$Unique_ID{how00945}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Das Kapital: A Critique Of Political Economy
Chapter XXII: National Differences Of Wages}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Marx, Karl}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{labour
value
wages
different
national
country
average
countries
intensity
money}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Das Kapital: A Critique Of Political Economy
Book:        Part VI: Wages
Author:      Marx, Karl

Chapter XXII: National Differences Of Wages

     The simple translation of the value or respectively of the price of
labour-power into the exoteric form of wages transforms all these laws into
laws of the fluctuations of wages.  That which appears in these fluctuations
of wages within a single country as a series of varying combinations, may
appear in different countries as contemporaneous difference of national
wages.  In the comparison of the wages in different nations, we must
therefore take into account all the factors that determine changes in the
amount of the value of labour-power; the price and the extent of the prime
necessaries of life as naturally and historically developed, the cost of
training the labourers, the part played by the labour of women and children,
the productiveness of labour, its extensive and intensive magnitude.  Even
the most superficial comparison requires the reduction first of the average
day-wage for the same trades, in different countries, to a uniform
working-day.  After this reduction to the same terms of the day-wages,
time-wage must again be translated into piece-wage, as the latter only can be
a measure both of the productivity and the intensity of labour.

     In every country there is a certain average intensity of labour, below
which the labour for the production of a commodity requires more than the
socially necessary time, and therefore does not reckon as labour of normal
quality.  Only a degree of intensity above the national average affects, in a
given country, the measure of value of the mere duration of the working time
This is not the case on the universal market, whose integral parts are the
individual countries.  The average intensity of labour changes from country
to country; here it is greater, there less.  These national averages form a
scale, whose unit of measure is the average unit of universal labour.  The
more intense national labour, therefore, as compared with the less intense,
produces in the same time more value, which expresses itself in more money.

     But the law of value in its international application is yet more
modified by this, that on the world-market the more productive national
labour reckons also as the more intense, so long as the more productive
nation is not compelled by competition to lower the selling price of its
commodities to the level of their value.

     In proportion as capitalist production is developed in a country, in the
same proportion do the national intensity and productivity of labour there
rise above the international level.  The different quantities of commodities
of the same kind, produced in different countries in the same working time,
have, therefore, unequal international values, which are expressed in
different prices, i.e., in sums of money varying according to international
values.  The relative value of money will, therefore, be less in the nation
with more developed capitalist mode of production than in the nation with
less developed.  It follows, then, that the nominal wages, the equivalent of
labour-power expressed in money, will also be higher in the first nation than
in the second; which does not at all prove that this holds also for the real
wages, i.e., for the means of subsistence placed at the disposal of the
labourer.

     But even apart from these relative differences of the value of money in
different countries, it will be found, frequently, that the daily or weekly,
&c., wage in the first nation is higher than in the second, whilst the
relative price of labour, i.e., the price of labour as compared both with
surplus-value and with the value of the product, stands higher in the second
than in the first.