed economy, they are unlikely to be able to acquire capital on a sufficient scale for it to be able to function effectively as capital. Their affluence only exists so long as they have paid employment, and their paid employment is conditional on them providing large amounts of unpaid labour to capital.
A small peasant farmer in China may have a much lower standard of living than the above affluent worker. Where the worker might work an 8 hour day, the peasant farmer may work a 12 hour day. But, the worker may only work 30 minutes of necessary labour, providing capital with 7½ hours of surplus labour, whilst the peasant farmer might work for 11 hours of necessary labour, just to sustain their meagre standard of living, undertaking just 1 hour of surplus labour, which they use to try to expand their own production. But, the peasant farmer has wealth, where the affluent worker does not. They can increase their wealth by the slow accumulation of means of production, from their 1 hour of surplus labour, each day, whereas the 7½ hours of surplus labour of the affluent worker is directly appropriated by capital, and increasingly confronts them itself as an alien force, requiring even more unpaid labour from them, under constant threat of removing the paid employment from them. The small peasant farmer, unless confronted by some natural crisis, has no such concern, they can continue to employ themselves and provide for their own meagre needs.
It was this concept that lay behind the ascetic ideas of Ravenstone, but which also lies behind the reactionary ideas of Sismondi, in trying to hold back capitalist development. The same ideas are criticised by Lenin, in his writings on Economic Romanticism, and they continue to be presented today in the arguments of the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”, who, to use Marx's phrase above, “hark back to antiquated forms of the contradiction in order to be rid of it in its acute form.”
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