Value, Price and Profit, XIII – Main Cases At Attempts of Raising Wages or Resisting Their Fall - Part 8 of 8

The slave, as discussed earlier, must be maintained, permanently, by the slave owner, even if the slave owner does so out of the product of the slave they appropriate. The serf has the security of the use of land to ensure their own reproduction, even if they must also hand over a quantity of free labour, products or money to the landlord as tribute. But, the wage-worker has no such security. The capitalist has no requirement to permanently maintain the worker, only to pay them wages for the period of employment. Unlike the serf, the wage worker has no independent means of production to ensure their own subsistence, because they are monopolised by capital.

“He must try to get a rise of wages in the one instance, if only to compensate for a fall of wages in the other. If he resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist as a permanent economical law, he would share in all the miseries of the slave, without the security of the slave.” (p 83-4)

The idea, therefore, that either capital can raise prices of commodities, or reduce wages, or that workers can raise wages, simply as an act of will, is false. It is subjectivist and unscientific, ignoring the fact that all of these prices are ultimately determined by values. The action of supply and demand, whether for labour-power, as a commodity, or for any other commodity, in bringing about movements of market prices, only moves these prices around their values. Moreover, the changes in supply and demand are themselves functions of these underlying material conditions, and objective laws. The idea that the determination of relative wages, and consequently relative profits is simply a matter of greedy capitalists, on the one side, or “more militancy” by workers, on the other side, pitted against each other in a battle of wills is unscientific.

“In all the cases I have considered, and they form ninety-nine out of a hundred, you have seen that a struggle for a rise of wages follows only in the track of previous changes, and is the necessary offspring of previous changes in the amount of production, the productive powers of labour, the value of labour, the value of money, the extent or the intensity of labour extracted, the fluctuations of market prices, dependent upon the fluctuations of demand and supply, and consistent with the different phases of the industrial cycle; in one word, as reactions of labour against the previous action of capital. By treating the struggle for a rise of wages independently of all these circumstances, by looking only upon the change of wages, and overlooking all other changes from which they emanate, you proceed from a false premise in order to arrive at false conclusions.” (p 84)

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