 Chapter 17 of Capital Volume 1. Part 5. The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus Value. Chapter 17. Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labor Power and in Surplus Value. The value of labor power is determined by the value of the necessaries of life, habitually required by the average laborer. The quantity of these necessaries is known at any given epoch of a given society and can therefore be treated as a constant magnitude. What changes is the value of this quantity. There are, besides, two other factors that enter into the determination of the value of labor power. One, the expenses of developing that power, which expenses vary with the mode of production. The other, its natural diversity, the difference between the labor power of men and women, of children and adults. The employment of these different sorts of labor power, and employment which is, in its turn, made necessary by the mode of production, makes a great difference in the cost of maintaining the family of the laborer and in the value of the labor power of the adult male. Both these factors, however, are excluded in the following investigation. Note. Note in the third German edition. The case considered at pages 300 to 302 is here, of course, omitted. F.E. And note. I assume, one, that commodities are sold at their value, two, that the price of labor power rises occasionally above its value, but never sinks below it. On this assumption we have seen that the relative magnitudes of surplus value and of price of labor power are determined by three circumstances. The length of the working day, or the extensive magnitude of labor, two, the normal intensity of labor, its intensive magnitude, whereby a given quantity of labor is expended in a given time, three, the productiveness of labor, whereby the same quantum of labor yields in a given time, a greater or less quantum of product dependent on the degree of development in the conditions of production. Very different combinations are clearly possible, according, as one of the three factors is constant and two variable, or two constant and one variable, or lastly, all three simultaneously variable. And the number of these combinations is augmented by the fact that when these factors simultaneously vary, the amount and direction of their respective variations may differ. In what follows the chief combinations alone are considered? Length of the working day and intensity of labor constant, productiveness of labor variable. On these assumptions the value of labor power and the magnitude of surplus value are determined by three laws. One, a working day of given length always creates the same amount of value, no matter how the productiveness of labor and with it the mass of the product and the price of each single commodity produced may vary. If the value created by a working day of twelve hours, say, six shillings, then, although the mass of the articles produced varies with the productiveness of labor, the only result is that the value represented by six shillings is spread over a greater or less number of articles. Two, surplus value and the value of labor power vary in opposite directions. A variation in the productiveness of labor, its increase or diminution, causes a variation in the opposite direction in the value of labor power and in the same direction in surplus value. The value created by a working day of twelve hours is a constant quantity, say, six shillings. This constant quantity is the sum of the surplus value plus the value of the labor power, which latter value the laborer replaces by an equivalent. It is self-evident that if a constant quantity consists of two parts, neither of them can increase without the other diminishing. Let the two parts at starting be equal, three shillings value of labor power, three shillings surplus value. Then the value of the labor power cannot rise from three shillings to four without the surplus value falling from three shillings to two, and the surplus value cannot rise from three shillings to four without the value of labor power falling from three shillings to two. Under these circumstances, therefore, no change can take place in the absolute magnitude, either of the surplus value or of the value of labor power, without a simultaneous change in their relative magnitudes, i.e., relatively to each other. It is impossible for them to rise or fall simultaneously. Further, the value of labor power cannot fall, and consequently, surplus value cannot rise without a rise in the productiveness of labor. For instance, in the above case, the value of the labor power cannot sink from three shillings to two, unless an increase in the productiveness of labor makes it possible to produce in four hours the same quantity of necessaries as previously required six hours to produce. On the other hand, the value of the labor power cannot rise from three shillings to four without a decrease in the productiveness of labor, whereby eight hours become requisite to produce the same quantity of necessaries for the production of which six hours previously sufficed. Which follows from this that an increase in the productiveness of labor causes a fall in the value of labor power and a consequent rise in surplus value, while on the other hand, a decrease in such productiveness causes a rise in the value of labor power and a fall in surplus value. In formulating this law, Ricardo overlooked one circumstance, although a change in the magnitude of the surplus value or surplus labor causes a change in the opposite direction in the magnitude of the value of labor power or in the quantity of necessary labor, if by no means follows that they vary in the same proportion. They do increase or diminish by the same quantity, but their proportional increase or diminution depends on their original magnitude before the change in the productiveness of labor took place. If the value of the labor power be four shillings or the necessary labor time eight hours and the surplus value be two shillings or the surplus labor four hours, and if in consequence of an increase in the productiveness of labor the value of the labor power fall to three shillings or the necessary labor to six hours, the surplus value will rise to three shillings or the surplus labor to six hours. The same quantity, one shilling or two hours, is added in one case and subtracted in the other, but the proportional change of magnitude is different in each case. While the value of the labor power falls from four shillings to three, i.e. by one quarter or twenty-five percent, the surplus value rises from two shillings to three, i.e. by one half or fifty percent. It therefore follows that the proportional increase or diminution in surplus value, consequent on a given change in the productiveness of labor, depends on the original magnitude of that portion of the working day which embodies itself in surplus value. The smaller that portion, the greater is the proportional change. The greater that portion, the less is the proportional change. Third. Increase or diminution in surplus value is always consequent on, and never the cause of, the corresponding diminution or increase in the value of labor power. Note. To this third law, McCullough has made, amongst others, this absurd addition, that a rise in surplus value, unaccompanied by a fall in the value of labor power, can occur through the abolition of taxes payable by the capitalist. The abolition of such taxes makes no change whatever in the quantity of surplus value that the capitalistic storts at first hand from the laborer. It only alters the proportion in which that surplus value is divided between himself and third persons. It consequently makes no alteration whatever in the relation between the surplus value and value of labor power. McCullough's exception, therefore, proves only his misapprehension of the rule, a misfortune that is often happens to him in the vulgarization of Ricardo as it does to J. B. C. in the vulgarization of Adam Smith. And note. Since the working day is constant in magnitude and is represented by a value of constant magnitude, since, to every variation in the magnitude of surplus value, there corresponds an inverse variation in the value of labor power, and since the value of labor power cannot change, except in consequence of a change in the productiveness of labor, it clearly follows under these conditions that every change of magnitude in surplus value arises from an inverse change of magnitude in the value of labor power. If then, as we have already seen, there can be no change of absolute magnitude in the value of labor power and in surplus value unaccompanied by a change in their relative magnitudes, so now it follows that no change in their relative magnitudes is possible without a previous change in the absolute magnitude of the value of labor power. According to the third law, a change in the magnitude of surplus value presupposes a movement in the value of labor power, which movement is brought about by a variation in the productiveness of labor. The limit of this change is given by the altered value of labor power. Nevertheless, even when circumstances allow the law to operate, subsidiary movements may occur. For example, if in consequence of the increased productiveness of labor, the value of labor power falls from four shillings to three, or the necessary labor time from eight hours to six, the price of labor power may possibly not fall below three shillings eight pence, three shillings six pence, or three shillings two pence, and the surplus value consequently not rise above three shillings four pence, three shillings six pence, or three shillings ten pence. The amount of this fall, the lowest limit of which is three shillings, the new value of labor power, depends on the relative weight, which the pressure of capital on the one side and the resistance of the laborer on the other throws into the scale. The value of labor power is determined by the value of a given quantity of necessaries. It is the value and not the mass of these necessaries that varies with the productiveness of labor. It is, however, possible that, owing to an increase of productiveness, both the laborer and the capitalist may simultaneously be able to appropriate greater quantity of these necessaries without any change in the price of labor power or in surplus value. If the value of labor power be three shillings and the necessary labor time amount to six hours, if the surplus value likewise be three shillings and the surplus labor six hours, then if the productiveness of labor were doubled without altering the ratio of necessary labor to surplus labor, there would be no change of magnitude in surplus value and price of labor power. The only result would be that each of them would represent twice as many use values as before. These use values being twice as cheap as before. Although labor power would be unchanged in price, it would be above its value. If, however, the price of labor power had fallen not to one shilling six pence, the lowest possible point consistent with its new value, but to two shillings ten pence or two shilling six pence, still this lower price would represent an increased mass of necessaries. In this way, it is possible with an increasing productiveness of labor for the price of labor power to keep on falling, and yet this fall to be accompanied by a constant growth in the mass of the laborer's means of subsistence. But even in such a case, the fall in the value of labor power would cause a corresponding rise of surplus value, and thus the abyss between the laborer's position and that of the capitalist would keep widening. Note, when an alteration takes place in the productiveness of industry, and that either more or less is produced by a given quantity of labor and capital, the proportion of wages may obviously vary, whilst the quantity which that proportion represents remains the same, or the quantity may vary whilst the proportion remains the same. Outlines of political economy, et cetera, page 67. End note. Ricardo was the first who accurately formulated the three laws we have above stated, but he falls into the following errors. One, he looks upon the special conditions under which these laws hold good as the general and sole conditions of capitalist production. He knows no change, either in the length of the working day or in the intensity of labor. Consequently, with him there can be only one variable factor, vis the productiveness of labor. Two, and this error evitiates his analysis much more than one, he is not any more than have the other economists investigated surplus value as such, independently of its particular forms, such as profit, rent, et cetera. He therefore confounds together the laws of the rate of surplus value and the laws of the rate of profit. The rate of profit is, as we have already said, the ratio of the surplus value to the total capital advanced. The rate of surplus value is the ratio of the surplus value to the variable part of that capital. Assume that a capital C of 500 pounds is made up of raw material, instruments of labor, et cetera, C to the amount of 400 pounds, and of wages V to the amount of 100 pounds, and further that the surplus value S equals 100 pounds. Then we have rate of surplus value S over V is 100 over 100 pounds equals 100 percent. But the rate of profit S over C, 100 over 500 pounds, is 20 percent. It is besides obvious that the rate of profit may depend on circumstances that in no way affect the rate of surplus value. I shall so in Book 3 that with a given rate of surplus value we may have any number of rates of profit, and that various rates of surplus value may, under given conditions, express themselves in a single rate of profit. Section 2. Working day constant, productiveness of labor constant, intensity of labor variable. Increased intensity of labor means increased expenditure of labor in a given time. Hence, a working day of more intense labor is embodied in more products than is one of less intense labor, the length of each day being the same. Increased productiveness of labor also, it is true, will supply more products in a given working day. But in this latter case, the value of each single product falls, for it costs less labor than before. In the former case, that value remains unchanged, for each article costs the same labor as before. Here we have an increase in the number of products unaccompanied by a fall in their individual prices. As their number increases, so does the sum of their prices. But in the case of increased productiveness, a given value is spread over a greater mass of products. Hence, the length of the working day being constant, a day's labor of increased intensity will be incorporated in an increased value, and the value of money remaining unchanged in more money. The value created varies with the extent of which the intensity of labor deviates from its normal intensity in the society. A given working day, therefore, no longer creates a constant, but a variable value. In a day of 12 hours of ordinary intensity, the value created is, say, six shillings. But with increased intensity, the value created may be seven, eight, or more shillings. It is clear that if the value created by a day's labor increases from, say, six to eight shillings, then the two parts into which this value is divided, viz, price of labor power, and surplus value, may both of them increase simultaneously, and either equally or unequally. They may both simultaneously increase from three shillings to four. Here, the rise in the price of labor power does not necessarily imply, here, the rise in the price of labor power does not necessarily imply that the price has risen above the value of labor power. On the contrary, the rise in price may be accompanied by a fallen value. This occurs whenever the rise in price of labor power does not compensate for its increased wear and tear. We know that, with transitory exceptions, a change in the productiveness of labor does not cause any change in the value of labor power. Nor, consequently, in the magnitude of surplus value, unless the products of the industries affected are articles habitually consumed by the laborers. In the present case, this condition no longer applies. Four, when the variation is either in the duration or in the intensity of labor, there is always a corresponding change in the magnitude of the value created, independently of the nature of the article in which that value is embodied. If the intensity of labor were to increase simultaneously and equally in every branch of industry, then the new and higher degree of intensity would become the normal degree for the society and would, therefore, cease to be taken account of. But still, even then, the intensity of labor would be different in different countries and would modify the international application of the law of value. The more intense working day of one nation would be represented by a greater sum of money than would the less intense day of another nation. Note, all things being equal, the English manufacturer can turn out a considerably larger amount of work in a given time than a foreign manufacturer. So much is to counterbalance the difference of the working days between 60 hours a week here and 72 or 80 elsewhere. Report of the Inspector of Factories for the 31st October, 1855, page 65. The most infallible means for reducing this qualitative difference between the English and continental working hour would be a law shortening quantitatively the length of the working day in continental factories. End note. Section three, productiveness and intensity of labor, constant, length of the working day, variable. The working day may vary in two ways. It may be made either longer or shorter. From our present data and within the limits of the assumptions made on previously, we obtain the following laws. The working day creates a greater or less amount of value in proportion to its length. Thus, a variable and not a constant quantity of value. Two, every change in the relation between the magnitudes of surplus value and the value of labor power arises from a change in the absolute magnitude of the surplus labor and consequently of the surplus value. Three, the absolute value of labor power can only change in consequence of the reaction exercised by the prolongation of surplus labor upon the wear and tear of labor power. Every change in this absolute value is therefore the effect but never the cause of a change in the magnitude of surplus value. We begin with the case in which the working day is shortened. One, a shortening of the working day under the conditions given above leaves the value of labor power and with it the necessary labor time unaltered. It reduces the surplus labor and surplus value. Along with the absolute magnitude of the latter, its relative magnitude also falls, i.e., its magnitude relatively to the value of labor power whose magnitude remains unaltered. Only by lowering the price of labor power below its value could the capitalist save himself harmless. All the usual arguments against the shortening of the working day assume that it takes place under the conditions we have here supposed to exist. But in reality, the very contrary is the case. A change in the productiveness and intensity of labor either proceeds or immediately follows a shortening of the working day. Note, there are compensating circumstances which the Working of the Ten Hours Act has brought to light. Report of the Inspector of Factories for the 31st October, 1848, page seven. End note. Two, lengthening of the working day. Let the necessary labor time be six hours or the value of labor power three shillings. Also, let the surplus labor be six hours or the surplus value three shillings. The whole working day then amounts to 12 hours and is embodied in a value of six shillings. If now the working day be lengthened two hours and the price of labor power remain unaltered, the surplus value increases both absolutely and relatively. Although there is no absolute change in the value of labor power, it suffers a relative fall. Under the conditions assumed in one, there could not be a change of relative magnitude in the value of labor power without a change in its absolute magnitude. Here, on the contrary, the change of relative magnitude in the value of labor power is the result of the change of absolute magnitude in surplus value. Since the value in which today's labor is embodied increases with the length of that day, it is evident that the surplus value and the price of labor may simultaneously increase either by equal or unequal quantities. This simultaneous increase is therefore possible in two cases. One, the actual lengthening of the working day, the other, an increase in the intensity of labor unaccompanied by such lengthening. When the working day is prolonged, the price of labor power may fall below its value, although that price be nominally unchanged or even rise. The value of a day's labor power is, as will be remembered, estimated from its normal average duration or from the normal duration of life among the laborers and from corresponding normal transformations of organized bodily matter into motion, in conformity with the nature of man. Up to a certain point, the increased wear and tear of labor power inseparable from a lengthening working day may be compensated by higher wages. But beyond this point, the wear and tear increases in geometrical progression and every condition suitable for the normal reproduction and functioning of labor power is suppressed. The price of labor power and the degree of its exploitation cease to be commensurable quantities. Note, the amount of labor which a man had undergone in the course of 24 hours might be approximately arrived at by an examination of the chemical changes which had taken place in his body. Changed forms in manner indicating the interior exercise of dynamic force. Grove on the correlation of physical forces. And note, section four, simultaneous variations in the duration, productiveness and intensity of labor. It is obvious that a large number of combinations are here possible. Any two of the factors may vary and the third remain constant or all three may vary at once. They may vary either in the same or in different degrees in the same or in opposite directions with the result that the variations counteract one another either wholly or in part. Nevertheless, the analysis of every possible case is easy in view of the results given in one, two and three. The effect of every possible combination may be found by treating each factor in turn as variable and the other two constant for the time being. And that briefly, but two important cases. A, diminishing productiveness of labor with the simultaneous lengthening of the working day. In speaking of diminishing productiveness of labor, we here refer to diminution in those industries whose products determine the value of labor power. Such a diminution, for example, as results from decreasing fertility of the soil and from the corresponding dearness of its products. Take the working day at 12 hours and the value created by it at six shillings of which one half replaces the value of the labor power or in the other forms the surplus value. Suppose in consequence of the increased dearness of the products of the soil that the value of labor power rises from three shillings to four and therefore the necessary labor time from six hours to eight. If there be no change in the length of the working day, the surplus labor would fall from six hours to four. The surplus value from three shillings to two. If the day be lengthened by two hours, i.e. from 12 hours to 14, the surplus labor remains at six hours, the surplus value at three shillings, but the surplus value decreased compared with the value of labor power as measured by the necessary labor time. If the day be lengthened by four hours, vis, from 12 hours to 16, the proportional magnitudes of surplus value and the value of labor power of surplus labor and necessary labor continue unchanged, but the absolute magnitude of surplus value rises from three shillings to four, that of the surplus labor from six hours to eight, an increment of 33 and one-third percent. Therefore, with diminishing productiveness of labor and a simultaneous lengthening of the working day, the absolute magnitude of surplus value may continue unaltered at the same time that its relative magnitude diminishes, its relative magnitude may continue unchanged at the same time that its absolute magnitude increases and provided the lengthening of the day be sufficient, both may increase. In the period between 1799 and 1815, the increasing price of provisions led in England to a nominal rise in wages, although the real wages expressed in the necessaries of life fell. From this fact, Weston Ricardo drew the conclusion that the diminution in the productiveness of agricultural labor had brought about a fall in the rate of surplus value, and they made this assumption of a fact that existed only in their imaginations, the starting point of important investigations into the relative magnitude of wages, profits, and rent. But as a matter of fact, surplus value had at that time, thanks to the increased intensity of labor and to the prolongation of the working day, increased both in absolute and relative magnitude. This was the period in which the right to prolong the hours of labor to an outrageous extent was established, the period that was especially characterized by an accelerated accumulation of capital here by populism there. Note, corn and labor rarely march quite abreast, but there is an obvious limit beyond which they cannot be separated. With regard to the unusual exertions made by the laboring classes in periods of dearness, which produced the fall of wages noticed in the evidence, namely before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry, 1814 to 1815, they are most meritorious in the individuals and certainly favor the growth of capital. But no man of humanity could wish to see them constant and unremitted. They are most admirable as a temporary relief, but if they were constantly in action, effects of a similar kind would result from them as from the population of a country being pushed to the very extreme limits of its food. Malthus, Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent, London, 1815, page 48. Note, all honor to Malthus that he lays stress on the lengthening of the hours of labor, a fact to which he elsewhere in his pamphlet draws attention, while Ricardo and others, in face of the most notorious facts, make invariability in the length of the working day the groundwork of all their investigations. But the conservative interests which Malthus served prevented him from seeing that an unlimited prolongation of the working day, combined with an extraordinary development of machinery and the exploitation of women and children, must inevitably have made a great portion of the working class supernumerary, particularly whenever the war should have ceased and the monopoly of England in the markets of the world should have come to an end. It was, of course, far more convenient and much more in conformity with the interests of the ruling classes, whom Malthus adored like a true priest, to explain this overpopulation by the eternal laws of nature, rather than by the historical laws of capitalist production. End note. Note, a principal cause of the increase of capital during the war proceeded from the greater exertions and perhaps the greater privations of the laboring classes, the most numerous in every society. More women and children were compelled by necessitous circumstances to enter upon laborious occupations, and former workmen were, from the same cause, obliged to devote a greater portion of their time to increased production. Essays on political economy in which are illustrated the principal causes of the present national distress. London, 1830, page 248. End note. B. Increasing intensity in productiveness of labor with simultaneous shortening of the working day. Increased productiveness and greater intensity of labor both have a like effect. They both augment the mass of articles produced in a given time. Both, therefore, shorten that portion of the working day which the laborer needs to produce his means of subsistence or their equivalent. The minimum length of the working day is fixed by this necessary but contractile portion of it. If the whole working day were to shrink to the length of this portion, surplus labor would vanish, a consumption utterly impossible under the regime of capital. Only by suppressing the capitalist form of production could the length of the working day be reduced to the necessary labor time. But even in that case, the latter would extend its limits. On the one hand, because the notion of means of subsistence would considerably expand, and the laborer would lay claim to an altogether different standard of life. On the other hand, because a part of what is now surplus labor would then count as necessary labor. I mean the labor of forming a fund for reserve and accumulation. The more the productiveness of labor increases, the more can the working day be shortened. And the more the working day is shortened, the more can the intensity of labor increase. From a social point of view, the productiveness increases in the same ratio as the economy of labor, which in its turn includes not only economy of the means of production, but also the avoidance of all useless labor. The capitalist mode of production, while on the one hand enforcing economy in individual business, on the other hand begets by its anarchical system of competition the most outrageous squandering of labor power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous. The intensity and productiveness of labor being given, the time which society is bound to devote to the material production is shorter. And as a consequence, the time at its disposal for the free development, intellectual and social of the individual is greater in proportion as the work is more and more evenly divided among all the able-bodied members of society. And as a particular class is more and more deprived of the power to shift the natural burden of labor from its own shoulders to those of another layer of society. In this direction, the shortening of the working day finds at last a limit in the generalization of labor. In capitalist society, spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole lifetime of the masses into labor time. End of part five, chapter 17. Chapter 18 of capital volume one. This is a labor-fox recording. All labor-fox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit liberfox.org, recording by Anna Simon. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, volume one by Karl Marx, translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels. Part five, the production of absolute and relative surplus value, chapter 18, various formulae for the rate of surplus value. We've seen that the rate of surplus value is represented by the following formulae. Roman numeral one, the ratio surplus value over variable capital or ratio S over V is equal to the ratio surplus value over value of labor power is equal to the ratio surplus labor over necessary labor. The two first of these formulae represent as a ratio of values, that which in the third is represented as a ratio of the times during which those values are produced. These formulae, supplementary the one to the other, are rigorously definite and correct. We therefore find them substantially but not consciously worked out in classical political economy. There we meet with the following derivative formulae. Roman numeral two, the ratio surplus labor over working day is equal to the ratio surplus value over the value of the product is equal to the ratio surplus product over total product. One and the same ratio is here expressed as a ratio of labor times of the value in which those labor times are embodied and of the products in which those values exist. It is of course understood that by value of the product is meant only the value newly created in a working day, the constant part of the value of the product being excluded. In all of these formulae under Roman numeral two, the actual degree of exploitation of labor or the rate of surplus value is falsely expressed. Let the working day be 12 hours, then making the same assumptions as in full more instances, the real degree of exploitation of labor will be represented in the following proportions. The ratio of six hours surplus labor over six hours necessary labor is equal to the ratio of the surplus value of three shillings over a variable capital of three shillings is equal to 100%. From the formulae Roman numeral two, we get very differently, the ratio six hours surplus labor over working day of 12 hours is equal to the ratio surplus value of three shillings over a value created of six shillings is equal to 50%. These derivative formulae express in reality only the proportion in which the working day or the value produced by it is divided between capitalist and laborer. If they are to be treated as direct expressions of the degree of self-expansion of capital, the following erroneous law would hold good. Surplus labor or surplus value can never reach 100%. Footnote. Thus, for example, in Dritter Brief an von Kirchmann von Ortbertes wie der Legung der Riccardochen Lehre von der Grundrente und Begründung einer neuen Rententheorie, Berlin, 1851. I shall return to this letter later on. In spite of its erroneous theory of rent, it sees through the nature of capitalist production. Note added in the third German edition, it may be seen from this how favorably Marx judged his predecessors whenever he found them in real progress or new and sound ideas. The subsequent publications of Roberta's letters to Rudolf Meyer has shown that the above acknowledgement by Marx once restricting to some extent. In those letters, this passage occurs. Quote, capital must be rescued not only from labor but from itself and that will be best affected by treating the acts of the industrial capitalist as economic and political functions that have been delegated to him with his capital and by treating his profit as a form of salary because we still know no other social organization. But salaries may be regulated and may also be reduced if they take too much from wages. The eruption of Marx into society, as I may call his book, must be warded off. All together, Marx's book is not so much an investigation into capital as a polemic against the present form of capital, a form which he confounds with the concept itself of capital. End quote. Briefer, et cetera, von Dr. Robertus Jagitzoff herausgegeben von Dr. Rudolf Meyer. For Lynn, 1881, vol. 1, page 111, 46, Briefer von Rudt-Bettes. To such ideological common places did the bold attack by Robertus in his social letters finally dwindled down. F-E. End footnote. Since the surplus labor is only an eloquent part of the working day, or since surplus value is only an eloquent part of the value created, the surplus labor must necessarily be always less than the working day, or the surplus value always less than the total value created. In order, however, to attain the ratio of 100 to 100, they must be equal. In order that the surplus labor may absorb the whole day, that is, an average day of any week or year, the necessary labor must sink to zero. But if the necessary labor vanish, so too does the surplus labor, since it is only a function of the former. The ratio, surplus labor over working day, or surplus value over value created, can therefore never reach the limit 100 over 100, still as rise to 100 plus the ratio x over 100. But not so the rate of surplus value, the real degree of exploitation of labor. Take, for example, the estimate of L de Lavigne, according to which the English agricultural laborer gets only one quarter, the capitalist farmer, on the other hand, three quarters of the product, or its value, apart from the question of how the booty is subsequently divided between the capitalist, the landlord, and others, footnote. That part of the product, which merely replaces the constant capital advanced, is of course left out in this calculation. Monsieur L de Lavigne, a blind admirer of England, is inclined to estimate the share of the capitalist too low rather than too high, and footnote. According to this, this surplus labor of the English agricultural laborer is to his necessary labor as three versus one, which gives a rate of exploitation of 300%. The favorite method of treating the working day as constant in magnitude became, through the use of formula Roman numeral two, a fixed usage, because in them, surplus labor is always compared with a working day of given length. The same holds good when the repetition of the value produced is exclusively kept in sight. The working day that has already been realized in given value must necessarily be a day of given length. The habit of representing surplus value and value of labor power as fractions of the value created, a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will thereafter be disclosed, conceals the very transaction that characterizes capital, namely, the exchange of variable capital for living labor power, and the consequent exclusion of the laborer from the product. Instead of the real fact, we have false semblance of an association in which laborer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively contribute towards its formation. Footnote. All well-developed forms of capitalist production being forms of cooperation, nothing is, of course, easier than to make abstraction from their antagonistic character and to transform them by a word into some form of free association, as is done by E. de la Borde in the l'esprit d'association dans tous les intérêts de la communauté. Paris, 1818. H. Kerry, the Yankee, occasionally performs this conjuring trick with like success, even with the relations resulting from slavery. And footnote. Moreover, the formulae Roman numeral two can at any time be reconverted into formulae Roman numeral one. If, for instance, we have the ratio surplus labor of six hours over working day of 12 hours, then the necessary labor time being 12 hours less the surplus labor of six hours, we get the following result. The ratio surplus labor of six hours over necessary labor of six hours is 100 over 100. There is a third formula, which I have occasionally already anticipated. It is Roman numeral three. The ratio surplus value over value of labor power is equal to the ratio surplus labor over necessary labor is equal to the ratio unpaid labor over paid labor. After the investigations we have given above, it is no longer possible to be misled by the formulae ratio unpaid labor over paid labor into concluding that the capitalist pays for labor and not for labor power. This formula is only a popular expression for the ratio surplus labor over necessary labor. The capitalist pays the value so far as price coincides with value of the labor power and receives in exchange the disposal of the living labor power itself. His usufruct is spread over two periods. During one, the labor produces a value that is only equal to the value of his labor power. He produces its equivalent. This the capitalist receives in return for his advance of the price of the labor power, a product ready made in the market. During the other period, the period of surplus labor, the usufruct of the labor power creates a value for the capitalist that costs him no equivalent. Footnote. Although the physiocrats could not penetrate the mystery of surplus value, yet this much was clear to them. That it is, quote, une richesse indépendante et disponible qu'il n'a pour acheter et qu'il vend. End quote. Turgo, réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses. Page 11, end footnote. This expenditure of labor power comes to him gratis. In this sense, it is that surplus labor can be called unpaid labor. Capital, therefore, is not only, as Adam Smith says, the command over labor. It is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All surplus value, whatever particular form, profit, interest, or rent it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor. The secret of the self expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people's unpaid labor. End of part five, chapter 18. Chapter 19 of Capital Volume 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and edited by Friedrich Engels. Part six, Wages. Chapter 19, the transformation of the value and respectively the price of labor power into wages. On the surface of bourgeois society, the wage of the laborer appears at the price of labor, a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain quantity of labor. Thus people speak of the value of labor and call its expression and money its necessary or natural price. On the other hand, they speak of the market prices of labor, i.e., prices oscillating above or below its natural price. But what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the social labor expended in its production. And how do we measure the quantity of this value? By the quantity of the labor contained in it. How then is the value, e.g., of a 12-hour working day to be determined? By the 12 working hours contained in a working day of 12 hours, which is an absurd tautology. Footnote, Mr. Ricardo, ingeniously enough, avoids a difficulty which, on a first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine, that value depends on the quantity of labor employed in production. If this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows that the value of labor depends on the quantity of labor employed in producing it, which is evidently absurd. By a dexterous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the value of labor depend on the quantity of labor required to produce wages. Or, to give him the benefit of his own language, he maintains that the value of labor is to be estimated by the quantity of labor required to produce wages, by which he means the quantity of labor required to produce the money or commodities given to the laborer. This is similar to saying that the value of cloth is estimated not by the quantity of labor bestowed on its production, but by the quantity of labor bestowed on the production of the silver for which the cloth is exchanged. A critical dissertation on the nature, et cetera, of value, pages 50, 51. Endnote. In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labor must, at all events, exist before it is sold. But could the laborer give it an independent, objective existence, he would sell a commodity and not labor? Footnote. If you call labor a commodity, it is not like a commodity which is first produced in order to exchange, and then brought to market where it must exchange with other commodities according to the respective quantities of each, which there may be in the market at the time. Labor is created the moment it is brought to market. Nay, it is brought to market before it is created. Observations on certain verbal disputes, et cetera, pages 75 and 76. Endnote. Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i.e., of realized labor with living labor, would either do away with the law of value which only begins to develop itself freely on the basis of capitalist production or do away with capitalist production itself, which rests directly on wage labor. The working day of 12 hours embodies itself, e.g., in a money value of six shillings. Either equivalents are exchanged and then the laborer receives six shillings for 12 hours labor, the price of his labor would be equal to the price of his product. In this case, he produces no surplus value for the buyer of his labor. The six shillings are not transformed into capital. The basis of capitalist production vanishes. But it is on this very basis that he sells his labor and that his labor is wage labor, or else he receives for 12 hours labor less than six shillings, i.e., less than 12 hours labor. 12 hours labor are exchanged against 10, six, et cetera, hours labor. This equalization of unequal quantities not merely does away with the determination of value. Such a self-destructive contradiction cannot be in any way even enunciated or formulated as a law. Footnote, treating labor as a commodity and capital, the produce of labor as another, then if the values of these two commodities were regulated by equal quantities of labor, a given amount of labor would exchange for the quantity of capital which had been produced by the same amount of labor, antecedent labor would exchange for the same amount as present labor. But the value of labor in relation to other commodities is determined not by equal quantities of labor, e.g., Wakefield in his edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Volume I, London, 1836, page 231, note, end note. It is of no avail to deduce the exchange of more labor against less from their difference of form, the one being realized, the other living. Footnote, there has to be a new agreement, a new addition of the social contract, that whenever there is an exchange of work done for work to be done, the latter, the capitalist, is to receive higher value than the former, the worker. Simon de Sismondi, de la richesse commerciale, Geneva, 1803, Volume I, page 37, end note. This is the more absurd as the value of a commodity is determined not by the quantity of labor actually realized in it, but by the quantity of living labor necessary for its production. A commodity represents, say, six working hours. If an invention is made by which it can be produced in three hours, the value, even of the commodity already produced, falls by half. It represents now three hours of social labor instead of the six formerly necessary. It is the quantity of labor required for its production, not the realized form of that labor, by which the amount of value of a commodity is determined. That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market is in fact not labor, but the laborer. What the latter sells is his labor power. As soon as his labor actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him. It can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labor is the substance and the imminent measure of value, but has itself no value. Footnote, labor, the exclusive standard of value, the creator of all wealth, no commodity. Thomas Hodgkin, popular political economy, page 186, end note. In the expression value of labor, the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions arise, however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the phenomenal forms of essential relations. That in their appearance, things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except political economy. Footnote, on the other hand, the attempt to explain such expressions as merely poetic license only shows the impotence of the analysis. Hence, in answer to Prudone's phrase, labor is called value, not as being a commodity itself, but in view of the value supposed to be potentially embodied in it. The value of labor is a figurative expression, et cetera. I have remarked, in labor, commodity, which is a frightful reality, he, Prudone, sees nothing but a grammatical ellipsis. The whole of existing society then, based upon labor commodity, is henceforth based upon poetic license. On a figurative expression. Does society desire to eliminate all the inconveniences which trouble it? It has only to eliminate all the ill-sounding terms. Let it change the language, and for that it has only to address itself to the academy, and ask it for a new addition of its dictionary. Karl Marx, Miser de la Philosophie, pages 34 and 35. It is naturally still more convenient to understand by value nothing at all. Then one can, without difficulties, subsume everything under this category. Thus, e.g., J.B. say, what is value? Answer, that which a thing is worth, and what is price? Answer, the value of a thing expressed in money. And why has agriculture a value? Answer, because one sets a price on it. Therefore, value is what a thing is worth, and the land has its value, because its value is expressed in money. This is anyhow a very simple way of explaining the why and the wherefore of things. End note. Classical political economy borrowed from everyday life, the category price of labor without further criticism, and then simply ask the question, how is this price determined? It soon recognized that the change in the relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price of labor as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes, i.e., the oscillations of the market price above or below a certain mean. If demand and supply balance, the oscillation of price ceases, all other conditions remaining the same. But then demand and supply also cease to explain anything. The price of labor at the moment when demand and supply are in equilibrium is its natural price, determined independently of the relation of demand and supply. And how this price is determined is just the question. Or a larger period of oscillations in the market price is taken, e.g., a year, and they are found to cancel one the other, leaving a mean average quantity, a relatively constant magnitude. This had naturally to be determined otherwise than by its own compensating variations. This price, which always finely predominates over the accidental market prices of labor and regulates them, this necessary price, physiocrats or natural price of labor, Adam Smith, can, as with all other commodities, be nothing else than its value expressed in money. In this way, political economy expected to penetrate a thwart, the accidental prices of labor, to the value of labor. As with other commodities, this value was determined by the cost of production. But what is the cost of production of the laborer, i.e., the cost of producing or reproducing the laborer himself? This question unconsciously substituted itself in political economy for the original one, for the search after the cost of production of laborers, as such, turned into a circle and never left the spot. What economists therefore call value of labor is in fact the value of labor power, as it exists in the personality of the laborer, which is as different from its function, labor, as a machine is from the work it performs. Occupied with the difference between the market price of labor and its so-called value, with the relation of this value to the rate of profit and to the values of the commodities produced by the means of labor, they never discovered that the course of analysis had led not only from the market prices of labor to its presumed value, but had led to the resolution of this value of labor itself into the value of labor power. Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of the results of its own analysis. It accepted uncritically the categories, value of labor, natural price of labor, et cetera, as final and as adequate expressions for the value relation under consideration, and was thus led, as will be seen later, into inextricable confusion and contradiction while it offered to the vulgar economists a secure basis of operations for their shallowness, which on principle worships appearances only. Let us next see how value and price of labor power present themselves in this transformed condition as wages. We know that the daily value of labor power is calculated upon a certain length of the laborer's life, to which again corresponds a certain length of working day. Assume the habitual working day is 12 hours, the daily value of labor power as three shillings, the expression in money of a value that embodies six hours of labor. If the laborer receives three shillings, then he receives the value of his labor power functioning through 12 hours. If now this value of a day's labor power is expressed as the value of a day's labor itself, we have the formula. 12 hours labor has a value of three shillings. The value of labor power thus determines the value of labor, or expressed in money, its necessary price. If on the other hand, the price of labor power differs from its value, in like manner, the price of labor differs from its so-called value. As the value of labor is only an irrational expression for the value of labor power, it follows, of course, that the value of labor must always be less than the value it produces. For the capitalist always makes labor power to work longer than is necessary for the reproduction of its own value. In the above example, the value of labor power that functions through 12 hours is three shillings, a value for the reproduction of which six hours are required. The value of which the labor power produces is, on the other hand, six shillings, because it in fact functions during 12 hours, and the value it produces depends not on its own value, but on the length of time it is in action. Thus we have a result absurd at first sight that labor which creates a value of six shillings possesses a value of three shillings. Footnote, see also, Zur critic, et cetera, page 40, where I state that, in the portion of that work that deals with capital, this problem will be solved. How does production on the basis of exchange value determined simply by labor time lead to the result that the exchange value of labor is less than the exchange value of its product? End note. We see further, the value of three shillings by which a part only of the working day, i.e. six hours labor is paid for, appears as the value or price of the whole working day of 12 hours, which thus includes six hours unpaid for. The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labor and surplus labor into paid and unpaid labor. All labor appears as paid labor. In the corvée, the labor of the worker for himself and his compulsory labor for his lord differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labor, even that part of the working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, in which therefore in fact he works for himself alone, appears as labor for his master. All the slave's labor appears as unpaid labor. Footnote. The morning star, a London free trade organ, naive to silliness, protested again and again during the American Civil War with all the moral indignation of which man is capable, that the Negro in the Confederate states worked absolutely for nothing. It should have compared the daily cost of such a Negro with that of the free workmen in the East end of London. End note. In wage labor, on the contrary, even surplus labor or unpaid labor appears as paid. There the property relation conceals the labor of the slave for himself. Here the money relation conceals the unrequited labor of the wage laborer. Hence we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labor power into the form of wages or into the value and price of labor itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible and indeed shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both laborer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists. If history took a long time to get at the bottom of the mystery of wages, nothing, on the other hand, is more easy to understand than a necessity, the raison d'être of this phenomenon. The exchange between capital and labor at first presents itself to the mind in the same guise as the buying and selling of all other commodities. The buyer gives a certain sum of money, the seller, an article of a nature different from money. The jurist's consciousness recognizes in this, at most, a material difference, expressed in the juridically equivalent formula. Do et dus, do et facias, facio et dus, facio et facias. Footnote, I give in order that you may give, I give in order that you may produce, I produce so that you may give, I produce so that you may produce. End note. Furthermore, exchange value and use value, being intrinsically incommensurable magnitudes, the expression's value of labor, price of labor, do not seem more irrational than the expression's value of cotton, price of cotton. Moreover, the laborer is paid after he has given his labor. In its function of means of payment, money realizes subsequently the value or price of the article supplied. I.e., in this particular case, the value or price of the labor supplied. Finally, the use value supplied by the laborer to the capitalist is not, in fact, his labor power, but its function. Some definite, useful labor, the work of tailoring, shoemaking, spinning, et cetera, that this same labor is, on the other hand, the universal value-creating element, and thus possesses a property by which it differs from all other commodities, is beyond the cognizance of the ordinary mind. Let us put ourselves in the place of the laborer who receives for 12 hours labor, say the value produced by six hours labor, say three shillings. For him, in fact, his 12 hours labor is the means of buying the three shillings. The value of his labor power may vary with the value of his usual means of subsistence from three to four shillings or from three to two shillings. Or if the value of his labor power remains constant, its price may, in consequence of changing relations of demand and supply, rise to four shillings or fall to two shillings. He always gives 12 hours of labor. Every change in the amount of the equivalent that he receives appears to him, therefore, necessarily as a change in the value or price of his 12 hours work. This circumstance misled Adam Smith, who treated the working day as a constant quantity to the assertion that the value of labor is constant, although the value of the means of subsistence may vary and the same working day, therefore, may represent itself in more or less money for the laborer. Footnote, Adam Smith only accidentally alludes to the variation of the working day when he is referring to peace wages. End note. Let us consider, on the other hand, the capitalist. He wishes to receive as much labor as possible for as little money as possible. Practically, therefore, the only thing that interests him is the difference between the price of labor power and the value which its function creates. But then he tries to buy all commodities as cheaply as possible and always accounts for his profit by simple cheating or buying under and selling over the value. Hence, he never comes to see that if such a thing is the value of labor really existed and he really paid to this value, no capital would exist. His money would not be turned into capital. Moreover, the actual movement of wages presents phenomena which seem to prove that not the value of labor power is paid but the value of its function of labor itself. We may reduce these phenomena to two great classes. One, change of wages with the changing length of the working day. One might as well conclude that not the value of a machine is paid but that of its working because it costs more to hire a machine for a week than for a day. Two, the individual difference in the wages of different laborers who do the same kind of work. We find this individual difference but are not deceived by it. In the system of slavery where frankly and openly without any circumlocution, labor power itself is sold. Only in the slave system, the advantage of a labor power above the average and the disadvantage of a labor power below the average affects the slave owner. In the wage labor system, it affects the laborer himself because his labor power is, in the one case, sold by himself, in the other by a third person. For the rest in respect to the phenomenal form, value and price of labor or wages as contrasted with the essential relation manifested therein, vis the value and price of labor power, the same difference holds that holds in respect to all phenomena and their hidden substratum. The former appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought. The latter must first be discovered by science. Classical political economy nearly touches the true relation of things without, however, consciously formulating it. This it cannot, so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin. End of chapter 19. Chapter 20 of capital volume one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, volume one by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Friedrich Engels. Part six, wages, chapter 20, time wages. Wages themselves again take many forms, a fact not recognizable in the ordinary economic treatises, which exclusively interested in the material side of the question neglect every difference of form. An exposition of all these forms, however, belongs to the special study of wage labor, not, therefore, to this work. Still, the two fundamental forms must be briefly worked out here. The sale of labor power, as will be remembered, takes place for a definite period of time. The converted form under which the daily, weekly, et cetera, value of labor power presents itself is hence that of time wages, therefore, day wages, et cetera. Next, it is to be noted that the laws set forth in the 17th chapter on the changes in the relative magnitudes of price of labor power and surplus value pass by a simple transformation of form into laws of wages. Similarly, the distinction between the exchange value of labor power and the sum of the necessaries of life into which this value is converted now reappears as the distinction between nominal and real wages. It would be useless to repeat here with regard to the phenomenal form what has been already worked out in the substantial form. We limit ourselves, therefore, to a few points characteristic of time wages. The sum of money, one which the laborer receives for his daily or weekly labor, forms the amount of his nominal wages or of his wages estimated in value. But it is clear that according to the length of the working day, that is, according to the amount of actual labor daily supplied, the same daily or weekly wage may represent very different prices of labor, i.e. very different sums of money for the same quantity of labor. Note, the value of money itself is here always supposed constant. End note. Note, the price of labor is the sum paid for a given quantity of labor. Sir Edward West, price of corn and wages of labor, London, 1836, page 67. West is the author of the anonymous essay on the application of capital to land by a fellow of the University College of Oxford, London, 1815. An epic making work in the history of political economy. End note. We must, therefore, in considering time wages, again distinguish between the sum total of the daily or weekly wages, et cetera, and the price of labor. How then to find this price, i.e. the money value of a given quantity of labor? The average price of labor is found when the average daily value of the labor power is divided by the average number of hours in the working day. If, e.g., the daily value of labor power's three shillings, the value of the product of six working hours, and if the working day is 12 hours, the price of one working hour is 312th shillings, or three pence. The price of the working hour thus found serves as the unit of measure for the price of labor. It follows, therefore, that the daily and weekly wages, et cetera, may remain the same, although the price of labor falls constantly. If, for example, the habitual working day is 10 hours and the daily value of the labor power's three shillings, the price of the working hour is three and three fifths pence. It falls to three shillings as soon as the working day rises to 12 hours, to two and two fifths pence as soon as it rises to 15 hours. Daily or weekly wages remain despite all this unchanged. On the contrary, the daily or weekly wages may rise, although the price of labor remains constant or even falls. If, for example, the working day is 10 hours and the daily value of labor power three shillings, the price of one working hour is three and three fifths pence. If the laborer in consequence of increase of trade works 12 hours, the price of labor remaining the same, his daily wages now rise to three shillings, one and one fifth pence, without any variation in the price of labor. The same result might follow if, instead of the extensive amount of labor, its intensive amount increased. Footnote. The wages of labor depend upon the price of labor and the quantity of labor performed. An increase in the wages of labor does not necessarily imply an enhancement of the price of labor. From fuller employment and greater exertions, the wages of labor may be considerably increased while the price of labor may continue the same. West, Opsite, pages 67, 68, 112. The main question, how is the price of labor determined? West, however, dismisses with mere banalities. End note. The rise of the nominal day or weekly wages may therefore be accompanied by price of labor that remains stationary or falls. The same holds as to the income of the laborer's family, as soon as the quantity of labor expended by the head of the family is increased by the labor of the members of his family. There are therefore methods of lowering the price of labor independent of the reduction of the nominal daily or weekly wages. Footnote. This is perceived by the fanatical representative of the industrial bourgeoisie of the 18th century, the author of the essay on trade and commerce, often quoted by us, although he puts the matter in a confused way. It is the quantity of labor and not the price of it, he means by this the nominal daily or weekly wages that is determined by the price of provisions and other necessaries, reduce the price of necessaries very low and of course you reduce the quantity of labor in proportion. Master manufacturers know that there are various ways of raising and felling the price of labor, besides that of altering its nominal amount. Opsite, pages 48 and 61. In his three lectures on the rate of wages, London, 1830, in which N.W. Senior uses West's work without mentioning it, he says, the laborer is principally interested in the amount of wages, page 14. That is to say, the laborer is principally interested in what he receives, the nominal sum of his wages, not in that in which he gives the amount of labor. End note. As a general law, it follows that, given the amount of daily or weekly labor, et cetera, the daily or weekly wages depend on the price of labor, which itself varies either with the value of labor power or with the difference between its price and its value. Given on the other hand, the price of labor, the daily or weekly wages depend on the quantity of the daily or weekly labor. The unit measure for time wages, the price of the working hour, is the quotient of the value of a day's labor power, divided by the number of hours of the average working day. Let the latter be 12 hours and the daily value of labor power three shillings, the value of the product of six hours of labor. Under these circumstances, the price of a working hour is three pence. The value produced in it is six pence. If the laborer is now employed less than 12 hours or less than six days in the week, e.g. only six or eight hours, he receives with this price of labor only two shillings or one shilling six pence a day. Footnote. The effect of such an abnormal lessening of employment is quite different from that of a general reduction of the working day enforced by law. The former has nothing to do with the absolute length of the working day and may occur just as well in a working day of 15 as of six hours. The normal price of labor is in the first case calculated on the laborer working 15 hours, in the second case on his working six hours a day on the average. The result is therefore the same. If he in the one case is employed for only seven and a half in the other for three hours. Endnote. As on our hypothesis, he must work on the average six hours daily in order to produce a day's wage corresponding merely to the value of his labor power as according to the same hypothesis he works only half of every hour for himself and half for the capitalist. It is clear that he cannot obtain for himself the value of the product of six hours if he is employed less than 12 hours. In previous chapters, we saw the destructive consequences of overwork. Here we find the sources of the sufferings that result to the laborer from his insufficient employment. If the hour's wage is fixed so that the capitalist does not bind himself to pay a day's or week's wage, but only to pay wages for the hours during which he chooses to employ the laborer, he can employ him for a shorter time than that which is originally the basis of the calculation of the hour wage or the unit measure of the price of labor. Since this unit is determined by the ratio of daily value of labor power over working day of a given number of hours, it of course loses all meaning as soon as the working day ceases to contain a definite number of hours. The connection between the paid and the unpaid labor is destroyed. The capitalist can now ring from the labor a certain quantity of surplus labor without allowing him the labor time necessary for his own subsistence. He can annihilate all regularity of employment and according to his own convenience, caprice and the interest of the moment make the most enormous overwork alternate with relative or absolute cessation of work. He can under the pretense of paying the normal price of labor abnormally lengthen the working day without any corresponding compensation to the laborer. Hence the perfectly rational revolt in 1860 of the London laborers employed in the building trades against the attempt of the capitalist to impose on them this sort of wage by the hour. The legal limitation of the working day puts an end to such mischief, although not of course to the diminution of employment caused by the competition of machinery by changes in the quality of the laborers employed and by crisis, partial or general. With an increasing daily or weekly wage, the price of labor may remain nominally constant and yet may fall below its normal level. This occurs every time that the price of labor reckoned per working hour remaining consonant, the working day is prolonged beyond its customary length. If in the fraction daily value of labor power over working day, the denominator increases, the numerator increases yet more rapidly. The value of labor power as dependent on its wear and tear increases with the duration of its functioning and in more rapid proportion than the increase of that duration. In many branches of industry where time wage is the general rule without legal limits to the working time, the habit has therefore spontaneously grown up of regarding the working day as normal only up to a certain point, e.g. up to the expiration of the 10th hour, normal working day, the day's work, the regular hours of work. Beyond this limit, the working time is over time and is taking the hour as a unit measure paid better, extra pay, although often in a proportion ridiculously small. The normal working day exists here as a fraction of the actual working day and the latter, often during the whole year, lasts longer than the former. The increase in the price of labor with the extension of the working day beyond a certain normal limit takes such a shape in various British industries that the low price of labor during the so-called normal time compels the laborer to work during the better paid overtime if he wishes to obtain a sufficient wage at all. Legal limitation of the working day puts an end to these amenities. Footnote, the rate of payment for overtime in lace making is so small from one half pence and three quarters pence to two pence per hour that it stands in painful contrast to the amount of injury produced to the health and stamina of the work people. The small amount thus earned is also often obliged to be spent in extra nourishment. Child Employment Commission, second report, page 16, note 117, end note. For example, in paper staining before the recent introduction into this trade of the Factory Act. We work on with no stoppage for meals so that the day's work of 10 and a half hours is finished by 4.30 p.m. And all after that is overtime and we seldom leave off working before 6 p.m. so that we are really working overtime the whole year round. Mr. Smith's evidence in Children's Employment Commission, first report, page 125, end note. For example, in the Scotch Bleaching Works, in some parts of Scotland this trade before the introduction of the Factory Act in 1862 was carried on by a system of overtime, i.e. 10 hours a day were the regular hours of work for which a nominal wage of one shilling two pence per day was paid to a man, there being every day overtime for three or four hours paid at the rate of three pence per hour. The effect of this system, a man could not earn more than eight shillings per week when working the ordinary hours. Without overtime pay they could not earn a fair day's wages. Report of the Inspector of Factories, April 30th, 1863, page 10. The higher wages for getting adult males to work longer hours are a temptation too strong to be resisted. Report of the Inspector of Factories, April 30th, 1848, page 5. The bookbinding trade in the City of London employs very many young girls from 14 to 15 years old, and that under indentures which prescribe certain definite hours of labor. Nevertheless, they work in the last week of each month until 10, 11, 12, or one o'clock at night along with the older laborers in a very mixed company. The masters tempt them by extra pay and supper which they eat in neighboring public houses. The great debauchery thus produced among these young immortals, Children's Employment Commission, 5th Report, page 44, note 191, is compensated by the fact that among the rest many Bibles and religious books are bound by them. End of note. Note. See, Reports of the Inspector of Factories, 30th April, 1863, page 10. With very accurate appreciation of the state of things the London laborers employed in the building trades declared during the great strike and lockout of 1860 that they would only accept wages by the hour under two conditions. One, that with the price of the working hour a normal working day of nine and 10 hours respectively should be fixed and that the price of the hour for the 10 hours working day should be higher than that for the hour of the nine hours working day. Two, that every hour beyond the normal working day should be reckoned as overtime and proportionally more highly paid. End of note. It is a fact generally known that the longer the working days in any branch of industry the lower are the wages. A Red Grave Factory Inspector illustrates this by comparative review of the 20 years from 1839 to 1859 according to which wages rose in the factories under the 10 hours law whilst they fell in the factories in which the work lasted 14 to 15 hours daily. Footnote. It is a very notable thing too that where long hours are the rule small wages are also reported the Inspector of Factories 31st October, 1863, page nine. The work which obtains the scanty pittance of food is for the most part excessively prolonged. Public Health, 6th Report, 1864, page 15. End note. Note. Report of the Inspector of Factories, 30th of April, 1860, page 31, 32. End note. From the law the price of labor being given the daily or weekly wage depends on the quantity of labor expended. It follows first of all that the lower the price of labor the greater must be the quantity of labor or the longer must be the working day for the laborer to secure even a miserable average wage. The lowness of the price of labor acts here as a stimulus to the extension of the labor time. Footnote. The hand nail makers in England, for example, have on account of the low price of labor to work 15 hours a day in order to hammer out their miserable weekly wage. It's a great many hours in a day, 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. and he has to work hard all the time to get 11 pence or one shilling. And there is the wear of the tools, the cost of firing and something for waste iron to go out of this, which takes off altogether two and a half pence or three pence. Children's Employment Commission, third report, page 136, note 671. The women earned by the same working time a week's wage of only five shillings. First C, page 137, note 674. End note. On the other hand, the extension of the working time produces in its turn a fall in the price of labor and with this a fall in the days or weeks wages. The determination of the price of labor is given by the daily value of labor power over working day of a given number of hours, which shows that a mere prolongation of the working day lowers the price of labor if no compensation steps in. But the same circumstances which allow the capitalist in the long run to prolong the working day also allow him first and compel him finally to nominally lower the price of labor until the total price of the increased number of hours is lowered. And therefore the daily or weekly wage. Reference to two circumstances is sufficient here. If one man does the work of one and a half or two men, the supply of labor increases, although the supply of labor power on the market remains constant. The competition thus created between the laborers allows the capitalist to beat down the price of labor, whilst the falling price of labor allows him on the other hand to screw up still further the working time. Note, if a factory hand, for example, refused to work the customary long hours, he would very shortly be replaced by somebody who would work any length of time and thus be thrown out of employment. Reports of inspectors of factories, 30th April, 1848. Evidence, page 39, note 58. If one man performs the work of two, the rate of profits will generally be raised in consequence of the additional supply of labor having diminished its price. Senior, first C, page 15, and note. Soon, however, this command over abnormal quantities of unpaid labor, i.e. quantities in excess of the average social amount, becomes a source of competition amongst the capitalist themselves. A part of the price of the commodity consists of the price of labor. The unpaid part of the labor price need not be reckoned in the price of the commodity. It may be presented to the buyer. This is the first step to which competition leads. The second step to which it drives is to exclude also from the selling price of the commodity at least a part of the abnormal surplus value created by the extension of the working day. In this way, an abnormally low selling price of the commodity arises, at first sporadically, and becomes fixed by degrees. A lower selling price, which, henceforward, becomes the constant basis of a miserable wage for an excessive working time, as originally it was the product of these very circumstances. This movement is simply indicated here as the analysis of competition does not belong to this part of our subject. Nevertheless, the capitalist may, for a moment, speak for himself. In Birmingham, there is so much competition of masters, one against another, that many are obliged to do things as employers that they would otherwise be ashamed of, and yet no more money is made, but only the public gets the benefit. Footnote, Children's Employment Commission, third report, evidence, page 66, note 22, end note. The reader will remember the two sorts of London bakers, of whom one sold the bread at its full price, the full priced bakers, the other below its normal price, the underpriced, the undersellers. The full price denounce their rivals before the parliamentary committee of inquiry. They only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting 18 hours' work out of their men for 12 hours' wages. The unpaid labor of the men was made, the source whereby the competition was carried on, and continues so to this day. The competition among the master bakers is the cause of the difficulty in getting rid of night work. An underseller who sells his bread below the cost price according to the price of flour must make it up by getting more out of the labor of the men. If I got only 12 hours' work out of my men, and my neighbor got 18 or 20, he must beat me in the selling price. If the men could insist on payment for overwork, this would be set right. A large number of those employed by the undersellers are foreigners and youths who are obliged to accept almost any wages they can obtain. Note, report, et cetera, relative to the grievances complained of by the journeymen bakers, London, 1862, page 411, and IBID evidence notes 479, 357, 27. Anyhow, the full-priced bakers, as was mentioned above, and as their spokesman, Bennett himself admits, make their men generally begin work at 11 p.m., up to eight o'clock the next morning. They are then engaged all day long as late as seven o'clock in the evening. First see, page 22, and note. This Jeremied is also interesting because it shows how the appearance of only the relations of production mirrors itself in the brain of the capitalist. The capitalist does not know that the normal price of labor also includes a definite quantity of unpaid labor, and that this very unpaid labor is the normal source of his gain. The category of surplus labor time does not exist at all for him, since it is included in the normal working day, which he thinks he has paid for in the day's wages. But overtime does exist for him, the prolongation of the working day beyond the limits corresponding with the usual price of labor. Face to face with his underselling competitor, he even insists upon extra pay for this overtime. He again does not know that this extra pay includes unpaid labor, just as well as does the price of the customary hour of labor. For example, the price of one hour of the 12 hours working day is three pence, say the value product of half a working hour, whilst the price of the overtime working hour is four pence, or the value product of two thirds of a working hour. In the first case, the capitalist appropriates himself one half, in the second, one third of the working hour without paying for it. End of chapter 20. Part six, chapter 21 of capital volume one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production, volume one, by Karl Marx. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Friedrich Engels. Part six, wages, chapter 21, peace wages. Wages by the peace are nothing else than a converted form of wages by time, just as wages by time are a converted form of the value or price of labor power. In peace wages, it seems at first sight as if the use value bought from the laborer was not the function of his labor power, living labor, but labor already realized in the product. And as if the price of this labor was determined, not as with time wages, by the fraction equals daily value of labor power over the working day of a given number of hours, but by the capacity for the work of the producer. Footnote, the system of peace work illustrates an epic in the history of the working man. It is halfway between the position of the mere day laborer depending upon the will of the capitalist and the cooperative artisan, who in the not distant future promises to combine the artisan and capitalist in his own person. Peace workers are in fact their own masters, even whilst working upon the capital of the employer. John Watts trades societies and strikes, machinery and cooperative societies. Manchester, 1865, pages 52 and 53. I quote this little work because it is a very sink of all long ago rotten apologetic common places. This same Mr. Watts earlier traded an owingism and published in 1842 another pamphlet, facts and fictions of political economists in which among other things he declares that property is rubbery. That was long ago, end note. The confidence that trust in this appearance ought to receive a first severe shock from the fact that both forms of wages exist side by side, simultaneously in the same breaches of industry. For example, the compositors of London as a general rule work by the peace, time work being the exception, while those in the country work by the day, the exception being worked by the peace. The shipwrights of the port of London work by the job or peace, whilst those of all other parts work by the day. Footnote, TJ Dunning trades unions and strikes, London, 1860, page 22, end note. In the same saddlery shops of London, often for the same work, peace wages are paid to the French, time wages to the English. In the regular factories in which throughout peace wages predominate, particular kinds of work are unsuitable to this form of wage and are therefore paid by time. Footnote, how the existence side by side and simultaneously of these two forms of wage favors the master's cheating. A factory employs 400 people, the half of which work by the peace and have a direct interest in working longer hours. The other 200 are paid by the day, work equally long with the others and get no more money for their overtime. The work of these 200 people for half an hour a day is equal to one person's work for 50 hours or five sixth of one person's labor in a week and is a positive gain to the employer. Reports of inspectors of factories 31st October, 1860, page nine. Overwork to a very considerable extent still prevails and in most instances with that security against detection and punishment which the law itself affords. I have in many former reports shown the injury to work people who are not allowed on peace work but receive weekly wages. Leonard Homer in reports of inspector factories 30th April, 1859, pages eight and nine. Endnote. But it is moreover self-evident that the difference of form in the payment of wages alters in no way their essential nature although the one form may be more favorable to the development of capitalist production than the other. Let the ordinary working day contain 12 hours of which six are paid, six unpaid. Let its value product be six shillings, that of one hour's labor, therefore six pence. Let us suppose that as the result of experience a laborer who works with the average amount of intensity and skill who therefore gives in fact only the time socially necessary to the production of an article supplies in 12 hours 24 pieces either distinct products or measurable parts of a continuous whole. Then the value of these 24 pieces after subtraction of the portion of constant capital contained in them is six shillings and the value of a single piece three pence. The laborer receives one and a half pence per piece and thus earns in 12 hours three shillings. Just as with time wages it does not matter whether we assume that the laborer works six hours for himself and six hours for the capitalist or half of every hour for himself and the other half for the capitalist. So here it does not matter whether we say that each individual piece is half paid and half unpaid for or that the price of 12 pieces is the equivalent only of the value of the labor power whilst in the other 12 pieces surplus value is incorporated. The form of piece wages is just as irrational as that of time wages. Whilst in our example two pieces of a commodity after subtraction of the value of the means of production consumed in them are worth six pence as being the product of one hour the laborer receives for them a price of three pence. Piece wages do not in fact distinctly express any relation of value. It is not therefore a question of measuring the value of the piece by the working time incorporated in it but on the contrary of measuring the working time the laborer has expended by the number of pieces he has produced. In time wages the laborer is measured by its immediate duration. In piece wages by the quantity of products in which the laborer has embodied itself during a given time. The price of labor time itself is finally determined by the equation value of a day's labor equals daily value of labor power. Piece wage is therefore only a modified form of time wage. Footnote. Wages can be measured in two ways either by the duration of the labor or by its product. Abrages l'elementaire des principes de l'économie politique. Paris 1796 page 32, the author of this anonymous work G. Garnier, end note. Let us now consider a little more closely the characteristic peculiarities of piece wages. The quality of the labor is here controlled by the work itself which must be of average perfection if the piece price is to be paid in full. Piece wages become from this point of view the most fruitful source of reductions of wages and capitalistic cheating. They furnish to the capitalist an exact measure for the intensity of labor. Only the working time which is embodied in a quantum of commodities determined beforehand and experimentally fixed counts a socially necessary working time and is paid as such. In the larger workshops of the London tailors, therefore, a certain piece of work, a waste could, for example, is called an hour or half an hour, the hour at six pence. By practice it is known how much is the average product of one hour. With new fashions, repairs, et cetera, a contest arises between master and laborer as to whether a particular piece of work is one hour and so on, until here also experience decides. Similarly, in the London furniture workshops, et cetera, if the laborer does not possess the average capacity, if he cannot in consequence supply a certain minimum of work per day, he is dismissed. Footnote, so much weight of cotton is delivered to him, the spinner, and he has to return by a certain time in lieu of it, a given weight of twist or yarn of a certain degree of fineness, and he has paid so much per pound for all that he returns. If his work is defective in quality, the penalty falls on him. If less in quantity than the minimum fixed for a given time, he is dismissed and an abler operative procured. First C, first C, page 317, end note. Since the quality and intensity of the work are here controlled by the form of wage itself, superintendents of labor becomes in great part superfluous. Peace wages therefore lay the foundation of the modern domestic labor described above, as well as of a hierarchically organized system of exploitation and oppression. The latter has two fundamental forms. On the one hand, peace wages facilitate the interposition of parasites between the capitalist and the wage laborer, the subletting of labor. The gain of these middlemen comes entirely from the difference between the labor price which the capitalist pays and the part of that price which they actually allow to reach the laborer. Footnote. It is when work passes through several hands, each of which is to take a share of profits while only the last does the work, that the pay which reaches the workwoman is miserably disproportioned. Children's Employment Commission, second report. Page 120, note 424, end note. In England, this system is characteristically called the sweating system. On the other hand, peace wage allows the capitalist to make a contract for so much per piece with the head laborer and manufacturers with the chief of some group, in mines with the extractor of the coal, in the factory with the actual machine worker, at a price for which the head laborer himself undertakes the enlisting and payment of his assistant work people. The exploitation of the laborer by capital is here affected through the exploitation of the laborer by the laborer. Footnote. Even Watts, the apologetic, remarks, it would be a great improvement to the system of peace work if all the men employed on a job were partners in the contract, each according to his abilities, instead of one man being interested in overworking his fellows for his own benefit. First C, page 53. On the vileness of this system, C, for example, Children's Employment Commission report the third, page 66, note 22, page 11, note 124, page 11, note 13, 53, 59, and et cetera. End note. Given peace wage, it is naturally the personal interest of the laborer to strain his labor power as intensely as possible. This enables the capitalist to raise more easily the normal degree of intensity of labor. Footnote. This spontaneous result is often artificially helped along, IE, in the engineering trade of London. A customary trick is the selecting of a man who possesses superior physical strength and quickness as the principle of several workmen and paying him an additional rate by the quarter or otherwise with the understanding that he is to exert himself to the utmost to induce the others who are only pay the ordinary wages to keep up to him. Without any comment, this will go far to explain many of the complaints of stinting the action, superior skill and working power made by the employers against the men. In trades unions, Dunning, first C, pages 22 and 23. As the author is himself a laborer and secretary of a trades union, this might be taken for exaggeration, but the reader may compare the highly respectable cyclopedia of agriculture of J. C. Morton, article, the laborer, where this method is recommended to the farmers as an approved one. End note. It is, moreover, now the personal interest of the laborer to lengthen the working day since with it his daily or weekly wages rise. This gradually brings on a reaction like that already described in time wages without reckoning that the prolongation of the working day, even if the peace wage remains constant, includes of necessity a fall in the price of the labor. Footnote. All those who are paid by piecework profit by the transgression of the legal limits of work. This observation as to the willingness to work overtime is especially applicable to the women employed as weavers and realers. Report of Inspector of Factories, 30th April, 1858, page nine. This system, piecework, so advantageous to the employer, tends directly to encourage the young potter greatly to overwork himself during the four or five years during which he is employed in the piecework system, but at low wages. This is another great cause to which the bad constitutions of the potters are to be attributed. Children's Employment Commission first report, page eight. Endnote. In time wages with few exceptions, the same wage holds for the same kind of work. Whilst in peace wages, though the price of the working time is measured by a certain quantity of product, the days or weeks wage will vary with the individual differences of the laborers, of whom one supplies in a given time the minimum of product only, another the average, a third more than the average. With regard to actual receipts, there is therefore great variety according to the different skill, energy, strength, staying power, et cetera of the individual laborers. Footnote. Where the work in any trade is paid for by the piece at so much per job, wages may very materially differ in amount. But in work by the day there is generally in uniform rate, recognized by both employer and employed as the standard of wages for the general run of workmen in the trade. Dunning, first C, page 17. Endnote. Of course this does not alter the general relations between capital and wage labor. First the individual differences balance one another in the workshop as a whole, while thus supplies in a given working time the average product and the total wages paid will be the average wages of that particular branch of industry. Second the proportion between wages and surplus value remains unaltered since the mass of surplus labor supplied by each particular laborer corresponds with the wage received by him. But the wider scope that piece wage gives to individuality tends to develop on the one hand that individuality and with it the sense of liberty, independence and self control of the laborers and on the other their competition with one another. Piece work has therefore a tendency while raising individual wages above the average to lower this average itself. But where a particular rate of piece wage has for a long time been fixed by tradition and it's lowering therefore presented a special difficulties, the masters in such exceptional cases sometimes had recourse to its compulsory transformation into time wage. Hence, for example in 1860, a great strike among the ribbon weavers of Coventry. Piece wage is finally one of the chief supports of the hour system described in the preceding chapter. Footnote, the work of the journeyman artisans will be ruled by the day or by the piece. These master artisans know about how much work a journeyman artisan can do per day in each craft and often pay them in proportion to the work which they do. The journeyman therefore work as much as they can in their own interest without any further inspection. Cantillon essay sur la nature du commerce en général. Amstead 1756 pages 185 and 202. The first edition appeared in 1755. Cantillon from whom Kesney, Sir James Stewart and A. Smith have largely drawn, already here represents piece wage as simply a modified form of time wage. The French edition of Cantillon professes in its title to be a translation from the English, but the English edition, the analysis of trade, commerce, et cetera, by Philippe Cantillon, late of the city of London merchant, is not only of later date, 1759, but proves by its contents that it is a later and revised edition, e.g. in the French edition, Hume is not yet mentioned, whilst in the English, on the other hand, Petty hardly figures any longer. The English edition is theoretically less important, but it contains numerous details referring specifically to English commerce, bullion trade, et cetera, that are wanting in the French text. The words on the title page of the English edition, according to which the work is taken chiefly from the manuscript of a very ingenious gentleman, deceased and adapted, et cetera, seem therefore pure fiction, very customary at that time. And note. How often have we seen in some workshops many more workers recruited than the work actually called for? On many occasions, workers are recruited in anticipation of future work, which may never materialize. Because they are paid by peace wages, it is said that no risk is incurred, since any loss of time will be charged against the unemployed. H. Gregor, les typographs devant le tribunal correctionneur de Bruxelles, 1865, page nine. End note. From what has been shown so far, it follows that peace wage is the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production. Although by no means new, it figures side by side with time wages officially in the French and English labor statutes of the 14th century, it only conquers a larger field for action during the period of manufacture, properly so-called. In the stormy youth of modern industry, especially from 1797 to 1815, it served as a lever for the lengthening of the working day and the lowering of wages. Very important materials for the fluctuation of wages during that period are to be found in the blue books. Report and evidence from the select committee on petitions respecting the corn laws, parliamentary session of 1813 to 14, and report from the Lord's committee on the state of growth, commerce, and consumption of grain, and all laws relating there too, session of 1814 to 15. Here we find documentary evidence of the constant lowering of the price of labor from the beginning of the Ante-Jacobin War. In the weaving industry, for example, peace wages had fallen so low that in spite of the very great lengthening of the working day, the daily wages were then lower than before. The real earnings of the cotton weaver are now far less than they were. His superiority over the common laborer which at first was very great, has now almost entirely ceased. Indeed, the difference in the wages of skillful and common labor is far less now than in any former period. Remarks on the commercial policy of Great Britain, London, 1815, end note. How little the increased intensity and extension of labor through peace wages benefited the agricultural proletariat, the following passage borrowed from a work on the side of the landlords and farmers shows. By far the greater part of agricultural operations is done by people who are hired for the day or on peace work. Their weekly wages are about 12 shillings, and although it may be assumed that a man earns on peace work under the greater stimulus to labor, one shilling or perhaps two shillings more than on weekly wages, yet it is found on calculating his total income that his loss of employment during the year outweighs this gain. Further, it will generally be found that the wages of these men bear a certain proportion to the price of the necessary means of subsistence so that a man with two children is able to bring up his family without recourse to parish relief. Footnote, a defense of the landowners and farmers of Great Britain, 1814, pages four and five. End note. Malthus at that time remarked with reference to the facts published by Parliament. I confess that I see with misgiving the great extension of the practice of peace wage. Really hard work during 12 or 14 hours of the day or for any longer time is too much for any human being. Footnote. Malthus, inquiry into the nature and progress of rent, London, 1815, end note. In the workshops under the factory acts, peace wages became the general rule because capital can there only increase the efficacy of the working day by intensifying labor. Footnote. Those who are paid by peace work constitute probably four-fifths of the workers in the factories. Report of the Inspector of Factories, 30th April, 1858, end note. With the changing productiveness of labor, the same quantum of product represents a varying working time. Therefore, peace wage also varies for it is the money expression of a determined working time. In our example above, 24 pieces were produced in 12 hours whilst the value of the product of the 12 hours was six shillings, the daily value of labor power three shillings, the price of the labor hour three pence, and the wage for one piece one half pence. In one piece, half an hour's labor was absorbed. If the same working day now supplies in consequence of the doubled productiveness of labor, 48 pieces instead of 24 and all other circumstances remain unchanged, then the peace wage falls from one and a half pence to three quarters pence as every piece now only represents one quarter instead of one half of a working hour. 24 by one and a half pence equals three shillings and in like manner, 48 by three quarter pence equals three shillings. In other words, peace wage is lowered in the same proportion as the number of pieces produced in the same time rises, and therefore as the working time spent on the same piece falls. This change in peace wage so far purely nominal leads to constant battles between capitalist and labor, either because the capitalist uses it as a pretext for actually lowering the price of labor, or because increased productive power of labor is accompanied by an increased intensity of the same, or because the laborer takes seriously the appearance of peace wages, vis that his product is paid for and not his labor power, and therefore revolts against a lowering of wages, unaccompanied by a lowering in the selling price of the commodity. Footnote, the productive power of his spinning machine is accurately measured and the rate of pay for work done with it decreases with though not as the increase of its productive power. Ure first see page 317. This last apologetic phrase Ure himself again cancels. The lengthening of the mule causes some increase of labor he admits. The labor does therefore not diminish in the same ratio as its productivity increases. Further, by this increase, the productive power of the machine will be augmented one fifth. When this event happens, the spinner will not be paid at the same rate for work done as he was before, but as that rate will not be diminished in the ratio of one fifth, the improvement will augment his money earnings for any given number of hours work. But the foregoing statement requires certain modification. The spinner has to pay something additional for juvenile aid out of his additional six pence, accompanied by displacing a portion of adults. First see page 321, which has in no way a tendency to raise wages. End note. The operatives carefully watch the price of the raw material and the price of manufactured goods and are thus enabled to form an accurate estimate of their master's profit. Footnote, H. Fawcett, the economic position of the British laborer, Cambridge in London, 1865, page 178. End note. The capitalist rightly knocks on the head such pretensions as gross errors as to the nature of wage labor. He cries out against this usurping attempt to lay taxes on the advance of industry and declares roundly that the productiveness of labor does not concern the laborer at all. Footnote, in the London standard of October 26, 1861, there is a report of proceedings of the firm of John Bright and Company before the Roachdale magistrates to prosecute for intimidation the agents of the carpet weavers trades union. Bright's partners had introduced new machinery which would turn out 240 yards of carpet in the time with the labor previously required to produce 160 yards. The workmen had no claim whatever to share in the profit.