User:Jaydavidmartin/Wage Labour and Capital

"Wage Labour and Capital" (German: Lohnarbeit und Kapital) is an essay on economics by Karl Marx based on lectures he gave in 1847 and first published as articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April 1849. It is widely considered the precursor to Marx’s influential treatise Das Kapital.^[1]

Summary[edit]

Wages[edit]

Marx argues that the idea that capitalists buy a worker's labour (the physical act of working) is an "illusion". He instead suggests that workers sell their "labour-power", which he defines as the amount of time that the worker agrees to work. He argues that labour-power is a commodity, providing the example that the capitalist trades a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of labour-power—in much the same way that the capitalist might buy a particular amount of sugar for a set price. Wages are thus a type of commodity pricing—"a special name for the price of labour-power". Marx makes this distinction in part to clarify his belief that wages are not a portion of the revenue generated from the sale of the product produced by the worker, but rather a commodity purchased by the capitalist prior to the sale.

Marx then considers the implications of this distinction. He argues that the sale of labour-power by the worker is an act of selling their own "life-activity" to "secure the necessary means of life". The worker, he contends, "does not count the labour itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life".

Commodity and wage pricing[edit]

Since Marx considers labour-power to be a commodity, he asserts that the price of labour-power (wages) is determined according to the same economic laws that determine the price of any other commodity.

Capital[edit]

Relation of Wage-Labour to Capital[edit]

Wages and Profits[edit]

Capitalist Class, the Middle Class and the Working Class[edit]

References[edit]

^ Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich (1978). Tucker, Robert C. (ed.). The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). London: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 203. ISBN 978-0-393-09040-6. It may be said that what Marx produced in the lectures of late 1847 was the future argument of Capital in embryo.

External links[edit]

Online text of this essay
Wage-Labour and Capital public domain audiobook at LibriVox

[1] Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich (1978). Tucker, Robert C. (ed.). The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). London: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 203. ISBN 978-0-393-09040-6. It may be said that what Marx produced in the lectures of late 1847 was the future argument of Capital in embryo.

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