And, so can also be seen the reason for the opposition to such regulation, for example by the EU, from all of those petty-bourgeois producers and traders, who grew in social weight from the 1980's onwards, and who captured conservative social-democratic parties, be it the Tories or Republicans etc., and who developed a series of reactionary, petty-bourgeois, populist parties, on their right flanks.
Marx notes that the fact that without regulation there would be no limitations shows that capital has a naturally stronger position. Competition for work weakens the position of labour. In contrast, Marx notes the point made earlier, about workers in the United States.
“The position of a wages labourer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term. To mend this colonial state of things the paternal British Government accepted for some time what is called the modern colonization theory, which consists in putting an artificial high price upon colonial land, in order to prevent the too quick conversion of the wages labourer into the independent peasant.” (p 89)
This fact led US capital to start by using machines and technology to a greater degree, in place of labour. The Civil War, also, meant that Northern industry could draw in black workers from the South, similar to the way England sucked in agricultural workers to the towns.
Marx, then, turns to the situation in agriculture, in Britain, between 1849-59. It was a period of long wave boom. Many rural workers moved to higher paid industrial jobs, but, also, during this period, more people were employed in railway construction than any other sphere. On top of that, others were drawn into the army, during the Crimean War. The result was a shortage of agricultural labour, and rise in wages.
“What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and with this the scale of production, and by these and other processes diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its productive power, made the agricultural population again relatively redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in old, settled countries.” (p 89-90)
Indeed, as Marx sets out, in Capital III, this is the means by which it resolves a crisis of overproduction of capital. It creates a relative surplus population, by using labour-saving technology, thereby, reducing relative wages, and raising relative profits; it raises productivity, and so reduces the value of labour-power, increasing relative surplus value; it educes the value of fixed capital, thereby, raising the rate of profit, and creating a release of capital available for accumulation.
Marx notes that these factors lead to a rising organic composition of capital that, in itself, puts labour in a weaker position.
“If of a total capital of 600, 300 is laid out in instruments, raw materials, and so forth, and 300 in wages, the total capital wants only to be doubled to create a demand for 600 working men instead of for 300. But if of a capital of 600, 500 is laid out in machinery, materials, and so forth and 100 only in wages, the same capital must increase from 600 to 3,600 in order to create a demand for 600 workmen instead of 300. In the progress of industry the demand for labour keeps, therefore, no pace with the accumulation of capital. It will still increase, but increase in a constantly diminishing ratio as compared with the increase of capital.” (p 91-2)
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