Karl, Marx. 1849. “Wage Labour and Capital” Pp. 273-293 in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan, Oxford University Press.

• Notes based on version in 2nd Edition, published in 2000 (original in 1977)

Project: Wage, labour, and capital all have determinants and interrelational dependencies, and Marx wishes to thoroughly outline them individually.

OVERVIEW

Wages vary for different workers, and, of course, capitalists. Wages are just the special name of the price for labour power, which the capitalist is buying, just as a price is the special name for the exchange-value of a commodity. Capital is a sum of all these concepts necessary in the means of production, from raw material to social magnitudes. The more of it that there is, the more common-spread competition is. The gap between the worker and the capitalist is rising constantly.

BULLETED NOTES

1. Relation of wage labour to capital, slavery, rule of the capitalist
2. Inevitable ruin of middle classes, bourgeoisie, and peasants within the present system
3. Exploitation of bourgeoise classes by the despot of the world market–Europe

(274)

• Everyone makes different wages
• Wages are the amount of money the capitalist pays for a certain amount of work of time of work
• Capitalist is buying labour
• Worker has exchanged his commodity of work for a plethora of commodity opportunities/possibilities
• Wages are just a special name for price of labour
• “Wages are the part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys for himself a definite amount of productive labour…Labour is, therefore, a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital… in order to live (275).
• The product he produces is not his goal!  “…the product of his activity is not the object of his activity” (276).
• His time/hours belong to whoever BUYS them…*
• Wages are determined by the same laws that price any other commodity–how is commodity price determined? BY COST OF PRODUCTION
  • Competition also increases the price of a given commodity
• “The determination of price by the cost of production is equivalent to the determination of price by the labour time necessary for the manufacture of a commodity…” (279-280)
  • Raw materials and direct labour (what cost of production consists of)
• What is the cost of production of labour?
• Social relations–capital is a social relation of production
• Capital is a sum of social magnitudes, means of subsistence, instruments of labour, raw materials, exchange values, and commodities.
• “…capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other” (283).
• Small amount of exchange values must produce a larger amount of exchange values.
• The social position of the worker is getting lower–that of the capitalist rising…
• Profit rises in the same way that wages fall, and vice versa.
• Capitalists rise when taking advantage of other capitalists or when instruments of labour improve.
• Wages fall BECAUSE profit rises…
• Labour increases in its dependence on capital (question below).
• The more capital there is, the more competition there is. 
• Wage labour can diminish at the hands of machinery. I say, we will then be competing with machinery for work or with capitalists for capital or with property owners for property. We may resort to cheating, lying, forgery, theft, and fraud to survive in this kind of extreme capitalistic setting with no other choice: Disintegrate or immorally persevere. Rates of poverty and homelessness will have skyrocketed and remain in place, and then the collapse…

QUESTIONS

• Marx asks many questions about how prices are determined, from relativity and comparisons governing prices to supply and demand… do these forces become collective in their dictation of price? Does true value play a role? And competition…
• How does labour depend on capital? Work cannot occur without the material and the need for the resulting product and the existence of money, the main motivation. Is this it?
• Division of labour causes even deeper division of labour… how so? Because of the expansion over time? He then discusses the convenience of machines and how they make production cheaper. How does this increase division of labour? Wouldn’t it decrease it?
  • “…the division of labour is necessarily followed by greater division of labour…” (289)