Wage-Labor and Capital (1979)

From the Spring/Summer 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

It has been said that Marx was a writer who spent the greater part of his life writing one important book under a number of different titles. The book referred to is, of course, Capital — a book the knowledge of which is virtually indispensable to an educated person in our time. Not alone is Capital a significant and influential chapter in economic thought but it is also a major book about MAN. Within its covers one will find a miscellany of topics of general interest, such as education, the family and its future, the implications of modern technological development, and so on.

Among the various analytical writings of Marx and Engels, and the best simple introduction to Marxism in Marx’s own words, is Wage-Labor and Capital. This work was first published in 1849, incorporating the text of lectures Marx delivered before members of the German Workingmen’s Club of Brussels, Belgium. In editing it for publication Engels made several changes, the most significant being the substitution of “labor power” [1] for the term “labor” in contexts in which Marx originally spoke of the worker’s sale of his labor to the capitalist.

Describing wages and the wage system of capitalism, and the worker’s selling of his labor power, or ability to work, to the capitalist, Marx wrote:

“. . . labor power is a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to the capitalist. Why does he sell it? In order to live. But the putting of labor into action, Le., the work, is the active expression of the laborer’s own life. And this life activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. His life activity, therefore, is but a means of securing his own existence. He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself as part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another. The product of his activity, therefore, is not the aim of his activity. What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold he draws up the mining shaft, not the palace he builds. What he produces for himself is the wages, and silk, gold and palace are resolved for him into a certain quantity of necessaries of life.”

The striking exactness with which Marx portrayed the role of the wageworker in capitalist society bears its own conclusion. The commodity labor power is unlike any other commodity. It creates more value than its own market value, that is, it produces an amount of value over and above its own value. In brief, the worker labors for the equivalent of but a part of what he produces, and what he produces for himself is no more than enough to live on and to father and bring up more wage workers to replace him. Under capitalism the workers, as a class, are condemned to relative material impoverishment.

The laborer, unlike the chattel slave of the past, does not belong to the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, but a good part of the laborer’s life does belong to the buyer of his labor power. Writes Marx:

“The worker leaves the capitalist to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as long as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him. But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labor, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence. He does not belong to this or that capitalist, but to the capitalist class; and it is for him to find his man, i.e., to find a buyer in this capitalist class.’’

Hence it comes about that socialists refer to workers, unflatteringly perhaps but nonetheless actually, as wage slaves. Capitalism dictates this abominable state of affairs, for capitalism is a system of society in which the instruments of production are operated not in the interest of society as a whole but rather for the private profit of those who own them by means of the socialized labor of the workers; and though the workers are not chattel slaves they are its modern equivalent — wage slaves, bound to a numerically small owning class if they would live and care for their loved ones.

Just what is it that takes place in the exchange between capitalist and wage laborer? Let Marx speak:

“The laborer receives means of subsistence in exchange for his labor power; but the capitalist received, in exchange for his means of subsistence, the productive activity of the laborer, the creative force by which the worker not only replaces what he consumes, but also gives to accumulated labor (of the raw materials) a greater value than it previously possessed. The laborer gets from the capitalist a portion of the existing means of subsistence. For what purpose do these means of subsistence serve him? For immediate consumption. But as soon as I consume means of subsistence, they are irrevocably lost to me, unless I employ the time during which these means sustain my life in producing new means of subsistence, in creating by my labor new values lost in consumption.”

This, then, is the gloomy picture of the workers. The worker when he receives his wage must spend it to live so that he produces more for the capitalist, and so that he can reproduce the equivalent of his wage again so that he can produce still more for the capitalist, and the equivalent of his wage again, and so on through his working life. The worker is chained to the treadmill of reproducing his bare subsistence, of laboring to live and living to labor for the non-worker, the capitalist.

We live in a society where instead of slavery or serfdom we have the wage system. While formerly the slave owners and serf lords appropriated the results of labor frankly, capitalists now do it deceitfully. The wage worker, if he will live, must agree to relinquish most of what he produces to the owner of the means of production.

Within the confines of the capitalist system there is no escape from this degrading oppression for the vast majority of workers. True, one can point to examples of working men raising themselves out of their class, but not of raising their class. If you would start to weaken the chains that bind you, of understanding what capitalism really is, how it operates, and why per force there are victims, it is recommended that you read Wage-Labor and Capital. If in your reading one point or another is not clear to you the World Socialist Party fraternally invites inquiries and welcomes the opportunity to clarify the point(s) in question.

REN.

[1] Labor power includes all the productive attributes of individuals, from the most elementary manual capacity to the most highly valued personality characteristics and managerial and technical skills.

Labor: Dignity of Man (1979)

From the Spring/Summer 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

In the ITU Review, June 8, 1978, under the heading: “Labor: Dignity of Man” appears this quote: . . . it is part of the dignity of man to create for himself and his family a basis for living through work” (My emphasis.) Unfortunately, the implication of the quote is that there is a harmony of interests between capital and labor. Can it be ignored that the primary objective of unions is as a weapon in the interests of the workers that arise because of the conflicts between capital and labor?

Capital's primary concern is PROFITS, and profits alone. Labor’s primary interests are wages and shop conditions. By the very nature of the economic relationships it cannot be otherwise, despite the claims of capital to the contrary. And the lessons of experience have proven this.

The notion that working for wages “creates for himself and his family a basis for living through work” is an illusion! The products produced by the workers on the job do NOT belong to them but to capital. Wages are determined by the costs of living! This can be seen by the many escalator clauses in union contracts.

Need I emphasize that today has seen a tremendous stride in science and technology? It has been established by research that nobody starves today because of shortages despite the propaganda to the contrary. The times are now ripe for a world fit for human beings instead of today’s dog-eat-dog jungle. Today, food is produced primarily FOR SALE, not only to be eaten. That is why potatoes, corn, wheat, cattle, etc., etc., are destroyed. We all are aware of this.

What is needed today is a world where everyone gives according to their abilities and receives according to their needs based on a real system of the DIGNITY OF MAN, freed from exploitation. This is no utopia but a present NECESSITY!!!

Rab.

In Boston Typographical Bulletin

A statement on trade unions (1979)

From the Fall 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

Under Capitalism the worker must organise into unions to improve or defend his wages and conditions of labour. But that is something quite apart from the political struggle for Socialism.

The modern class struggle first showed itself as the action and reaction between capitalist and worker on the industrial field. But the worker does not see it as a class struggle. In many ways the worker believes that the capitalist and worker have a common interest. The attitude of the worker when he votes, during wars, and his support of capitalist governments on many questions makes this clear. Although the worker has shown a growing consciousness during recent years of his position as a wage worker, yet he has been drawn into national and international questions which do not concern him and which we are bound to oppose.

When the worker becomes class conscious he realises not only that it is a class conflict he is engaged in but that it can only be fought out on the political field, because all class struggles are political struggles and must be so — struggles for control of the state.

Our sole job is to prosecute the class struggle on the political field and not be led into false positions by supporting trade union actions just because workers take part in them.

The fact that workers in trade unions indiscriminately support Tory, Liberal and Labour parties is incontrovertible evidence that their membership in trade unions is something apart from their political affiliations. The mass of those who support the Labour Party do so because they think that the Labour Party will help them to get better wages and conditions of labour.

Workers join trade unions in the main for the sole purpose of getting better wages and conditions in their particular industry, often regardless of the interests of workers in other industries employed by other employers. Further than that, they fight against each other on questions of status — and sometimes one union fights against another. This has become more frequent in recent years.

These are questions we should not be involved in and questions upon which we cannot always get proper information.

Again, leaders of trade unions, for their own aggrandisement, sometimes project the weight of their unions into questions that are outside the trade union struggle and contrary to the interests of the international working class.

Unions make their own blacklegs by setting limits to the number that can be employed in an industry and by barring certain categories of workers.

It should be borne in mind that we are not organised to improve the wages and conditions of workers under capitalism but to abolish the conditions that have given rise to capitalist and worker and replace them by Socialism.

Gilbert McClatchie, 

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Blogger's Note:

This was obviously an old piece, as Gilbert McClatchie actually died in April 1976. His obituary appeared in the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Materialist Conception of History (1979)

From the Fall 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

Down through the ages there have been various interpretations of history. For example, there are the theories which see in history the working out and realization of some sort of divine plan — like Hegel’s philosophy of history, which sees the whole historical development of society as the realization stage by stage of the so-called Absolute Idea. Again, there are the various theories which see history as moving through “cycles,” every civilization passing by some inescapable necessity through the cycle of rise, plentitude of power and decline — as in Spengler’s Decline of the West or Toynbee’s Studies in History. These are idealist theories and socialists are opposed to them. The idealism of such theories lies in the fact that they see the laws of development of society as a “fate” imposed upon society from outside, so that men and women are mere instruments of fate, the tools of external necessity. If such theories are accepted, then we are driven to fatalism. If what takes place is in the hands of God, or is decreed by fate, or follows by some iron necessity — it makes little difference in practice which you say — then it follows there is little we can do to determine our own destinies for ourselves.

Until the advent of Marx the various interpretations of history might be listed under five headings — religious, political, hero, ideas, and war. The elaborations found under these headings make interesting reading but they all contain serious shortcomings. The war or military interpretation of history, for instance, fails to recognize that war, a phenomenon that has been present in all phases of human development, is a result rather than a cause of events. With the coming of Marx and his theory of the materialist conception of history, history took on new meaning — it became rooted in the material conditions of life.

This interpretation of history holds that in any given epoch the economic relations of society, the means whereby men and women provide for their sustenance, produce, exchange, and distribute the things they regard as necessary for the satisfaction of their needs, exert a preponderating influence in shaping the progress of society and in molding political, social, intellectual and ethical relationships. In his Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, Edward Aveling, Marx’s son-in-law defines this theory :

“The materialist conception of history is that the chief, the fundamental factor in the development of any nation or any society, is the economic factor — that is, the way In which the nation, or the society, produces and exchanges its commodities . . .

"Now, whilst it (the economic factor) appears to be the fundamental one, there are others developed from it and reflexes of it, that also play their parts, acting and reacting upon their parent, the economic factor, and one another. The art, the science, the literature, the religion, the legal and juridical formulae of a country, although they all spring directly from the economic conditions of the country, have to be reckoned with.”

The most complete and most significant statement of the main elements of the materialist conception of history are formulated in Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. There one learns that the subject matter of history is man himself, his economic and social conditions and not his ideas. The relations between men’s material conditions of life and their ideas are described in this general fashion by Marx: It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence which determines their consciousness. William Ebenstein in his Today’s Isms illustrates this concept:

“In a nomadic society . . . horses might be considered the principal means of acquiring and accumulating wealth. From Marx’s viewpoint, this foundation of nomadic life is the clue to its superstructure of law, government and dominant ideas. Thus, Marx would say that those who are the owners of the greatest number of horses in such a nomadic society would also be the political chieftains who make and interpret the law; they are also likely to receive the highest response and deference from the tribe’s members who own no horses. In the realm of ideas, the predominant social and cultural concepts would reflect the dominant economic position of the owners and horses. Even in religion the impact would not be missing. God might, for instance, be represented in the image of a swift and powerful rider, and the concept of divine justice and rule would be, in a sense, an extension and magnification of human justice as determined by the horse-owning chiefs.’’

Even as the above horse-owning class determined the political, social, legal, and cultural institutions in its society, so, too, do we find, on looking back, that the landowners in a settled agricultural society set its society’s values. Today in our industrial society the owners of the means of production are in the saddle and have been for the last two hundred years. No matter the formal and legal facades, this owning class, the capitalist class, rules contemporary society. This class conceives that “the ultimate purpose of the law, education, the press, and artistic and literary creation is to maintain an ideology that is imbued with the sanctity and justice of capitalist property ownership.”

The misrepresentations and distortions of Marx’s writings are legion. They perhaps are paralleled only by the slanders and vilifications on Marx’s person. For instance, critics love to reproach Marx that the materialist conception of history disregards the influence of non-economic factors. This is not so. There is nothing in Marx’s theory to indicate such an assertion, though it is true that he failed sufficiently to safeguard himself against this charge. Engels repeatedly acknowledged that many interacting forces give rise to an historic event. Again, some critics would have one believe that Marx’s “materialism” is but a depiction of man’s wish for monetary gain and comfort, of his desire for material goods, and this charge is sometimes coupled with the distortion that Marx was an advocate of the barracks, that is, the giving up of one’s individuality and entrusting oneself to an all-powerful state bureaucracy. Again not so. Relative to this Erich Fromm writes in Marx’s Concept of Man:

This “description . . . fits almost exactly the reality of present-day Western capitalist society. The majority of people are motivated by a wish for greater material gain, for comfort and gadgets, and this wish is restricted only by the desire for security and the avoidance of risks. They are increasingly satisfied with a life regulated and manipulated, both in the sphere of production and of consumption, by the state and the big corporations and their respective bureaucracies; they have reached a degree of conformity which has wiped out individuality to a remarkable extent They are, to use Marx’s term, impotent ‘commodity men’ serving virile machines. The very picture of mid-twentieth century capitalism is hardly distinguishable from the caricature of Marxist socialism as drawn by its opponents.”

The materialist conception of history is not only a theory about how to interpret history, but also a theory about how to make history. This theory was arrived at by Marx by applying the materialist world outlook to the solution of social problems. And in making this application materialism was no longer just a theory aimed at interpreting the world, of building a society free of the expoitation of man by man.

REN.

America . . . Land of the Free (1979)

From the Fall 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

America is the land of the free. Or is it? They certainly taught you at school that you were a free citizen living in a free country. The media screams out the glorious message to you every day: “You are free — now go to work.” Read the American Declaration of Independence; you can’t be freer than that . . . can you?

The definition of freedom adopted by a society determines the degree to which it imagine itself to be free. The Greeks called their society a free one, but it was based upon slavery. Since the Sixteenth Century in Europe individualism has reigned supreme. Liberty, in accordance with this definition, means the liberty of the individual: if you’re a worker you demand the liberty to work; if you’re a landlord you demand the liberty to take rent; if you’re a manufacturer you demand the liberty to make profits. Such is the freedom of individualism.

But what if your freedom is my slavery, if your profit is my unpaid labour, if your luxury is my poverty? Is that freedom Yes, it is the freedom of the individual.

The individualist conception of freedom is a class based one. It works well as long as there are workers willing to pay the price for the liberty of the minority. The working class need a new conception of freedom, a social expression of freedom. This will be in the interest of not just the lucky few, but the entire population of society. The social expression of freedom is socialism. Socialists argue that freedom is not just an abstract notion providing a defence for oppression, but a political necessity arising out of class antagonisms which are caused by property society. The socialist view of freedom is not moral — for morality tends to be simply the defence of established social relations — but practical. We do not say that freedom is desirable, but that it will be inevitable if workers are to bring to an end the oppression which is the product of class society.

Capitalist ideology faces a profound dilemma. Its liberal philosophical origins incline it towards conceptions of liberty and democracy, but its structure causes the system to act against the freedom of the vast majority, the working class. The liberal capitalist’s utopia is the liberal State described by Mill and proposed by the Declaration of Independence, but in practice the State serves as the oppressor of the working class. This must be so for property to be defended and profits to be made. In America and Western Europe the workers have won the right to participate in their own oppression by their possession of the vote. This is a valuable weapon which could be used to win control of the State machine and abolish capitalism. But workers Should be under no liberal illusions: this limited freedom is ever-precarious while the owning class have the upper hand. Legal expressions of freedom are useful, as those who lack them know, but they are no substitute for social freedom itself.

Socialists do not stand for individual freedom. The “right” of the capitalist to exploit the workers is not in our interest and so we oppose it. We will not support campaigns for the “right” of parasites to send their children to better schools than the rest or the “right” of the indolent class to kill animals for entertainment. We want social freedom where there will be no classes, no government, no laws, no social discrimination on grounds of age, race or sex, and free access to all wealth.

Such social freedom implies democratic decision-making. That will not mean simply the act of mindlessly voting for a leader once every few years. It will mean the informed, intelligent, uncoerced organisation of social affairs in which the minority viewpoint will be given the same freedom of expression as that of the majority.

Under capitalism they tell people that they are free and it is because the majority are unfree that they believe it. Let there be no confusion in the minds of the working class about the extent of their freedom.

Ask yourself this simple question: if you refused to sell your mental or physical energies on the labour market for one month how much food would your free society give you to eat? The answer is that under capitalism you can starve to death for all your mythical freedom.

Steve Coleman

Abuse of a revolutionary by the bourgeois press (1979)

From the Fall 1979 issue of The Western Socialist

If one thing is certain it is this: that no writer in history has been more misrepresented by his friends or vilified and abused by his foes than Karl Marx. For example, his “friends” the Russians misrepresent him to help them continue the massive fraud that Russia has something to do with socialism or communism. On the other hand, his avowed enemies don’t consider at what he said, merely at what his supposed friends said he said. And as that is usually so awful, the press find it useful to present Marx to the working class as a sort of bogey man, in a way mothers used to frighten children. What concerns socialists is not some defence of Marx as though his works were holy writ. But we are interested here for two main reasons: first, because we think truth is important; second, because although the case of the WSP is our own unique point of view, we are the first to acknowledge our debt to Marx. It was his towering achievements that enabled the founders of this party to place socialism on a sound basis.

So let me take two prime examples of abuse of Marx from the British bourgeois press to illustrate the point. The first from The Times in an article by Philip Howard called “Keeping cool in these muddy Marxist waters” (12/29/76). This article explains that the word “Marxism” has been used indiscriminately and suggests that the term ought to be used to describe followers of the political and economic theory of Marx. Howard then gives the reader the “three principles” of Marx. It is fair to say that the first principle is approximately correct but trite, and that the second and third principle given by Howard are wrong. The first principle says Howard is that Marx held that “labour is basic to wealth,” Now this is not a doctrine of Marx, but a truism that was obvious long before Marx was born. What Marx did, however, was to point out that capitalism functions on the basis of the work of the working class being paid for (in wages) by the capitalist class, at less than the worth of the things (commodities) the workers produced for the capitalists. This difference between what the worker produces for the capitalist and what the capitalist pays the worker is what Marx called “surplus value,” (I come back to that below) and is the source of profit.

The second principle of Marx according to Howard is “that economic determinism governs human activities in every sphere.” Rubbish! Marx said no such thing! Economic determinism means that every human action, in particular the human actions involved in the development of human society, i.e., history, are purely the result of the economic relations in society. Put simply the doctrine means men have no say in their destiny. This is not what Marx said at all. On the contrary, Marx said that men make history, though they do not necessarily do so as “free agents.” They can only make history out of the circumstances at hand. To take a simple example: it is impossible to build a machine that will fly, until scientific development has reached a certain level. Economic determinism is a doctrine designed to demonstrate that human action is irrelevant to social change. The horrors that have been practiced in its name by the Soviet block owe nothing to Marx.

The third principle of Marx according to Howard is “that historical development . . . must lead to the violent overthrow of the capitalist class and the taking over of the means of production by the proletariat. the real problem here is the word “violent.” Marx (and Engels) made it clear that in those countries where political democracy prevails (for example in the USA today) the revolution to establish socialism must be democratic and peaceful. Indeed, the socialist revolution cannot occur in any other way. The “violence” notion is an invention of others, usually used to justify the purported establishment of socialism in the face of the opposition of the majority. But socialism can only be established by the majority of the world’s working class, in the full knowledge of all that the establishment of socialism entails. This means that the socialist revolution must be a peaceful one. Violence is only necessary where understanding is absent. This is the WSP’s point of view, and there is nothing in Marx’s mature works that dissents from it.

So Howard, having started out to present the alleged principles of Marxism, ends by spreading as much confusion as possible. But then slandering Marx is no new thing for the bourgeois press. The right-wing Daily Telegraph naturally is not above such things. They published an article on Marx by Robert Conquest called ‘“A Little Bit of Poison”. (4/30/77) If for that title you read “A Huge Host of Invention” you will have an idea of the article’s purpose.

Conquest’s article says that Marx was wrong from the word go (though in the same article Conquest says Marx is refuted by 1900!). The article begins with a classic piece of villainy — identifying people who CLAIM that what they stand for has something to do with Marx, as representative of Marx’s ideas. Conquest starts with Wedgwood Benn (the British Labour Party politician) and ends, predictably, with Lenin and the Russian monstrosity. Conquest first says that Wedgwood Benn and the faction of the Labour Party that he represents has something to do with Marxism. How incredible it is that this myth still persists. The Labour Party (Wedgwood Benn and the others) is a party committed to one system of society only, capitalism. It was formed to obtain political power for the purpose of trying to do the impossible — improve capitalism in the interests of the working class. Seventy-three years after its inception, here is the Labour Party today still feebly trying to do the undoable, make capitalism work for all. Mr. Conquest has nothing to do with Marx’s main aim; i.e., the analysing of capitalism in monumental detail for the purpose of showing the working class that capitalism is not in their interests.

To get to the end of Conquest’s article, he deals with Russia and the Leninist distortion. The World Socialist Party has pointed out time after time the ludicrous nature of the suggestion that what took place in Russia in 1917 and has been taking place since has anything to do with socialism or by implication with Marx. There is no need to set out at length again the reasons the WSP and its companion parties has given for pointing out that the Russian revolution was not socialist. Anyone who wants further information on this subject is welcome to write to the party, and references to extensive party literature dealing with the subject can be supplied. Suffice it to say here that the Russian working class in 1917 was in no way ready to establish a world of common ownership.

Between these two extremes of ignorance and prejudice Conquest turns his mighty attention to Marx’s analysis of the class struggle and the importance of surplus value. Conquest claims that Marx analysed society in terms of class struggle, and then in his later research discovered that in modern times the class struggle “is rooted in the fact that all profit is extracted — as ‘surplus value’ — from the workers”. This argument says Conquest “is purest metaphysics. No evidence was presented”! This last libel borders on the fantastic. To claim that Marx’s economic analysis is wrong is one thing. If such an argument were supported by reasoned discussion it could be examined on its merits. But lack of evidence! Has Conquest ever tried to lift the 3 volumes of “Capital” and the 3 volumes of “Theories of Surplus Value,” let alone read them? The painstaking way Marx evidences his arguments is so formidable that it has a lot to do with Marx’s work being so lengthy. (Incidentally, Marx himself was not above a joke at his own expense on this score. While working on “Capital” he wrote to Engels. “I am stretching out this volume since those German dogs estimate the value of books by their cubic contents”!) He “stretched out” all 3 volumes of “Capital” by including a large amount of data, mostly from government sources, all justifying his theoretical contentions. To claim that Marx had no evidence for his arguments on surplus value is the despair of the ignorant abuser.

Marx’s writings still merit close study and critical attention. They explain to the working class why it is that capitalism cannot and does not work in their interests. The WSP argues that the only conclusion to be drawn from Marx’s work is that as capitalism can’t solve the problems it raises, a different sort of society must be established. To that end, Marx’s writings are as relevant as when first written. The writings of the Conquests and the Howards on the other hand have no relevance today, and are forgotten tomorrow.

R. A. Warrington