A Wage is a quantity of money paid for the purchase of a worker's labor-power over a standard work day. The capitalist-worker wage relationship is foundational to capitalism since it is how surplus value is created. Hence, the surplus value created is in the hands of the capitalist because of their purchase of the worker's labor-power. The motion of wages, up or down, is largely controlled by the ratio of employed workers to unemployed workers in the working age population.[1] Consider a small town with 10 jobs available and 100 unemployed workers. The competition and fighting between these workers trying to get work from the capitalist(s) causes wage suppression.
Function in capitalism
It is not in the interests of the capitalist ruling class, the Bourgeoisie, to tell workers how exploited they are. This is why Bourgeois society masks foundational relationships of capitalism; to hide the true form of things.
In his critique of political economy, Karl Marx exposed the misguided analysis of classic political economists such as Adam Smith in their presentation of the relationships behind wages, stating that
"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"[2]
Marx explains that economists use the concept of wages for a similar function; to mask the distinction between necessary labor and surplus labor, which makes all labor appear to be paid labor
"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 corvée, 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."[2]
Marx goes on further on the subject
"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 juridical 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 economist"[2]
Classifications
Wages can be measured in two ways: nominal and real. Nominal wages are the amount of money that the worker receives. Real wages are expressed in terms of the cost of consumer goods and can change when taxes or prices change even if the nominal wage stays constant.[3]
See also
References
- ↑ “Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and these again correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They are, therefore, not determined by the variations of the absolute number of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into active and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of the surplus population, by the extent to which it is now absorbed, now set free.”
Karl Marx (1887). Capital, Vol 1: '[Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and these again correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle 25 The general law of capitalist accumulation]'. - ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Karl Marx (1867). Capital: 'The Transformation of the Value (and Respective Price) of Labour-Power into Wages; Money'. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
- ↑ Political Economy: 'Wages; Nominal and Real Wages' (1954). [MIA]