History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0094/00942.txt

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$Unique_ID{how00942}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Das Kapital: A Critique Of Political Economy
Chapter XIX: Transformation Of The Value Of Labour-Power Into Wages}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Marx, Karl}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{labour
value
price
hours
labour-power
labourer
money
itself
production
paid}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Das Kapital: A Critique Of Political Economy
Book:        Part VI: Wages
Author:      Marx, Karl

Chapter XIX: Transformation Of The Value Of Labour-Power Into Wages

     On the surface of bourgeois society the wage of the labourer appears as
the price of labour, a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain
quantity of labour.  Thus people speak of the value of labour and call its
expression in money its necessary or natural price.  On the other hand they
speak of the market prices of labour, i.e., prices oscillating above or below
its natural price.

     But what is the value of a commodity?  The objective form of the social
labour expended in its production.  And how do we measure the quantity of
this value?  By the quantity of the labour contained in it.  How then is the
value, e.g., of a 12 hours' working day to be determined?  By the 12 working
hours contained in a working day of 12 hours, which is an absurd tautology.

     In order to be sold as a commodity in the market, labour must at all
events exist before it is sold.  But could the labourer give it an
independent objective existence, he would sell a commodity and not labour.

     Apart from these contradictions, a direct exchange of money, i.e., of
realized labour, with living labour 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-labour.  The working day of 12 hours embodies itself, e.g.,
in a money value of 6s.  Either equivalents are exchanged, and then the
labourer receives 6s. for 12 hours' labour; the price of his labour would be
equal to the price of his product.  In this case he produces no
surplus-value, for the buyer of his labour, the 6s. are not transformed into
capital, the basis of capitalist production vanishes.  But it is on this very
basis that he sells his labour and that his labour is wage-labour.  Or else
he receives for 12 hours' labour less than 6s., i.e., less than 12 hours'
labour.  Twelve hours' labour are exchanged against 10, 6, &c., hours'
labour.  This equalisation 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.

     It is of no avail to deduce the exchange of more labour against less,
from their difference of form, the one being realized, the other living.
This is the more absurd as the value of a commodity is determined not by the
quantity of labour actually realized in it, but by the quantity of living
labour necessary for its production.  A commodity represents, say 6 working
hours.  If an invention is made by which it can be produced in 3 hours, the
value, even of the commodity already produced, falls by half.  It represents
now 3 hours of social labour instead of the 6 formerly necessary.  It is the
quantity of labour required for its production, not the realized form of that
labour, by which the amount of the 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 labour, but the labourer.  What the latter sells
is his labour-power.  As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already
ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him.  Labour
is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value.

     In the expression "value of labour," 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.

     Classical political economy borrowed from every-day life the category
"price of labour" without further criticism, and then simply asked 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
labour, 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 prices ceases, all other conditions
remaining the same.  But then demand and supply also cease to explain
anything.  The price of labour, 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 finally predominates over the accidental market-prices of labour
and regulates them, this "necessary price" (physiocrats) or "natural price"
of labour (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 athwart the accidental prices of labour, to the value of labour.
As with other commodities, this value was determined by the cost of
production.  But what is the cost of production - of the labourer, i.e., the
cost of producing or reproducing the labourer himself?  This question
unconsciously substituted itself in political economy for the original one;
for the search after the cost of production of labour as such turned in a
circle and never left the spot.  What economists therefore call value of
labour, is in fact the value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality
of the labourer, which is as different from its function, labour, as a
machine is from the work it performs.  Occupied with the difference between
the market-price of labour 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
means of labour, &c., they never discovered that the course of the analysis
had led not only from the market prices of labour to its presumed value, but
had led to the resolution of this value of labour itself into the value of
labour-power.  Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of the
results of its own analysis; it accepted uncritically the categories "value
of labour," "natural price of labour," &c., 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 labour-power, present
themselves in this transformed condition as wages.

     We know that the daily value of labour-power is calculated upon a
certain length of the labourer's life, to which, again, corresponds a certain
length of working-day.  Assume the habitual working-day as 12 hours, the
daily value of labour-power as 3s., the expression in money of a value that
embodies 6 hours of labour.  If the labourer receives 3s., then he receives
the value of his labour-power functioning through 12 hours.  If, now, this
value of a day's labour-power is expressed as the value of a day's labour
itself, we have the formula: Twelve hours' labour has a value of 3s.  The
value of labour-power thus determines the value of labour, or, expressed in
money, its necessary price.  If, on the other hand, the price of labour-power
differs from its value, in like manner the price of labour differs from its
so-called value.

     As the value of labour is only an irrational expression for the value of
labour-power, it follows, of course, that the value of labour must always be
less than the value it produces, for the capitalist always makes labour-power
work longer than is necessary for the reproduction of its own value.  In the
above example, the value of the labour-power that functions through 12 hours
is 3s., a value for the reproduction of which 6 hours are required.  The
value which the labour-power produces is, on the other hand, 6s., 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 labour which creates a value of 6s.
possesses a value of 3s.

     We see, further: The value of 3s. by which a part only of the working
day - i.e., 6 hours' labour - is paid for, appears as the value or price of
the whole working-day of 12 hours, which thus includes 6 hours unpaid for.
The wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the
working-day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid and unpaid
labour.  All labour appears as paid labour.  In the corvee, the labour of the
worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his lord, differ in space
and time in the clearest possible way.  In slave-labour, 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 labour for his master.  All the slave's labour appears as unpaid
labour.  In wage-labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid
labour, appears as paid.  There the property-relation conceals the labour of
the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour
of the wage-labourer.

     Hence, we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation
of value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value
and price of labour 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 juridicial notions of both labourer and
capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic 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 the
necessity, the raison d'etre, of this phenomenon.

     The exchange between capital and labour 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. . . .

     Further.  Exchange-value and use-value, being intrinsically
incommensurable magnitudes, the expressions "value of labour", "price of
labour," do not seem more irrational than the expressions "value of cotton,"
"price of cotton."  Moreover, the labourer is paid after he has given his
labour.  In its function of means of payment, money realises subsequently the
value or price of the article supplied - i.e., in this particular case, the
value or price of the labour supplied.  Finally, the use-value supplied by
the labourer to the capitalist is not, in fact, his labour-power, but its
function, some definite useful labour, the work of tailoring, shoemaking,
spinning, &c.  That this same labour 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 cognisance of the ordinary mind.

     Let us put ourselves in the place of the labourer who receives for 12
hours' labour, say the value produced by 6 hours' labour, say 3s.  For him,
in fact, his 12 hours' labour is the means of buying the 3s.  The value of
his labour-power may vary, with the value of his usual means of subsistence,
from 3 to 4 shillings, or from 3 to 2 shillings; or, if the value of his
labour-power remains constant, its price may, in consequence of changing
relations of demand and supply, rise to 4s. or fall to 2s.  He always gives
12 hours of labour.  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 labour 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 labourer.

     Let us consider, on the other hand, the capitalist.  He wishes to
receive as much labour as possible for as little money as possible.
Practically, therefore, the only thing that interests him is the difference
between the price of labour-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, by buying under, and selling over
the value.  Hence, he never comes to see that, if such a thing as the value
of labour really existed, and be really paid 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 labour-power is paid, but the value of its
function, of labour itself.  We may reduce these phenomena to two great
classes: (1.) 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.  (2.) The individual difference in the wages of different labourers 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, labour-power itself is sold.  Only, in the slave system,
the advantage of a labour-power above the average, and the disadvantage of a
labour-power below the average, affects the slave-owner; in the wage-labour
system it affects the labourer himself, because his labour-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
labour," or "wages," as contrasted with the essential relation manifested
therein, viz., the value and price of labour-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.