There was once a story in circulation of Siamese twin brothers who hated one another from birth. Inseparably joined together, their hatred became deeper and more bitter with each inconvenience they caused one another. Either could have willingly killed his brother, but they were joined in such a manner that the death of one would mean the death of both. One could not exist without the other.
Thus it is with wage-labour and capital. Born together, they are inseparable yet they are antagonistic. They are complementary yet they are perpetually in opposition to one another. They strive strenuously against one another but the abolition of one means the end of both. Neither can exist without the other.
Capital is wealth that is invested for the purpose of producing further wealth with a view to profit. The process requires the bringing together of raw material, machinery and human effort. The capitalist owns the raw material and the machinery but the human effort he must obtain from the workers. He needs to obtain and use it in a particular manner—a manner known as wage-labour.
There have been other forms of labour in the past. There was once free labour, then slave labour and serf labour. These different forms served certain conditions but are useless to capital.
In very distant times men lived under social conditions now known as Primitive Communism. Under those conditions they worked with their very primitive tools to produce things in order that the whole community might use them. There was no question of profit, no question of some working to produce for the benefit of an idle section of the community. All who were capable assisted in the tasks of obtaining and preparing the things that were necessary to feed, clothe, house and maintain them all. They thought not of things as “Mine” or “Yours” but as “Ours—the property of us all.” Those conditions of labour were free. They are obviously useless to the capitalist who seeks only profit and relies on others to produce it.
Slave labour followed. This was a system where one section of the community owned, body and soul; lock, stock and barrel, a number of others—owned them and worked them as slaves. They had to feed them, clothe them and shelter them, whether they were working or not. Such conditions required, for the slave owners, that as far as possible there should be regular and constant work to be done so that they did not have to maintain slaves who were idle and temporarily useless to them. Their main problem was whether it was better to get slaves and work them to death and then get others, or whether it was cheaper to treat their slaves with some little consideration so that they had a long working life.
To the capitalist this form of labour is equally useless. He requires to be able to employ his labourers and dismiss them just when he has need. The wealth that his workers produce for him must go to a market and the condition of that market is unpredictable. The capitalist may have orders to fulfil to-day that may be doubled or may cease altogether to-morrow. He needs to get his labourers to suit his orders, some to-day, maybe more to-morrow and perhaps sack the lot the next day. He wants his labour power in the same way that he wants his electricity, switch it on when required and off when not required. He does not want the expense of wasted electricity, neither does he want the expense of maintaining labourers for whom he cannot find work.
The capitalist does not want the initial expense of buying his labourers, as slaves were bought. It would enormously increase his capital outlay, and replacement would be a costly business. This point is adequately illustrated by the story of a man who paid £100 for a negro slave and sent him to work painting a roof. The slave turned to his master and said, “ Massa, if you send me on to that roof and I fall and break my neck you will be £100 out of pocket, but if you go to the city and get some of that white trash for sixpence an hour and he falls and kills himself, all you have to do is go and get another one without losing a penny.”
The capitalist does not want to be bothered with the carcasses of his employees, all he wants is the energy that they contain and he only wants that when there is profit to be made.
Serf labour is of a different order. The serf is not bound to his master but to the soil that his master owns. The serf has his piece of land, no matter how small or poor, and he produces things for use, a little for himself and family, and the rest for his overlord. He may also give his overlord some of his working time to till the lord's crops or to defend his domain. The serf owns some of the tools that are needed to produce his food, clothing and shelter, and he owns a little raw material—the land on which he works. But he is chained to the soil. A change of overlords leaves him on the same ground working on behalf of the new lord. To the overlord the land is useless without the serf and he assumes certain obligations to his serfs, as they assume certain others to him. The lord, of course, gets the fatter living whilst the serf struggles in poverty.
This, likewise, is useless to the capitalist. He does not want his workers chained to any particular place. They must come to the work, he cannot take the work to them. The factory, the mine, the workshop, the garage, the depot, the dock, the warehouse or whatever sort of place the capitalist owns is the spot to which the worker must be free to come.
Neither does the capitalist want his workers to have the slight amount of independence that a piece of land, such as the serf had, would give them. The capitalist cannot afford to have his machinery held up because some of his workers have taken time off to get in their hay or their potato crop or to thatch a roof. The worker must be entirely dependant on the capitalist for his livelihood so that he can be disciplined into punctuality, regular attendance at the place of work when required, and respect for his employer’s wishes. He must be conditioned by the job without outside interference. Absenteeism and insubordination that might flow from a little independence are a curse to the capitalist. So serfdom does not suit capital.
The capitalist needs wage-labour. He wants not the worker’s body but his energy, mental and physical. Mental and physical energies are inseparable. There is no physical work that does not call for thinking and no mental work that does not entail some physical effort even if it is only pushing pen over paper. The capitalist wants this energy on tap and he wants it to be completely at his disposal. Wage-labour offers him all that. The worker seeks employment, he offers for sale his bodily and mental energies for a price. That price is the wage. It may be called a salary, an income, a fee, a stipend or what you will, it is the same thing. The capitalist can employ the wage-labourer or not, employ him today and put him on part time or sack him tomorrow; tell him what time to come to work and what time to go; tell him how the work shall be done and take from him the wealth that he produces.
The capitalist also likes to have a reserve of labour power from which he can draw when his business requires it. If there is no such reserve and he needs extra wage-labourers he must compete with his fellow capitalists for workers by offering higher wages, a process that is distasteful to the capitalist class. Efforts are made to create a larger army of wage workers or build a reserve in some way.
When capitalism first appears in any part of the world wage-labour appears with it. One of the capitalists’ first worries is the creation of a reserve of wage-labour. In most countries this problem was originally solved by taking away from the serf, or the peasant, the land that he owned. This made him propertyless—-a proletarian, and drove him into the ranks of the wage-labourers to seek employment from those who did own property. The hundreds of enclosure acts on the statute book of this country are evidence of the ruthless process of dispossessing the English serfs and peasants. Their land was taken and enclosed by fences to be used largely as sheep grazing land, large hunting parks or for large scale agriculture. The poor landless families wandered to the towns where the factories were, there to operate machines that made woollen goods from the sheep that now wandered over the site of their late homesteads. The reserve army of wage labour, in those days, included small children, the aged and the infirm, as well as women.
The reserve army now-a-days is maintained by drawing more and more women into the wage-labour category. Labour saving machinery is introduced to enable one man to do the work that was previously done by two. The redundant men help to fill the ranks of the reserve of wage-labour, to be drawn on when occasion may demand.
If capitalists have to compete with one another for a limited supply of wage-labour and the price tends to rise, they howl “blue murder.” They will use their political power to freeze wages, bind the worker to his job or direct him to another. They have even conscripted women to the wage-labour ranks. The competition between capitalists for the limited markets wherein to sell the goods that the workers make, results in the accumulation of capital into fewer and fewer hands and the bankruptcy of the weaker capitalists, who then go to join the swelling ranks of the wage-labourers.
If capital needs wage-labour, so does wage-labour need capital. Whilst there are men and women who own nothing but the energy contained in their bodies, they must, in order to live, have access to the tools of production and the raw materials to work on. Whilst these things are in the hands of capitalists the workers must go to them for permission to use them. Unless the capitalist is prepared to invest these things in some profit making enterprise, the workers can starve.
Yet, despite needing one another so desperately, wage-labour and capital fight tooth and nail. The capitalist seeks always to increase his profit which means that, out of the total wealth that the workers produce, he seeks to increase his share. The larger the capitalists’ share, the smaller the workers portion.
To increase his profit the capitalist tries to cheapen the price of wage-labour, increase the price of goods to be sold or reduce the amount of wage-labour used. All three of these methods are detrimental to the wage worker. In the first instance he gets lower wages, in the second his wages will buy less because the price of commodities will be higher and in the third case, the introduction of labour saving machinery or the reorganisation of an industry will cause some workers to have their work intensified whilst others can be idle if they cannot find another employer. So the wage-labourers resist the capitalist’s attempts to increase his profit.
The wage-labourer also seeks to increase his part of the total wealth produced. He strives for higher wages. Things that were originally luxuries become comforts and finally necessities. To be able to read and write was once an accomplishment for the wealthy only, now it is a necessity for the humblest wage-worker. A Sunday suit of clothes, holidays, passenger transport were once luxuries and are now very essential needs. Radio has passed the luxury stage and can be considered a comfort, in time to be a necessity. These things become essential for the workers who seek to increase their wages to enable them to acquire these new needs. Variations in the price of things that have long been established as essential needs—food, houses and clothing, cause the worker to seek to adjust his wages whenever the variation is upward. The capitalist will put on the pressure to cheapen the price of labour-power when the variation is downwards.
So the two, wage-labour and capital, are continuously locked in a ding-dong struggle. The worker will find the capitalist’s discipline irksome and he will organise in a Trade Union in an endeavour to have a say in the conditions under which he is to work. The capitalist will have to resist again. The capitalist will jealously guard his trump card, the political weapon, and use it when the workers become a little too audacious.
The worker sells his labour power either by time or by amount. When he sells it by time he receives a wage rate calculated by the hour, day or week. He strives to reduce the amount of time over which he sells it by struggling for a shorter working day or shorter working week, whilst maintaining his total wage at the previous level. The capitalist, on the other hand, endeavours to increase the working time without a wage increase, thus gaining for himself a larger share in the total wealth. When labour power is scarce he will increase the total time by demanding overtime work and he will pay for such time at special rates, still ensuring himself a profit.
When the worker sells his labour power by the amount it is known as piece work. Here he is paid, not by the measure of time but by the quantity of wealth produced in a given time. This urges him to intensify his work by working as hard and as fast as he can in order to increase his total wage. Now-a-days piece work is referred to as "payment by results" or "incentive bonus.” The effect is to squeeze the maximum amount of energy out of the worker in the minimum amount of time. This is most useful to the capitalist when the market is good and orders are flowing in rapidly, when he is competing with other capitalists to get goods to the market in the shortest possible time. Piece work is often a prelude to a re-adjustment of time rates. Having enticed the worker to betray just how fast he can work he is then called upon to work at that pace for a time measured wage.
All these points are the issues which keep wage-labour and capital perpetually at war with one another.
There are some features of wage-labour which resemble slave-labour. So much so, in fact, that it is often referred to as wage-slavery. Although the capitalist only requires the workers energies he cannot have them separate from the body which generates them. The worker cannot rise in the morning, extract a quantity of labour power from himself, wrap it and send it to his employer with a stamped addressed envelope, then return his body back to bed with a pipe and a book. The worker must, himself, go to his place of employment and have his labour power extracted by the day, hour or contract. So, during his periods of work, the wage-labourer appears to be owned by the capitalist.
In this relationship of wage-labour and capital the advantages are all with the capitalist. He gets the wealth and the privileges whilst the worker's lot is one of continual work in order to live, coupled with which are his poverty and the insecurity of livelihood. Capital is his enemy. If he destroys capital he destroys wage-labour also, but he does not destroy himself or his ability to labour.
The problem has a simple solution. Having no property the worker must work for a wage in order to live. The capitalist has the property and can employ the worker. Take away the capitalist's property and place it in the possession of the whole of the people and there will be neither propertyless wage workers nor property owning people who can command the labour power of others. Labour remains; so do the raw materials and the machines, but the labour becomes free—free to produce wealth in order that everyone may enjoy it. No wage-labour, no capital, no profits, no markets, no wars to capture markets, no class domination, no classes. Instead, a classless society working to produce the needs, comforts and luxuries of life and having all things available when produced.—Socialism.
One thing is clear. Where there is wage-labour there is capital, and where there is capital there is capitalism. Some would have us believe that capitalism has been abolished in some parts of the world. To test the truth of this is easy. Do the people work for wages? If so, there is capital, and capitalism is the same all the world over. Society will be well rid of both wage-labour and capital.
W. Waters
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