Outline of Marx's Argument:

The value of "labor" cannot be measured by labor. For "Labor is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself."

The Physiocrats and the Classical economists saw that behind the market price of "labor" lay its costs of production, but conceived of its production in terms of the production of the worker.

But what is produced and what the worker sells is not "labor" but "labor power."

The worker sells labor power in exchange for a wage, but:.


--the wage-form hides the distinction between necessary labor (to reproduce labor power) and surplus labor (appropriated by the capitalist).

In corvée labor distinction between labor for self and labor for the lord is clear.

But in slave and wage labor the "form of appearance" hides the "essence":


--In slave labor all labor seems to be for the owner, hides labor for self.
--In wage labor all labor seems to be for the worker, hides surplus labor for capitalist.

The wage is thus one form of appearance of the essential value of labor power that lies behind it, but the discovery of this "essence" required clear "scientific" thought of which the bourgeois economists did not prove capable.

Commentary:

This chapter, along with the other chapters on the wage (20-22), is the only one in volume one of Capital in which Marx examines the monetary form of the variables he has developed for his analysis. Throughout the rest of the book his analysis is couched in value terms. Later, in volume III he will take up the various money forms of surplus value, i.e., profit, interest and rent, but this is the only place in this volume where he examines the implications of the particular money forms that his value categories allow us to understand in socio-political ways.

The basic thrust of this first chapter in this section on wages is to argue that the money wage is a "form of appearance" of the value of labor power. The money wage is only one possible form, there are others. For instance, with payment in kind harvest workers are paid by a share of the harvest, or shoemakers employed by early capitalists were paid in part through tolerance of the appropriation of scraps of the leather they were given to work. Salaries are yet another form of payment for the value of labor power. The analysis presented in these chapters provide a more general methodology for analyzing other kinds of form, and therefore has an interest that goes beyond the immediate subject. In the case of wages the analysis he presented in chapter six on the buying and selling of labor power (and also on its use-value) is also true here and you should probably reread that discussion as a prelude to studying this chapter. What he adds here to what he has already said about the "essence" is an analysis of the implications of the "form."

Marx's emphasis in the first quote cited in the summary above, that "Labor is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself.", is logical enough: if labor is the measure, or nummeraire, of value, then we can't speak of the value of that nummeraire in the same sense we do of what it measures. This is like mainstream economists saying that value of something is its money price and then being aware that they can't speak of the value of money, except in terms of its "value" as nummeraire or in terms of its functional roles, e.g., means of circulation. However, just as Marx, with his theory of value, showed that we can indeed understand the "value" of money in terms of a different kind of value, "labor value", so too can we understand the "value" of labor in other terms. Little by little in Capital we come to see that the "value" of labor is not merely that it is the nummeraire for measuring the value of other things, but that it plays that role in capitalism because labor is itself the fundamental social relationship that capital imposes to create and maintain its social order. Labor is the fundamental measure of value in capitalism because labor is the fundamental means of social control and social order. The value of labor, in other words, is its value to capital in the creation and maintenance of its kind of society. Every hour a person works in this society, no matter what kind of work is being done, is an hour that person's time and energy, their very life is subordinated to capital. The more hours, the more subordination, the more value. Labor time measures capital's success at imposing itself; labor time measures the life workers lose to capital.

The distinction that Marx uses between appearance and essence is a very Hegelian one and one that has been much critiqued in recent years. The primary thrust of that critique has been against the notion that there is one discoverable essence lying behind the appearance of things. This critique has been a by-product of the post-structuralist emphasis on how any object, event, relationship, etc., can be viewed from many points of view and be subject to many different interpretations without any one of them being able to lay claim to the one-and-only "Truth" about what is being interpreted. In the language of appearance and essence, there are as many "essences" as there are interpreters. What is seen as essential by one, is perhaps not essential to another. The relevance of this to Marx’s use of the distinction is only, it seems to me, to remind us that the essence that he "chooses" at this point in his analysis –what he thinks is essential to the exchange relationship between worker and capitalist— is that what is being bought and sold is labor power, the ability and willingness to work, and not the work itself. As the development of his argument proceeds we soon learn that another "essence" of the relationship is the way this reality is hidden, the way exploitation is made to disappear by the apparent nature of the wage.

Marx’s analysis of the way the wage hides the exploitation of labor is reminiscent of his discussion of fetishism in chapter one. There he discussed how the commodity and its relationship to money appeared to be merely a relationship between things, but upon analysis those "things" were actually moments of the social relationships among people. Here the wage appears to be payment for work performed, and is often called the price or value of labor. But just as we have seen how "price" more generally embodies a complex set of class relationships, so too here he argues that the wage embodies the class relationship of exploitation: the usually invisible distinction between necessary labor and surplus labor.

The wage, he argues, makes exploitation invisible by making it seem as if the worker is paid for the labor performed. With most forms of the wage, as we will see in the next two chapters, the more workers work the more they are paid, so there seems to be a one-to-one correspondence between work performed and wages paid. The opposite extreme is illustrated by slavery. In the case of slavery because the slave is forced to work by and for the master, it appears as if all the work is done for the master. But of course some of the work performed by the slave must produce the slave's own means of subsistence (or in capitalism the value thereof) or the slave would soon die. So here too the real relationship, that slaves work both for themselves and for their masters is hidden from view by the form of the relationship. Marx juxtaposes both these situations to that of a certain feudal form of imposed work called corvee labor. In corvee labor the serf is forced to spend part of the week working directly for the lord, perhaps in the lord’s fields, perhaps building the lords roads and buildings, and so on. In such a case the distinction between the time the serfs work for themselves (necessary labor) and the time they work for the lord (surplus labor) is clear -- just the opposite of the situations under capitalism.

The wage and the unwaged

Since Marx wrote Capital feminist Marxists have pointed out another way in which the wage hides work done for the capitalist. Because factory workers --who were Marx's primary object of study-- are waged and the wage is generally seen as payment for labor performed, it is at least clear to most people that those being paid a wage are working, in some sense for the capitalist who hires them. But, as these feminists have pointed out they are not alone. There are others who are unwaged who also work for capital. Those who do the work of procreation and child rearing do the work of producing the next generation of labor power. Those who do the work of repairing, on a daily and weekly basis, the labor power of waged workers are reproducing the current generation of waged workers. Originally this argument was made about the work of "housework" and the role of housewives. The fact that such women were unwaged, that there is no direct payment by the capitalist for such work, hides the reality that much of this work benefits the capitalist by creating and recreating the labor power necessary for capital to exist.

It is not that such work is not paid -- if it was not paid through, for example, a "family" wage adequate to the reproduction of the whole worker family, the class would perish. The point is that because it is not paid directly the work does not appear to be done for capital but only for other family members. Indeed, women (and more recently men) are encouraged to do housework for love, as a manifestation of their affection for spouses and children. But irrespective of the motivation of the worker the reality is that much of the work done produces and reproduces the labor power of the family members for capital.

Moreover the more such housework substitutes for commodities, the lower can be the wage and the greater the surplus value for any given quality of labor power. For instance, if housework involves extensive gardening then less wages are required to adequately feed and reproduce waged workers. If clothes are made at home from cloth more cheaply than they can be purchased in a store, then less wages are required to adequately cloth waged workers. And so on. In this sense housework is "productive" of surplus value even though it produces no commodity on which a profit can be realized.

A major corollary of this insight is that because there is no direct payment for labor performed (even if such payment might also hide exploitation), there is no proportion between that part of the "family" wage that goes to support the houseworker and the work that worker performs. When waged workers work overtime they are paid extra, but when an unwaged housewife (or husband) works more, there is no corresponding increase in "payment." An exception would seem to be children's "allowances" when they are tied to work performed. Some parents give children money according to work performed: the more chores accomplished, the more money. But here although there is a correspondence between work and money, there is merely a redistribution of the value of labor power from adults to children. It is not the capitalist who is paying more because more work is performed.

The way in which the absence of a wage hides such work is now widely recognized. Measures of gross national product, for example, systematically ignore unwaged work and the value of what houseworkers produce because there is no wage and the product is not sold. Economists who work on countries in which such unwaged work as subsistence agricultural production is widespread are well aware that conventional measures of GNP understate the magnitude of aggregate output. Lawyers have also hired economists to present to courts -- in support of demands for the payment of alimony or palimony -- estimates of the value of housework performed by housewives being divorced by their husbands.

In both of these cases, economists can only impute values to the work performed and products produced because there are no market prices. Yet the exercise is instructive if the market price for various kinds of labor and for the products are taken as reference points. Imagine, for example, the estimated value of a housewife's services if years of cooking, cleaning, washing and providing health and sexual services were estimated at the cost of hiring cooks, maids, cleaners, nurses and prostitutes.

Such analysis has been subsequently extended to other forms of unwaged work, most obviously, the work of students that produces and reproduces labor power. Although in the past there have been ideologies of education that claim schooling is aimed primarily at personal fulfillment and citizenship, it has long been the case, and more obviously in recent years, that much if not all of schooling is conditioning and disciplining for the labor market. Energetic and active children are conditioned, little by little, to sit still and do as they are told. As they progress through school the amount of work and discipline increases and extends from the school itself to off-school hours through "homework" and such. By the time a person reaches the university level for the most part they are assumed to have so internalized work discipline that they no longer require regular supervision but can be counted on to impose work on themselves. Professors, as opposed to teachers, serve primarily as quality-control engineers to check papers and test results to determine the degree to which such discipline has been acquired. Students are "graded" not merely on skills manifested but indirectly on the amount of discipline they are willing to impose on themselves. All this with, for the most part, no wages. In fact, most students are in the absurd position of paying (tuition etc.) to have work imposed on them, paying to demonstrate their willingness and ability to work. The "degree" provides a certification of just this ability and just this willingness. Exceptions include scholarships and fellowships, teaching and research assistantships that do provide money for work even though they are rarely presented in this manner. Seen as various forms of payment for labor power -- labor power employed in the production of labor power -- such forms should be submitted to the same kind of analysis that Marx uses to examine wages. So too should we apply the methodology to the various forms in which unwaged work is imposed. We will do a bit of this in the examination of chapter 21 on piece wages.

A final point, the above considerations should make clear why a definition of the "working class" as a class of waged workers is inadequate. While the wage may be the quintessential form through which capital imposes work, it is far from the only one. Just as we must understand all that the form of the wage hides, so too must we understand the other forms of the imposition of work that are hidden by the wage. Once we recognize this then we can also recognize how the "working class" is made up of all of those who work, waged or unwaged, for capital whether in the production of commodities to be sold for a profit, or in the production of the least profitable but most basic commodity of all: labor power.

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

1. What is wrong with the notion that workers sell their labor for a wage?

2. What is the relation between the wage and the value of labor power?

3. How is the wage used to hide eploitation? How is it more subtle than, say, corvée labor?

4. What is similar between the relation between labor and payment for slaves and for housewives?

5. What property does labor power possess which is different than all other commodities?

6. In what sense are grades IOU's on future wages? Do they constitute a form of credit? Do they hide exploitation? In what sense?

7. How much of what Marx has said about the value of labor power before Chapter 19 is relevant for understanding wages?

8. What is the relation between the wage and the definition of the working class? Does the wage define it, i.e., are all workers waged?

Outline of Marx's Argument

Wages take many forms.
Two commonplace forms: time wages and piece wages.

The Wage = "price of labor", in this chapter usually payment per hour

Nominal wages = money exchange value of labor power
Real wages = the sum of the means of subistence purchased by wages

Average "price" of labor = average daily value of labor power divided by the average number of hours worked,
e.g., (daily wage of 3 shillings)/12 hours = hourly price, or wage, = 3s/12 = 36d/12 = 3d = hourly wage of 3 pence.
(In pre-metric English measure, 1 shilling = 12 pence, today 1s = 10d).

So, if the daily wage is fixed, e.g., 3s, then if the capitalists impose longer hours, the effective hourly wage drops:


With a daily wage of 3s, 10 hours of work implies hourly wage of 3s/10 = 36d/10 = 3.6d = 3 6/10d = 3 3/5d.
Or, w/12 hrs of work, the hourly wage falls to 3/12 = 3d
Or, w/15 hrs of work, the hourly wage falls to 3/15 = 2 2/5d
As we saw in chapter 10, if the working day is lengthened with no change in the value of labor power, then the capitalists make more surplus value or profit.

Conversely, if the hourly wage is fixed, then a change in the number of working hours will change the workers income.


The importance of this: whether or not workers earn enough to survive, i.e., to reproduce their labor power, will depend on whether they have enough hours of work.

Suppose daily value of labor power = 3s and normal working day = 12 hours, under these conditions, the hourly wage = 3d, but . . .
Then suppose the capitalist reduces working hours (say during a downturn in the business cycle):
Hours reduced from 12 to 8, but wages still 3d/hr implies daily wage = 2s
Hours reduced from 12 to 6, but wages still 3d/hr implies daily wage = 1s 6d
In both cases, the workers are now earning less than the wage they require for survival. And assuming the workers are still producing the same value product per hour, the capitalists are making more surplus value or profit.

The implication of these two sets of observations is that unless capitalists are constrained by law, e.g., Factory Acts in Marx's time, they may manipulate hours and wages for their own benefit, to the detriment of the workers.

"The capitalist can now wring from teh worker a certain quantity of labor 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 inerest of the moment, make the most frightful over-work alternate with relative or absolute cessation of work. He can abnormally lengthen the working day without giving the worker any corresponding compensation, under the pretense of paying 'the normal price of labor'." (p. 686, Penguin Edition)

"Hence," Marx writes, "the perfectly rational revolt of the London building workers in 1860 against the attempt of the capitalists to impose on them this sort of wage by the hour." And hence too, the fight for the Factory acts to put a limit on such manipulations.

OVERTIME

In Marx's time, as in our own, notions of a "normal" working day implied an awareness - on the part of both capitalists and workers - of the imposition of "overtime" or hours in excess of the "normal", whatever that happened to be.

1) Overtime should be paid at a higher rate, because the "deterioration" of labor power accelerates during extra, exhausting hours, and therefore, the value of labor power (the cost of repairing and reproducing that labor power rises). Sometimes the capitalists recognize this and pay a bit more, although Marx suggests that the bit more they pay is not proportional to the cost of repairing the extra wear and tear on the worker.

2. If, using methods such as those described above, the capitalist succeed in lowering wages at current hours, then workers will need and either be willing to accept or even fight for longer hours.

3. The same effect is sometimes achieved by increasing the intensity of work. Higher intensity means more labor being supplied, an increased supply of labor will tend to lower wages, lower wages will lead to more overtime.

4. These kind of dynamics are circulated through "competition" wherein the success of one capitalist in this area will lead other capitalists to seek the same success as the success of the first allows the undercutting of the others through the reduction in the prices of their wares.

Commentary

Two general methodological points:

First, Marx is here talking about the peculiarities of one form of a form. Wages are the form of the value of labor power; time wages are the form of that form. The peculiarities that interest him at this point concern the various ways in which this particular form of wages can be and often is manipulated by capital in its efforts to impose more work. The same will be true in his next chapter on piece-wages. The same would be true if he had analyzed other forms. The same should be true if we do what he didn't do and extend his analysis to those other forms. We might note, for example, how salaries - which are paid at a fixed rate, usually so-and-so-much per year (and thus per month) leave open the amount of actual labor time required. We might also note how this means that jobs that pay salaries generally designate the tasks to be performed and that those tasks often require far more than the standard number of hours per week, e.g., 40 hrs in the US after WWII. Thus the commonplace that salaried workers wind up spending many extra hours in their offices and also take home briefcases full of work to be done in their supposed "free time." In the next chapter we will see how the analysis of piece wages throws further light on what turns out, in this case, to be a hybrid form of the wage.

The same should still be true if we turned from his focus on the explicit wage to other forms of working class income that support the reproduction of labor power, e.g., unemployment compensation, welfare payments, grades, public health services. For example, in the case of unemployment compensation, that is generally presented to the public as a kind of welfare for the temporarily unemployed, we would note how it is structured to require the work of looking for work, of making the labor market function by forcing those who want to receive compensation to actively seek out employers and then provide evidence of having done so. In this case both the amount (low) of the compensation and the rules (how many interviews are required) can and are manipulated to impose more work. In each case the objective of the analysis should be to identify the particular ways in which those particular forms of income might be, or have been, or are being manipulated to impose more work.

Second, Marx's emphasis here, as in so much of the book, is on the way capital tries to manipulate this form of the wage to its own advantage. To the degree that he discusses workers' struggle, it is primarily about their defense reactions to such manipulations. His one example is mentioned in the summary above - the "revolt of the London building workers of 1860". But surely, we can go further than this and look at how workers wage struggles may be not merely "resistance" but quite positive demands for things they want. We saw this distinction in Marx's treatment in Chapter 10 over the battles over the working day. He sketched how workers resisted the lengthening of the working day, but then passed over to the attack, took the initiative, and fought for a reduction in the working day. Wage struggles, like the battles for reducing the working day, may be, and often have been struggles for higher consumption, more choices, and so on.

For example, it should be clear from his analysis above that workers have fought to raise wages not only to get more money, but to be able to work less! Success at forcing up the hourly wage, especially when they have been successful in fixing a normal working week, e.g., 40hrs in the post-WWII period, means less compulsion to work. As wages rise, not only is there less compulsion but the rising wage makes more and more possible during non-work hours and therefore leads to demands for a reduction in working hours. Thus the more or less steady rise in wages after 1945 led eventually to demands in the United States and Europe for reduced working weeks, either 35-36 hours spread out over five days, or the existing 40 hours packed into four days (an effective reduction of working time if you consider - as I think you must - that the time of preparing for work, going to work, returning from work etc is really all time "working" for the boss and not "free" for your own use).

Where there have been institutional obstacles - such as the reactionary recalcitrance of union bureaucrats to the formal posing of such demands - workers have often simply refused work and appropriated extra free time. This has happened in many ways including absenteeism, playing on the job, wildcat strikes, sabotage and so on. In the Appalachian coal fields of the 1960s and 1970s, for example, success in raising wages (in part through Keynesian productivity deals that resulted in massive reductions in the number of jobs) led many young miners to seek more free time through wildcat strikes. They would go to work with their hunting rifle or fishing pole in the trunk of their car in anticipation of a wildcat strike which would give most of them the day, or days, off. The possible provocations of such a strike in coal mines were multiple given the dangerous, poisonous character of the work. The point here is simply that it was the success in raising wages that made possible these other struggles.

Time wages hide exploitation

Along with the way time wages provide one set of tools for capital to exploit workers, and increase that exploitation, so too does their structure play the convenient role of hiding that exploitation. In the case of hourly wages, for example, the more workers work, the more they are paid - at least in principle. The less they work, for sure the less they will be paid. To keep track of exactly how long many workers work, capitalists developed "time clocks". There is a traditional one in Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times - the kind that requires each worker to pick up their personal card from one rack, stick it in the clock mechanism where the time is recorded, and then place the card in another rack. (The use of two racks makes it easier to see if anyone is late or has left early.) Such clocks are still used in some places. (An example is the the blocky, green " Acroprint 125/150 Mechanical Time Clock" to the right.) Because workers learned to cover for each other, by punching their friend's card in if the friend was a little late, or by punching their friend out if they left early, capitalists have updated their time clocks to use "biometrics", i.e., they use modern fingerprint recognition equipment to make sure one worker can't help out another and that the corporation extracts the maximum feasible work time from each worker. The biometric time clock below is from the Qqest Software Corporation. Similar technologies included things like personalized card swipe units, portable/PDA technology (for geographically dispersed workers) and computer login recordings, e.g., in computer tech call centers the workers' logins are automatically recorded as the moment they start work - not when they leave home for work, or when they arrive at the company, or even when they walk in the door, but when they pick up their head phones and login. Associated with such modern computerized time clocks are software programs to reduce the labor costs of tracking work times and calculating wages due. Take a look at the reports generated by "TimeClock Plus" software.

Because workers are paid so-and-so much per hour, and because their work time is so carefully monitored, it would seem that because if they work more, they are paid more, that they are not exploited. But this apparent correlation between labor time and pay obscures the existence of surplus labor time. On the aggregate it is obvious that there is surplus labor time - it is expended producing the means of production - but at the micro level each capitalist's access to those means of production is controlled by the amount of profit they earn. The more labor they can get their workers to do, ceteris paribus, the more profit they make, the more investment they can undertake by buying the products of the aggregate surplus labor. Not surprisingly, when Marx talks about overtime wages, one of the things he emphasizes is that even though workers are paid extra for working longer, that extra pay is only a small portion of the value their labor adds to what they are producing and to the profits the capitalists realize upon the sale of those products.

Overtime and Competition

Marx's discussion of "overtime" - when workers work more than the current normal working day - was shaped by the widespread use of such extra work in a period in which capitalists were still fighting the Factory Acts discussed in Chapter 10 and sought various ways to subvert any limits on the time over which they could exploit workers. You might want to re-read Marx's comments in Section 2 of that chapter on capitalists' "nibbling and cribbling" at the working day: stealing a few minutes here, a few minutes there. That day-to-day, hour-to-hour struggle between managers and workers never disappeared, even with the Factory Acts or more recent labor legislation. Not only has such legislation often left uninforced, but it has often had only partial coverage, leaving many workers unprotected. Marx gives several examples of industries, e.g., paper-staining and bleaching-works, in which capitalist manipulation results in workers being forced to work overtime; others are easy to find today.

As Juliet Schorr documented in her book The Overworked American, the assault on workers in the United States by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980s resulted in such reductions in hourly wages (and other benefits) and such increases in unemployment that more and more workers were forced to work overtime in order to try to maintain their real income and standards of living. This was not a change in this industry or that industry, but a change in the overall condition of workers at the national level. By mid-century capital had learned from John Maynard Keynes and his followers how government macro economic policies could be brought to bear against the class as a whole and the methods previously used by individual capitalists could be generalized.

Two associated effects were the way more spouses were forced to enter the labor market to seek a second wage in order to maintain the family wage and the way more workers were forced to seek second jobs for the same purpose. In both cases the amount of work being extracted from the working class increased as people worked longer hours - whether in old jobs, new jobs or extra jobs. Official statistics on "overtime" naturally fail to take such phenomena into account.

Currently workers in Western Europe are under also considerable pressure to accept both a lengthening of the "normal" working week - which many had suceeded in reducing to 35 hours in the last quarter century - and overtime. The weapon being used by European business and government to achieve this increase in exploitation is the "competition" of Eastern Europe - especially those just recently admitted to the European Union.

In one of the cases Marx cites in this chapter (p. 690), that of the baking industry, he uses a screed from one set of bakers against another set to illustrate how desperate foreign workers and young workers who "are obliged to accept almost any wages they can obtain" were being forced to work extra-long hours giving some baking enterprises a competitive advantage over others. Today in Europe the same kind of thing is engineered as poor workers from the collapsed communist East have been pitted against the higher waged, shorter working time, better organized workers in Western Europe. Added to this pressure is the threat by modern multinational corporations to close down operations in the higher-waged West and move to the lower-waged, longer working time, less organized East. Their excuse, as in Marx's time, is "competition". In a recent New York Times' article we find the following testimony by the representative of one of those multinational corporations:

"It's about lowering labor costs," said Peter Gottal, a spokesperson for Siemens, which is based in Munich. "Where we are in a global competition, 35 hours are no longer feasible. We just need more hours."

The article contains many more examples. It also makes clear that hovering behind the current assault on working hours, is a follow-up assault on vacation time. Just as European workers have been more successful than American workers in reducing the length of the working week, so too have they been more successful in gaining annual days of vacation. Whereas the average annual vacation in the U.S. is only 12 days, it has been forced up to 18 days in Japan, 25 days in France and 30 in Germany. What we can see here is the contingent relationship between "overtime" and "the normal working day". Obviously, if the "normal working day" (or week, or year) can be redefined legally in a way that lengthens it then some of what had hitherto been "overtime" and paid a bit more, would become "normal" time and paid at regular rates. Here we are at the beginning of the 21st Century and the relevance of Marx's analysis of work time in the mid-19th Century is strikingly, and appallingly, relevant.

What this use of desperate immigrant labor and of the threat of corporate displacement to weaker pools of labor demonstrate is the real class logic behind "competition." The term is used rhetorically, and ideologically, to evoke competition between corporations or between nations, but what we see here is that the capitalist organization of "competition" is really the pitting of workers against workers with the objective of undermining the power of the stronger through the employment of the weaker. The corollary to this strategy is that of fanning racial and ethnic prejudices and the vicious politics that support them. Thus in Germany fear of Polish or Turkish workers feed Nazis hate groups who, crying "Defense of the Fatherland!!", attack those workers and burn their apartment buildings down. Thus similar hate groups in France, egged on not only by Jean Le Pen's minority National Front Party but by official state policies encouraging such competition mount similar campaigns. Thus American politicians from George H.W. Bush to David Duke play the racial card against Black and Latin workers in the United States. In each case the politics works to divert workers from the defense of the rights they have gained through past struggles and capitalists have an easier time driving down wages, imposing overtime and redefining "normal work time" upward. After being defeated as a capitalist strategy for almost forty years in the West, absolute surplus value is back with a vengence.

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

1. Why does Marx think "It would be useless to repeat here, with regard to the phenomenal form, what has been already worked out in the substantial form."?

2. What happens to the real wage if the intensity of labor rises while time wage rates remain constant?

3. How have the capitalists manipulated time wages in order to force workers to work more? How was this done in the colonies when workers could evade wage labor by retreating to the land? Do any elements of this persist today?

4. How do time wage rates such as $10.00/hr. hide exploitation?

5. Under what conditions would workers demand overtime or longer working hours?

6. How can overtime wages be both nominally higher per hour and actually lower in real terms?

7. During periods in which workers are struggling to reduce the length of work time, what else must they demand to avoid a fall in real income?

8. How are wages an expression of working class power? Of its weakness?

Outline of Marx's Argument:

Piece wage = payment according to the number of pieces produced
Piece rate = payment per piece
Piece wage = "converted form of time wages" and time wages are a converted form of the value of labor power, so...
Piece wage = a form of a form, just like time wages


Piece wages seem as if workers sell their embodied labor in each piece.
Piece wages seem as if the wage is not determined by the value of labor power.

Piece wages and time wages often exist side-by-side:

-- in the same industry
-- in the same factory

Marx gives us an example as a point of departure:

-- 12 hours of labor, 6 required to reproduce labor power, 6 for capitalist
-- 24 pieces produced
-- value of 24 pieces = 6s (shillings) or 72d (pence)

Therefore:
--value product per hour = 6d [72/24]
--value per unit = 3d [72/24]
--piece wage = 1.5d/piece, or a total of 3s for days work --surplus value = 3s (or six of the 12 hours)

The Particularities of Piece Wages

"piece wages become . . . the most fruitful source of reductions in wages, and of frauds committed by the capitalists." (p. 694)
"the piece wage is the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production." (pp. 697-698)

1) Setting of piece rates is a source of struggle between workers and capitalists

--What is the socially necessary labor time (SNLT) per piece? What is the "average degree of efficiency?"
--In general, these questions are answered by experience.
--But, with new technology or new products there is a struggle
--Whatever the SNLT is determined to be, that is the standard each worker must meet, or be dismissed.

--The standard is set in terms of time, e.g., waistcoat = 1 hour
--The standard also sets the average intensity of labor required, e.g., to produce a waistcoat within 1 hour


2) With piece work the need for direct "superindendence" is reduced or even eliminated; workers are forced to work fast and well to meet the going standard of production under the threat of not being fully paid, or losing their job.

3) Piece wages tend to produce hierarchies of wages

a) The "sweating system" wherein a parasitic middleman "sublets" or "subcontracts" workers and takes a cut of their wages
b) An employer signs a contract with only one worker who then subcontracts other workers, oversees them and pays them.
c) Individual abilities vary, therefor output and wages vary from individual to individual and this produces a wage hierarchy and competition among workers.

4)Piece wages result in workers being willing, or even desirous, of longer working hours.

--they may be willing because lower piece rates make them want to work longer to maintain their total wages
--they may be desirous in order to make more money than others


5) Technological change that increases the productivity of a given time and intensity of labor will:

--either, lead to a rise in wages if the piece rates remain the same
--or, lead capitalists to try to reduce piece rates in order to capture all of the fruits of rising productivity

To illustrate this dynamic, Marx modifies the example previously given on the basis of a doubling of productivity, i.e., total output goes from 24 to 48. As a result:

--@ 1.5d/piece workers wages would double (assuming the sales price remained the same at 3d/piece.)
--the total product value would double and the worker and the capitalist would now get 6s each instead of only 3s.
--therefore, the capitalists try to lower the piece rate from 1.5d to .75d in order to capture all the increased value
--if they are successful, then of the new total value of 12s the workers would continue to get only 3s while the capitalist walks off with 9s.
--therefore, there is a struggle over who benefits how much from the rise in productivity brought on by the introduction of the new technology.
--"the change in the piece rate . . . tends to constant struggles between capital and workers." (pp. 699-700)
--The capitalists accuse the workers who try to share in the increased productivity of "intimidation" and of trying to "establish a duty on mechanical improvements" (p. 700, fn 20)

Commentary:

"Piece-work", to the experienced worker whether in home, factory or field always carries the flavor of exploitation. The subtlety that Marx insists upon - how the form of payment leads workers to drive themselves to high intensity and long hours - is not always immediately apparent to new and naive workers. To them piece-work may seem to provide an opportunity for great achievement: the more you work, the more you get paid. They don't realize at first that the piece rates have been set so that even with their greatest efforts they will earn little in relation to what they produce. They don't realize, because they haven't had the experience, that if they outperform past standards, the piece-rates will be adjusted downward so that their income rises but little, even with increased effort.

In the passage below, from his story "The Apostate", Jack London describes some of this psychological dynamic as well as the physical costs workers may bear under such conditions of exploitation.

One of the great attractions of piece work and piece wages to capitalists is that with piece rates set low enough, very little supervision is required. In order to earn a living wage workers must work hard, fast and well to produce enough pieces - quite irrespective of whether anyone is looking over their shoulder. The costs of supervision are essentially passed from the capitalist to the workers as they internalize the discipline of piece work and impose work on themselves. This self-imposition of work, of course, goes against workers' instinctive ressentment and resistance to suffering the indignities of alienating work - doing what some one else says to do, they way they say to do it, for their profit and enrichment, and so on. The piece workers, therefore, pay the psychological costs not only of alienation but of the hour-to-hour experience of imposing that alienation on themselves.

In reaction to the unpleasantnesses of piece-work exploitation, workers often band together in self-defense. On the one hand, they often fight for hourly wages instead of piece wages to improve their situation. But if that doesn't seem feasible and they must remain on the terrain of piece work then their primary objective is to avoid being drawn into the cruel dynamic of more work - lower rates - more work - lower rates, etc. One way they avoid this is to cooperate to make sure that they not be pitted against each other; that everyone works at about the same speed and no-one outperforms the others. They know that if this happens the fastest worker's time will be used to set the pace for everyone else, and that the rates will be lowered so even the fastest worker will make little more than before. The following example, taken from another of London's tales "South of the Slot" about a conservative sociologist who got a factory job in order to study "labor", describes the kind of conflict that would sometimes emerge between the cooperating workers and an individual who either didn't understand the dangers, or refused to go along with the collective strategy. In this case the violence of the piece-rate system was resisted by a cooperation which was willing to use violence to preserve itself. This situation was undoubtedly one London knew well, since he had worked in just such a cannery himself.

Almost a hundred years later, this same theme was the substance of Patti Smith's 1974 autobiographical blast that shook the world of rock and role. The following are first part of the lyrics to her song Piss Factory.

Piss Factory Sixteen and time to pay off I got this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe Forty hours thirty-six dollars a week But it's a paycheck, Jack. It's so hot in here, hot like Sahara You could faint in the heat But these bitches are just too lame to understand Too goddamned grateful to get this job To know they're getting screwed up the ass All these women they got no teeth or gum or cranium And the way they suck hot sausage But me well I wasn't sayin' too much neither I was moral school girl hard-working asshole I figured I was speedo motorcycle I had to earn my dough, had to earn my dough But no you gotta, you gotta [relate, babe,] You gotta find the rhythm within Floor boss slides up to me and he says "Hey sister, you just movin' too fast, You screwin' up the quota, You doin' your piece work too fast, Now you get off your mustang sally You ain't goin' nowhere, you ain't goin' nowhere." I lay back. I get my nerve up. I take a swig of Romilar And walk up to hot shit Dot Hook and I say "Hey, hey sister it don't matter whether I do labor fast or slow, There's always more labor after." She's real Catholic, see. She fingers her cross and she says "There's one reason. There's one reason. You do it my way or I push your face in. We knee you in the john if you don't get off your get off your mustang Sally, If you don't shake it up baby." Shake it up, baby. Twist & shout" ALL the lyrics Patti Smith, Piss Factory, 1974 Available on Arista Records, Land (1975-2002), 2002.

The understanding of the danger to workers of piece work had become so obvious, and so exposed, that by 1949 workers in the United States were able to pressure Congress into adding an amendment to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act governming wages and hours that specified that piece workers receive wages at least as high as the created "minimum wage." Unfortunately, a great many workers were not covered by that legislation and many are still not covered even today.

Piece Wages Hide Exploitation

Marx's comments about how piece wages make it seem as if workers are paid for their labor, not their labor power parallel those in the last chapter about time wages. If you work a little more and are paid a little more, there would seem to be a correlation between your work and your pay, in such a manner that you seem to be paid for your work, not your labor power. It is only by examining the actual dynamic of piece work - how capitalists manipulate the piece rates to keep the workers wages at the level of the value of the labor power - that we see how appearances can be deceiving, or, how what may be true in the short run (more work = more wages) is undermined in the long run (more work = same wages, same value of labor power).

To get a detailed analysis of the kind of dynamic Marx described, you would do well to read the book A Worker in a Worker's State by Miklos Haraszti. It's a short book and well worth the effort. Haraszti worked in the "Red Star Tractor Factory" in Communist Hungary where piece work was omnipresent and his book describes the dynamics of the struggles between the workers and their managers in great detail. Indeed, the book reads like an extended amplification of Marx's chapter on piece wages. Haraszti was caught smuggling the manuscript out of Hungary, arrested and given a suspended sentence for his efforts. The book was eventually published in the United States and is currently available from Pelican Books.

Piece Wages and The Amount of Work

Marx draws on the reports of English factory inspectors to conclude that piece rates generally make workers work faster, more intensely, especially, when piece rates are lowered. But more generally he sees piece wages as "the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production" in large part because they facilitate speed-up. There are other methods for forcing workers to work faster, of course, such as tying the workers' speed to that of machines - the kind of thing he discussed in chapter 15 on machinery and modern industry. But in the absense of such methods imposing piece wages and keeping wages low forces speed-up. The same can, and has been, observed in the United States today.

For example, in the vinyards of California many workers are paid piece wages while others are paid hourly wages (an example of Marx's citation of piece and hourly wages existing side-by-side). A study by a professor of the University of California gathered evidence that confirmed the perpetuation of the tendency observed by the factory inspectors in England and suggested by Marx's theory: pruners in the vinyards paid by the piece, work faster than those paid by the hour. The former took on the average about 19 hours to prune an acre of vinyard; the latter about 26 hours. The piece workers do earn a little more - $6.84 vs $6.20 per hour - but not much, about 10% more.

Growers in California, however, have noticed a draw-back to piece wages (that they and their economists call "incentive pay programs"), namely that workers paid piece wages may just walk off the job when they meet their income goals. In such cases any gain in work due to increased intensity might be offset by a reduction in total labor time - a source of considerable annoyance to the employers.

Responding to this annoyance with typical concern for the capitalist's worries about such an "income effect", another researcher from the University of California interviewed field workers and concluded that wages were so low that few workers could afford to leave early. In general, it seemed, very low and uncertain wages were more likely to result in workers leaving the job early due to simple disgust. Therefore, the researcher concluded the growers could safely continue their "incentive" piece-wages without being overly concerned with absenteeism.

Piece Wages and Quality Control

That piece wages reduce the need for direct supervision doesn't mean that workers are left entirely on their own. With standards set for the number of pieces produced (and hence the time and intensity of work), the capitalist has to make sure that the workers don't create the illusion of having met that standard by working fast but producing shoddy products. Hence the need for "quality control". In any piece work situation, there must be quality control inspectors who examine the quality of the pieces produced to make sure that the quality as well as the amount and intensity of work time are up to snuff. If the number of pieces being produced is large, then it is commonplace for only a random sample to be checked for quality. If the number is small, all can be checked. For the kind of field workers whose work behavior was being examined in the studies of California agriculture mentioned above, the number of vines pruned, or fruit picked, etc. was certainly large so the examination of quality was likely only a sampling. Under such circumstances capitalists try to organize the work so it is obvious which worker produced which piece - a step necessary to be able to identify those responsible for not meeting quality standards.

Shortly after coming to Texas in 1976 I was asked to come aid Los Obreros Unidos - a union of workers employed by Del Monte Corp. - in their negotiations. I traveled to the factory-town where those workers lived and worked and was able to inspect the organization of the work. Among those tasks that I observed was the forking (literally) of cooked spinach into cans by individual workers (mostly women) lined up on each side of a conveyor belt. The belt carried the spinach to the various stations and a can dispensor hung above each station. The cans being dispensed were marked (by hand if I rememer right) so that the quality control person could immediately identify - and chastize - the worker responsible for over-filling, or under-filling, a given can.

Another example, this time from mining: for probably most of the history of capitalism many coal miners were paid by the amount they dug from the earth. They would dig coal and deliver it to be measured, either by the cart or by the ton. At delivery the coal would be inspected to make sure that the miners had not carelessly (or carefully) included rock in with the coal. This was also the point at which the kind of "fraud" Marx alludes to might occur, namely that the scales measuring the amount of coal might be rigged to register less than the actual tonnage, thus resulting in lower wages for the miner and higher profits for the boss. In his novel King Coal Upton Sinclair evoked the dangers of challenging such fraud:

If we switch our attention from the kinds of manufacturing factories that concerned Marx to more contemporary forms of white-collar labor we often find the same kind of dynamics. For example, there are any number of sales workers who work "on commission"; that is to say their wage depends on the number of items they sell. This is generally true of automobile and truck salespersons. While they may receive a base salary, it is often so low that in order to meet the expectations of their employers and to earn enough total income they must work long and hard at talking people into buying as many units as possible.

Another white-collar job which is structured by the dynamics of piece work is that of university professors. While most professors formally receive pay in the form of a salary, in truth the size of that salary is largely determined by piece work. Although universities make much to the public of the importance of teaching, large research universities - that dominate the field and set the standards by which others are judged - overwhelmingly base professoral pay not on teaching but on research and publishing. The old saw "publish or perish" has never ceased to be appropriate.

Now it is characteristic of the working conditions of academic labor that when it comes to research the projects of individual professors or research groups are rarely set by university administrators but are left up to the individuals involved. There is little or no direct supervision. Instead, professors are supposed to understand their fields well enough to choose appropriate projects and skilled enough to craft both research and articles reporting on that research without direction. The more research they perform, the more articles they publish, the more likely their promotion (usually with higher pay) and the more likely they are to receive what is now commonly known as "merit" pay increases. They are, in short, paid according to the number of "pieces" they produce. Moreover, like other piece workers they are not entirely on their own. They too are subject to quality control. That quality control usually takes the form of "peer review" wherein other professors evaluate their research projects or articles and decide whether they should receive grants in the one case or publication in the other. This situation, again in a manner similar to other piece-work situations, is highly conducive to intense competition. Research funds and space in prestigeous journals are always limited and professors compete with each other for both - as well, of course, for tenure and promotion.

Piecework and Piece "wages" in Unwaged Work

While Marx's analysis is focused on formally waged work, it is not hard to see how in capitalism its logic extends beyond that realm into various spheres of unwaged work. Not only is much unwaged work organized by the task, rather than by the hour, but much defacto payment for that work is also organized by the piece. As a result many of the characteristics of piece work peculiar to capitalist industry are also to be found in various parts of the larger social factory.

Piece Work in Schools

Having just mentioned the piece-work character of the work of professors in universities, it is not hard to see how those professors, and the university administrators for whom they work, often imposed the same kind of logic on the students they are training for future waged work. While in elementary and high school, students are kept at work for a considerable set number of hours, and carefully supervised, at the university level this is much less the case. Although there are a few professors who behave like school teachers and take attendence, for the most part students can come or not come to class lectures as they like. They are expected to impose the discipline of coming to class on themselves - and most do. While in elementary and high school, students are assigned some homework, and their parents are admonished to supervise them to make sure they do it, at the university level the vast majority of students' work is of this kind: unsupervised study whose accomplishment is totally dependent on the student's self-discipline.

Although by most accounts the objective of students' study is "learning" - acquiring familiarity with some area of knowledge - in practice most schoolwork consists in the accomplishment of specific tasks, such as writing papers or preparing for tests. Given the large number of courses most students are expected to take (often required to take to qualify for full-time student status or for scholarships) and the associated large number of tasks they are set by their professors, they rarely have either time or energy left over for any autonomous process of study or "learning". Indeed, students are notorious among professors for doing only what is required to prepare for a test or to write a paper.

This is hardly surprising, of course, given that they are not emgaged in self-directed study but are generally doing what is called for by specific degree plans, accomplishing a pre-established set of tasks that will lead to some kind of certification - in short suffering the imposition of externally imposed alienated labor of the sort Marx analyzed in the 1844 Manuscripts and I discssed in my commentary on Chapter 7. Nor should it be surprising that a great many students seek to minimize the amount of time and energy required to meet those requirements. They want to know which pieces of knowledge they will have to know for tests and don't want to waste their time on other, useless, topics. The first question most students ask about required papers is "How long does it have to be? How many pages? how many footnotes? How many sources?" So commonplace is such minimization of effort, that nowadays in the age of computers some professors go to the extent of specifying such things as font size, margins or work count to force students to do the amount of work desired (by the professor).

Associated with such structuring of school work by the piece are piece-rate-like payment systems. The most universal of these is the grading system in which students are "paid" by the piece, a grade for each task accomplished, each quiz, each test, each paper, each research report, etc. Grades, of course, are not money payments, like wages, but the promise that school administrators, professors and future employers attach to grades - that the better grades you get, the better jobs and higher wages you will eventually obtain - makes the "I.O.U.'s" on future income. And like piece wages, grades are handed out according to the number of pieces accomplished and according to the "quality" of that accomplishment. The professors, of course, play the role of quality control inspectors; they do the grading, they decide which piece is worth an "A", which is only worth a "B" and so on.

From this we can see that whereas piece wages in industry produces an immediate hierarchy of better and worse paid workers, piece work in schools produces an immediate grade hierarchy that, it is promised, will eventually be translated into a later income hierarchy. As with all such hierarchies, this kind of grading system encourages competition among workers as many students strive to get higher grades than others - both for the immediate satisfaction of demonstrating their superiority and in the hope that later on they may get better jobs. Thus the common presense of Marx's third form of alienation in schools: the alienation of worker from worker, of student from student and the associated tendencies toward mutual hostility and loneliness in the crowd.

Hence too the common phenomenon of students banning together in various ways to overcome this alienation. One form of such banning together are simple study groups or cheating networks whereby students help each other out in pre-test study or in the tests themselves in order to minimize the amount of alienated work and to maximize their grades. Another associated form is that of fraternities, sororities and other kinds of clubs and associations wherein students collaborate to reduce their schoolwork and increase the time and fun they have outside their academic requirements. What these two forms of banning together have in common is that they tend to accept the conditions of work imposed on them and simply try to cope, either by being more efficient in their studies or by outsmarting their bosses.

Still another form - that can escape the trap of "just coping" - is that of student movements, wherein students act in their collective self-defense at a much broader level. Student movements have challenged student working conditions. They have demanded the elimination or reduction of tasks (e.g., the elimination of redundant comprehensive exams, easier grading), and they have demanded changes in curriculum and the possibility of self-structured programs in order to make their work correspond to their own intellectual interests instead of someone else's notion of what they should be doing. All these demands were common in the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s but by no means completely disappeared thereafter.

Piece Work in the Home

Beyond school and school work, we can find similiar structures of work and resistance to those structures in the larger community, especially in the home. While in Marx's time working class men/husbands, women/wives and children were all finding themselves being herded into factories and mines so that the sphere of domestic life was being eaten away by formally waged work, this changed in the 20th Century. Continued success at reducing the length of the working day of the sort he documented in Section 5 of Chapter 10 came to be complemented, thanks to workers struggles, by new laws banning child labor and expanding the time and energy available for "family" life. The result was the emergence of the "nuclear family" of one spouse being a wage earner (usually the husband), one spouse being a housekeeper (usually the wife) and children going to school and doing school-assigned "homework" or chores at home instead of waged labor in factories. In short, an expanding sphere of "housework" - mainly, but not always uniquely, undertaken by wives and children.

Rarely recognized, but important for our understanding, is how capitalits played an important role in structuring this sphere of housework. Just as they intervened directly and systematically to control the shape of schooling and higher education, so too did they intervene to control the shape of housework: who did it, how it was structured, what technologies were used, what standards would apply, and so on. Often the very same capitalist institutions were involved in shaping both education and housework. One example was the General Education Board - funded by John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil infamy and formed as a vehicle for guiding the transformation of agrarian workers into industrial workers and women into housewives. Just as the Board lobbied throughout the South for expansion of public education so too did it set up Girls Canning Clubs to teach future mothers more modern, efficient methods of housework.

Any careful consideration of housework quickly reveals the piece work character of its organization. No one directly supervises housewives but governments and private industry set standards that housewives are expected to meet - and husbands and welfare agents and often neighbors and co-workers and bosses are the quality control inspectors who check to see that the standards are met.

Let's begin with governments - generally responding to pressure from business - that formulate things like pro-natalist policies to encourage women to bear more children to expand the available labor force (or conversely, in other times and places, implement family planning programs to limit procreation). Pro-natalist programs are sometimes accompanied by piece wage "family allocation" payments to women according to the number of children they produce - a bump in pay for each new child. In China, on the other hand, those who violate its 1979 One Child Policy by having other children face fines and other legal sanctions. Governments also structure programs such as unemployment insurance to make sure that beneficiaires do the work of looking for work, or welfare programs in which social workers monitor the housework of welfare recipients checking up on such things as the degree of cleanliness, whether children's health is properly cared for, whether single mothers are engaged in illegal relationships with men, and so on.

Such intrusiveness can also be found from time to time in efforts by the employers of waged workers to shape their family life. Early on the English industrialist and so-called "utopian socialist" Robert Owen structured workers' homes and community to shape both work and non-work life. In colonial times, of course, both public and private agents of empire sought to reshape and control whole societies to turn them into maleable and profitable labor. On a smaller, but still substantial scale, multinational corporations engaged in foreign investment such as United Fruit in Central America promulgated public health measures to reduce employee sickness and company costs. So did the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission in the United States in its anti-hookworm and anti-malaria campaigns. Henry Ford, of Ford Motor infamy, tried to monitor his employees' homelife in the 1920s - and met with so much resistance that he had to drop the effort. Today, it is common for some corporations to try to structure the off-work lives of their employees in various ways such as providing gyms and organizing sports teams and picnics etc. The electronic giant Motorola calls its employees "Motorolans" and devises all sorts of mechanisms to shape their employees' "private" life.

Beyond such direct interventions, there are a wide variety of more or less subtle ways capitalists set standards for housework. Corporate advertising, for example, constantly bombards housewives (indeed all the denizens of the "home") with images and detailed and explicit specifications of what housework should consist of and what standards should be met. As corporations have developed more and more "products" that can be used in household work, they naturally have sought to convince everyone of their necessity in order to maximize their sales and profits. To take just one example, the development of a wide variety of household cleaning agents - for clothes, floors, dishes, furniture, windows, kitchen surfaces, toilets, tubs, and so on - have been peddled by advertisers trying to convince people that households have to be spotless, pandering to fears of illness they have lately pushed antibiotic ladden soaps and cleansers of all sorts.

One advertisement that became almost proto-typical of the breed was for a laundry detergent called Wisk that would, it was claimed, clean so well as to "Beat ring-around-the-collar", i.e., the "oil, dirt and grime that gathers around the neck" and rubs off on the inside of white business shirts. The ad was dreamed up by Madison Avenue ad-man James Jordan and offered a solution for frustrated housewives. This standard - the absense of "ring around the collar" was one that whoever washed work clothes should meet - or risk condemnation from bosses, fellow employers, friends and neighbors who had all been exposed to, and convinced by the same advertizing. In effect, everyday people were quite being drafted by the corporation as quality control managers for this particular kind of household piecework!

(Today Wisk has changed it's slogan from "Wisk beats ring around the collar" to "America needs dirt" and its advertising campaign (see its web page) encourages children to play hard and get dirty; there is always Wisk to get them clean again and in an age of growing child obesity and too much television watching hard physical exercise out there in the dirt is good for them - and good for Wisk profits too.)

The pervasiveness of this kind of thinking is manifest in web-based, "creative homemaking", "cleaning forums" where you can find such testimony of image-preoccupied clothes washers as the following:

"I have white blouses and slacks 14 years old that I work around the house and in the garden I would hold up to anyone on bright white. I use any regular laundry soap-liquid-even cheap & 2 cups of borabeem. I wash whites in the same water 2x's and if I can I soak in the soap & borateem over night then resume washing proceder with 2 tablespoons of borateem in my downy ball which I have added HOT water and some vinegar to and shake it up good. Add this ball to the start of the wash. You will have beautiful bright whites and your other colors will perk up.

Another example is the peddling of dishwasher detergents like "Cascade" that would prevent "embarassing" spots on classware. In the ads, dinner guests have been shown casting critical eyes on the crystal, raising eyebrows over water spots, or smiling approvingly at perfect, spotless, gleaming glass. The message is clear: meet the standard - artificially set by the capitalist corporation to get you buy its product - or suffer the contempt of your friends.

Most of this advertising is done, of course, on television or in magazine adds against backdrops of beautifully clean, spotless homes of the sort portrayed in magazines like Home Beautiful and in virtually every soap opera and sit-com focused on upper and middle class life. The result are both explicit and implicit messages of acceptable standards by which anyone and everyone can judge the work of a given housewife, or househusband.

Those who have studied the evolution of the work of household cleaning, for example, have noted how, over time, such standards have risen. When clothes washing was by hand, and only occasional because of its difficulty no one expected - nor judged others ill - for appearing in less than sparkling attire. But as capitalist businesses have invented product after product and used methods such as the above to sell them, effectively raising the standards of "cleanliness" (which is, after all, we are told "next to godliness"), the amount of work required to meet such rising standards has also steadily risen. Today people have complex and effective washing machines that dramatically reduce the wear and tear on hands and arms of washing clothes, but given the heightened standards of what is "clean", they wind up spending as much or more time running washes, drying, ironing and folding as they used to with more primitive technology. The amount of this kind of piece work has been increased rather than decreased despite the introduction of more effective "labor-saving" technology.

Such analysis can be extended to any number of tasks that are undertaken by the complex labor of housework: the clothing, cleaning, and feeding of children and spouses, the nursing of the sick and the psychological support given to the worn out and beaten down, and even the provision of sensual and sexual services to spouses. While some such tasks are inherent in any relationship, the number, frequency and character have all be quite consciously shaped by capitalist social planners, advertizers and policy makers with the aim of making sure that they contribute not just to the happiness or well-being of family members but to the reproduction of their lives as labor power.

Piece Work in the Countryside

A final example of the extended application of Marx's analysis of piece work is that of more or less independent farmers and peasants who produce at least in part for the market. Although economists and capitalist ideologs like to paint such peoples' work as that of small businesses - producing commodities to be sold on the market with the hope of a profit - in reality the vast bulk of such producers earn barely enough to maintain themselves on their land and in their communities. Indeed, the history of both primitive and ongoing accumulation, of the ever greater concentration of agricultural land in the hands of corporate agribusiness shows quite clearly that most small farmers and peasants in the United States and Europe have not made profits, but have done so poorly as to be driven off their lands. (Listen to the song "Rain on the Scarecrow" in my notes on chapter 27.)

For such small farmers and peasants the price of their output, e.g., the price of a bushel of wheat or corn, amounts to a piece-wage for their work and the income they receive, on the average, barely allows them to survive. As with other piece work, it is rarely supervised (unless they work under a putting out arrangement to some corporation), in the presence of agribusiness competition they impose long, intense hours of work on themselves (and often all their family members), they have varied abilities and their varied success results in an income hierarchy (unless they ban together in cooperatives) in which a very few may actually turn a enough of a profit to invest, expand their operations, hire growing numbers of waged workers and actually become the capitalist firm they are portrayed as being.

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

1. How are piece wages different in form from time wages but the same in essense?

2. How is labor measured in piece wages?

3. How is the product a measure of quality in piece work as well as one of measure? What does this mean for factory supervision and control over workers' activities on the job?

4. How does piece work tend to produce a "natural" wage hierarchy?

5. What other forces associated with the organization of piece work tend to produce hierarhcy?

6. How do piece wages tend to induce the internalization of capitalist discipline? Explain this in the factory and in the school.

7. Discuss the applicability of Marx analysis of piece work and piece wages to such areas of unwaged labor as farm work, housework, school work, the work of unemployment.

8. Discuss the link between piece wages and the putting out system of cottage industry Marx discussed in Chap. 15 and Part VIII.

9. What is the likely relation between rises in productivity and piece rates in the average factory?

10. In what sense are professors as well as students paid on a piece rate basis? How is hierarchy organized among them?

11. How does the form of piece wages hide exploitation?

12. How are little kids in the home often introduced to piece wages?

13. Explain some of the ways the film "Lulu the Tool" illustrates Marx's analysis of the wage and the capitalist relative surplus value strategy.

14. If you were a worker, under what circumstances would you prefer to work under piece wages rather than hourly wages? Why?

Outline of Marx's Argument:

Comparing wages in different countries requires that we take into account all the factors that determine changes in the amount of the value of labor power." These include:
--The price and extent of the necessities of life in the natural and historical development
--The costs of training workers
--The part played by the labor of women and children
--The productivity of labor
--The extensive and intensive magnitude of labor
--The reduction of the average daily wage for the same trades to a uniform working day.
--Time wages must be translated into piece wages because only piece wages can be a measure of the productivity and intensity of labor.

Each country has a certain average intensity of labor.

--that average intensity varies from country to country
--with some higher and some lower the result is a scale "whose unit of measure is the average unit of universal labor"
--where the average national labor is more intense, then there is more value and more money

Each country has a certain average productivity

--again, that average productivity will vary from country to country
--again, there will be a scale (or hierarchy)
--more productive labor amounts to more intensity and more value as long as the absense of competition means no lowering of selling price

The development of capitalism brings increases in productivity and in the intensity of labor, above average development means above average levels of these characteristics.

Suppose we have the same kind of commodity being produced during the same working time in different countries. Given the above we should expect:

--different unit values and different prices in different countries
--the relative value of money will be less in more developed countries
--nominal wages will be higher in more developed countries
--but real wages may actually be lower in more developed countries

Case Studies

Case Study #1: Spinning Industry in England and Continental Europe

Marx notes that in the spinning industry productivity, wages and the organic composition of capital (c/v)are all lower on the continent while hours of work are longer. His two main cases are Germany and Russia.

With respect to the organic composition of capital he gives data for the ratio spindles/worker (the technical composition of capital) in several countries. When speaking of Russia he notes that despite "over-work" (long hours) and "shameful under-payment of the workers" (low wages), Russian manufacturing "vegetates" due to protectionism.

Case Study #2: Railroad Construction in Eastern Europe and Asia

Marx is refering here to English business investment abroad.

English firms use both English and foreign labor, so:

--English labor is more intense and gets paid higher wages
--Foreign labor is less intense and gets paid lower wages
--The price of labor in relation to the product is still high.

Marx ends with critiques of H. Carey:

1) Carey tried to prove that differences in national wages are directly proportional to the degree of productivity. Obviously Marx thinks this is wrong because so many other factors have to be taken into account.
2) Carey argued that where this was not true it was due to the interference of the state with its taxes etc. Marx attacks Carey's "free market" idealism and his notion that that interference was caused by the "diabolical influence of England on the world market."
3) Marx mocks Carey's idea that the real antagonisms of capitalism are the result of Ricardo's theories (instead of the other way around) and that ...
4) Carey thinks that trade "destroys the inborn beauties and harmonies of the capitalist mode of production".

Commentary:

Marx's discussion of this subject is more of a cursory indication of what things should be taken into account than a systematic treatment. He starts off with a list of seven factors, but in his ensuing discussion he really only deals with two issues: variations in intensity and in productivity across countries. It's good that he does what he does, but it's unfortunate that he doesn't do more, because this subject has long been an extremely important one.

As recent work by historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker has begun to document, along with the tendency of British capital to follow the Dutch lead in developing trade and foreign investment as international extensions of domestic operations went the internationalization of their labor force. "British" capital did not merely employ workers in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but shipped them abroad and put them to work in colonies, hired polyglot crews from all nations to man their commerical and war fleets, entered the slave trade to redistribute African workers internationally and enslaved workers in every colonial area they could manage. In short, throughout virtually its entire history capitalism has been international, it has imposed work on people over as much of the world as it could conquer and has reorganized both itself and those workers in ways designed to maximize its profit and control.

With the extensive development of multinational corporations and rapid rebound of international trade in the post-WWII period such international organization and reorganization became evermore essential. The more capitalists came to operate production at a multinational level and the more international trade developed to redistribute that production globally, the more important this subject has become.

By the end of the 20th Century, capitalist attacks on higher paid workers in "developed countries" by shifting production overseas to lower paid labor pools and their drive for so-called "free trade" to facilitate the re-import of production that has been shifted abroad made consideration of international wage differentials of growing importance. The current growing use of offshore "outsourcing" of particular business operations has become a hot political topic as the slow growth of jobs during the recovery from the 2000-2001 recession has made any and all replacement of American jobs anathma to American workers and political fodder for Democratic politicians.

Therefore, we can see that Marx's interest in "national differences in wages" is not merely a casual interest in making international comparisons or constructing some United Nations-like index of development or standards of living, but in drawing attention to the unevenness of capitalist development and how that unevenness is the result of different circumstances.

"Price and Extent of the Necessities of Life"

Some of those circumstances, as his original list makes clear, may have to do with "natural" factors, e.g., the cost of reproducing labor in northern countries may be higher than that in the tropics because winters mean greater housing costs. But most of the factors involved are historically determined, and as we have seen throughout Capital at the core of that "historical determination is the class struggle.

For example, Marx was interested, and clearly amused, by the efforts by capitalist to reinstitute slavery in the British Carribean in the 19th Century because of the difficulty in getting free workers to work for them. There were at least two factors in this difficulty: first, the one Marx has noted in the Grundrisse, that free workers would only work enough to earn what little they needed for their own consumption without concern for capitalist profits, and second, the reason why such work so short as to aggrevate capitalists: because food was apparently plentiful and cheap. Marx's comment on this situation is worth quoting again:

"The Times of November 1857 contains an utterly delightful cry of outrage on the part of a West-Indian plantation owner. This advocate analyses with great moral indignation -- as a plea for the re-introduction of Negro slavery -- how the Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) content themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own consumption, and, alongside this "use-value" regard loafing (indulgence and idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar and the fixed capital invested in the plantations but rather observe the planter's impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure."

The capitalist anger and racist hate inspired by this situation can be seen in comments by one of their best known apologists: Thomas Carlyle. Writing much earlier (1849), Carlyle penned an "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question". Inspired by the renewed attention to the circumstances mentioned in The Times, Carlyle revised and reissued his essay as a pamphlet in 1853 as "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question." In that pamphlet we find Carlyle raving against the high price of labor in the presence of sun and rich soil that makes people largely autonomous of the labor market:

"Far over the sea, we have a few black persons rendered extremely 'free' indeed. Sitting yonder, with their beautiful muzzles up to the ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; the grinder and incisor teeth ready for ever new work, and the pumpkins cheap as grass in those rich climates: while the sugar-crops rot round them uncut, because labour cannot be hired, so cheap are the pumpkins . . . The West Indies, it appears, are short of labour; as indeed is very conceivable in those circumstances. Where a black man, by working about half-an-hour a-day (such is the calculation), can supply himself, by aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work!"

While there is much else in Carlyle's pamphlet worth reading because of what it reveals about capitalist racism, ideology, and strategy, the point here is simply the relevance to Marx's discussion of wages. What the situation in Jamaica revealed, once again, is how "natural" circumstances - untamed by the imposition of the social relationships of capitalist imposed work - may work against capital rather than for it. It is Wakefield (Chapter 33) all over again. Therefore, the need to re-impose those relationships. Carlyle discusses various strategies for doing so, from a dramatically increased importation of free labor to make land and "pumpkins" so scare so that free labor would have to bow to the labor market to the reimposition of slavery which would achieve the same results much more quickly.

Clearly what is required, whatever the strategy, is the capitalist monopoly over the land and its product. If that could be achieved then the very low cost of producing the means of subsistence ("pumpkins") would work to the capitalist advantage and whether the labor force was slave or "free" the cost of labor (whether the feeding of slaves by their masters or wages) would be low indeed - and oh, so profitable for the sugar-growers of Jamaica.

At the same time, it should be clear that whether slavery could be reintroduced or whether large numbers of workers could be brought to Jamaica would be determined by the class struggle - by the respective power of capitalists and workers, not just in Jamaica but in England (where both workers and people like John Stuart Mill opposed the reintroduction of slavery) or Africa (where short of slavery damned few Africans might be interested in moving to Jamaica, especially at near-slave wages.)

A serious survey of conditions throughout the colonial world of that period reveals again and again how a top priority for colonizers was mastery of the conditions of reproduction to take advantage of their low costs of production and where that was infeasible the imposition of some alternative method for overcoming its absense. Slavery was one such alternative. Another was the imposition of a "hut" tax was another - where colonized people were forced to pay taxes with the colonizer's money and the only way they could get such money was to work for their new overlords. Where the latter method was used, wages could and were kept low. They could be kept low because most of the workers' subsistence was produced by either the workers or their families. They would be kept low in order to force those who entered the labor force to earn the money necessary to pay the tax to work long hours.

Again and again we find similar situations in the post-colonial world - a world where, in general, when they were forced out by independence movements colonial powers left behind neo-colonial elites who continued the economic policies of their mentors. In every case, and across all cases, the pattern of "national differences in wages" was determined by the historical path of class struggle.

In the so-called "developed" countries - or what Marx in this chapter would call the "more developed" countries, the cost of the "necessities" of life was just as important in determining the value of labor power, and thus the level of wages. Never was this more obvious than in the debate over the "corn laws" in England. During the Napoleonic Wars of early 19th Century England was cut off from much continental trade and as a result there was a substantial drop in imports of "corn", i.e., wheat, and an increase in its price due to the restriction of supply. When the wars ended, landowners who's rents had benefited enormously were able to get parliament to pass protective tariffs on imported wheat in order to keep its price, and their rents high. The high price of wheat meant a high price of bread - the staple of much of the English working class - and therefore higher wages than would otherwise be necessary to sustain the reproduction of labor power. Not surprisingly capitalists who wanted to lower wages mounted a movement - which enlisted workers - to end the "Corn Laws", increase wheat imports, and lower the price of bread. (Of course, they didn't mention to the workers they sought to draft into their cause the fact that once the price of bread dropped they fully intended to lower wages!)

From the above discussion I think we can see three things. First, the particular "price and extent of the necessities of life" in each country depends only partly on "natural" circumstances and mainly on the "historical development" - especially of the class struggle. Second, "national" differences" are dependent upon not only local circumstances, both natural and historical, but international ones as well, i.e., the overall pattern of class struggle across countries. Third, that overall pattern of class struggle involves both capitalist strategies for controling labor and workers resistance to those strategies as well as their struggles to realize their own desires (e.g., good food and an easy, leisured life in Jamaica).

"The Costs of Training Workers"

This topic was discussed by Marx in Chapter 6 on labor market where he dealt with the value of labor power but, as he points out, deserves attention in dealing with wage differentials at the international level. The costs of training are determined, for the most part, by the character of work for which workers are trained. Clearly it costs more to train an engineer than an assembly line worker and if engineers tend to rear future engineers, and assembly line workers to rear future assembly line workers, then the former need higher wages than the latter. (Sociological studies show that despite the presence of some upward mobility, the wage hierarchy tends to reproduce itself.)

From the time of colonialism to the present global capitalism has been characterized by a global division of labor in which, for the most part, the colonized and then decolonized, yet still "less-developed" world mainly has produced raw materials (either MP or means of subsitence) while the so-called "developed world" has moved toward specializing in manufacturing and later service production. That means that, in general, those put to work by capitalists in the "less-developed" world have been employed throughout most of the modern history in such activities as mining and agriculture. Although both of those kinds of industry require some high-skilled labor, the bulk of the workers do not. Moreover, given the colonial and neocolonial history of such industries what skilled labor that has been required has often been drawn from the abroad. As a result the level and cost of training of the labor force in such countries has been low. It doesn't take a university education to learn how to pick up palm nuts, or dig peanuts, or shovel debris in diamond or gold mines. Thus insofar as the wages of such unskilled workers in those countries have been determined by the need to cover their education they could be kept low.

In the "more developed" capitalist countries where industries such as manufacturing (from tool making to computers) and more sophisticated services (from health care and finance to software development) are more common, the costs of training for many workers is greater. It does take a university education to train an electrical or software engineer as well as considerable on-the-job training. Obviously there are a great many unskilled or low skilled workers in those industries, workers who don't require little more training than their counterparts in the "less developed" world, but they are a smaller proportion of the labor force and therefore the average cost of training and level of wages tends to be higher in these countries.

"The Part Played by Women and Children"

Although he doesn't discuss this factor in this chapter, elsewhere in Capital it is clear enough that Marx's concern with the "part played by women and children" primarily involved the way they were being increasingly drafted into the labor force as cheap labor to undermine more highly paid male labor. (Much as one of the strategies Carlyle considered - that of bringing in more immigrant labor - was designed to undermine the wages of Jamaican workers.) In other words, the drafting of women and children was a capitalist strategy to hold down or even lower wages. Therefore, where such a strategy was feasible you would expect, ceteris paribus to find lower wages. This would be true within a country and across different countries. There can be little doubt that one reason some capitalists have embraced feminist demands for the removal of traditonal patriarchal obstacles to women obtaining waged jobs has been the desire to see an expansion of labor supply and downward pressure on wages. (The associated feminist demand for wage equality, however understandable and laudable, ignores this aspect of capitalist strategy. The feminist demand for "wages for housework" does not.)

The battle over child labor around the world has resulted in a much greater public awareness of such issues. The emphasis of those fighting to eliminate child labor has been on the low wages and execrable working conditions of children. The emphasis of those opposed to its elimination has been on the low wages of their parents and their families' need for the extra money, however little, the children bring in. In other words, whatever benefits to the children achieved by the elimination of child labor in many parts of the world, it is argued, would be offset by the increased poverty and suffering of their whole families. Clearly one issue in that debate should be the size of effects. The elimination of child labor would reduce family income from the children, but it would also reduce the labor supply which would, ceteris paribus, tend to raise wages. Would the rise in wages be enough to offset the fall in income? The answer to this question can not be given a priori but depends upon labor market condtions that may vary from place to place. (Nor, I hasten to add, is it necessarily a deciding issue; even if wages did not rise enough to offset the reduction of income caused by the elimination of child labor, some other offsetting mechanism might be divised.)

Beyond this kind of discussion, my comments on earlier chapters should have made clear that there is another dimension of the "part played by the labor of women and children" in the determination of average national wages and in the determination of national differences in wages. That other dimension is the labor of women and children in the home and community that contribute to the production and reproduction of labor power. Generally speaking, as I indicated in my discussion of the circuit of the reproduction of labor power, the more work done by women and children the lower the wage can be in order to obtain a given quality of reproduction. Two examples.

First: the housework of wives. The more wives in the typical patriarchal nuclear family do the work of cooking, the less wages have to cover the cost of eating out or of buying more expensive prepared food. Indeed, the more time and energy wives plough into gardening - the growing of food - the less food has to be bought out of the wage, and the lower the wage can be. (This is especially important in rural areas, but not negligible in suburban or even urban areas.) The more wives do the work of cleaning the house or clothes, the less need for wages to cover the higher costs of maids or laundry services. The more wives play truancy officer and keep their kids doing their homework the less need for teachers or expensive private tutoring. The more ego boosting and other psychological maintenance work done by wives at home, the less need for wages to cover shrinks. The same for health care: the more nursing, the more home care, the less need for doctors, nurses and hospitals - all high and growing costs of the reproduction of labor power. The more effort wives put into meeting the sensual and sexual needs of their partners the less money spent on prostitution and other commerical sex. All of this is also true with respect to whatever domestic labor is performed by husbands and by children.

Second: homework. Where children go to school (which is not everywhere) they are usually forced to work both in school and after school doing very appropriately labeled "homework" - appropriate because it is usually done in the home. Basically homework involves students imposing work on themselves with little minute-to-minute oversight of the sort they get in school classrooms. (Although as mentioned above, parents may play the role of truant officer or study hall supervisor in the home.) Clearly, the more children can be made to do such work outside of school, the less need to fund resources and teachers within the school. In some cases of resources it may just seem to be a matter of shifting the cost, say of a computer, from being covered by parent-paid taxes to direct parent payments. But there is an economy of scale advantage in buying computers for schools where many students may use a single computer over the cost of putting one in every student's home, or even room.

The cost of teachers is more important. The more students figure things out on their own, the lower the cost of hiring and employing teachers; the larger the feasible class size, the lower the teacher/student ratio, the lower the cost of teacher per student trained. This is true at all levels, though the most extreme examples are to be found in universities rather than in elementary and secondary schools. There, where those students who have been admitted have demonstrated their ability and willingness to impose work on themselves, one finds gigantic class rooms full of literally hundreds of students. Clearly the professor cost per student being trained is dramatically lowered by this method by this shifting of effort from teachers to students.

"The Productivity of Labor"

As mentioned at the outset of these comments, Marx deals more with the productivity than with those "factors" discussed above. The main reason why differences in the average level of national productivity is important in determining differences in the average level of national wages is revealed in Marx's chapters 12-15 discussion of relative surplus value. There we saw that increases in the productivity of the labor that produces the means of subsistence lowers their per unit value and when this is translated in the market into lower per unit prices, it lowers the nominal wage necessary to supply a given real wage. A similar, indirect, effect follows from increases in the productivity in the production of the means of production to the degree that those means of production directly (or indirectly) enter into the production of the means of subsistence.

Therefore, we should expect that to the degree that productivity is higher in one country than another, the lower the value per unit of subsistence goods in that country higher-productivity country. All other things equal, we should therefore expect the prices of those subsistence goods to be lower prices, and therefore lower wages to reproduce labor power. However, to the degree that the workers in higher-productivity, more developed countries are able to force capital to share the fruits of rising productivity, that rise makes it possible for capital to supply them with a higher real income. Depending on the size of the various forces, it is, paradoxically, possible that the higher nominal wages of workers in the higher-productivity countries actually buy a lower value package of consumer goods than the lower nominal wages of workers in less developed countries.

The second factor on which Marx dwells in this chatper - the relative average intensity of labor also can contribute, to the existence of an international scale or hierarchy of wages. Given his discussion in chapters 12-15 of the influence of capitalist organization and the use of machinery to set the rhythm of work, we might expect intensity to be higher in more developed capitalist countries. This may or may not, however, be the case because, as always, other things are not generally the same. For instance, it may be that the relative weakness of workers in a less developed area - say forced to work for extremely low piece wages - may drive them to the very limits of the intensity possible to any human being. It may also be the case that good self-organization of workers in the more developed areas may provide the means by which they are able to shift from piece to hourly wages and force up the level of those wages and impose enough work rules that they are able to work at a more leisurely pace. About all that can be said a priori is that capital always seeks the highest intensity that it can impose and that workers resist this. Given differnces in the balance of power between capital and workers across countries we can expect that the degree of intensity will vary and that that variation will play a part in the shaping of the global wage hierarchy.

Case Study #1: Spinning

Marx's example of differences in the spinning industry between England and the European continent and among countries on that continent could be generalized to the textile industry as a whole. As a general rule England was at the forefront of the development of textile production machinery at every stage of production, from the growing of the raw materials through the spinning of thread and weaving of cloth to the sewing of clothing. It is likely, therefore, that Marx's observation that English spinning labor was more intense was also applicable throughout the industry. The basis for his argument that spinning labor was more intense in England was the data upon which he drew, and which he supplies in the chapter, on the number of spindles per worker. The assumption was that the more spindles for which each worker was responsible, the more intense would be the labor of taking care of them. This may well have been the case. Although, it is worth noting, in the period in which spinning and weaving was being gathered from homes into factories and then automated with water and then steam power driving the machines, it is quite possible that the still-at-home handloom weavers who were struggling to survive in the face of factory competition and falling prices might well have been working not only longer hours but more intensely than factory operatives. Obviously while it is relatively easy to observe changes in the pace of work (speed-up or slow-down) it is not so easy to obtain any absolute value for intensity. One can imagine the use of modern scientific apparatus to measure something like BTU's burned per hour per worker, but I have never heard of such a thing being done, much less done systematically in such a way as cross industry or cross country comparisons were possible.

At any rate, the higher productivity and presumed higher intensity of labor in the English factories is presumed to follow from a higher organic composition of capital (more machinery per worker) and to allow for higher wages in England than on the continent. As we have seen above, this would be at least the tendency although other factors would have to be taken into account in a concrete historical analysis. In the photograph by Louis Hine to the left taken in 1909 you can see a small girl tending a very large number of spindles. This was the kind of high capital/labor ratio Marx was talking about.

Case Study #2: Railroad Construction in Eastern Europe and Asia

This case is of interest for several reasons. First, it is a case of British foreign investment: considerable British capital was invested in railroad construction not only in Eastern Europe and Asia but also in the United States. It was a major area of British overseas investment for quite a long time. One must suppose that such investment was undertaken on the basis of familiarity with production and cost conditions in the various areas and the estimates of those conditions and costs were expected to yield competitive profits.

Second, when Marx notes that British labor was more "intensive" than local labor and got paid higher wages he doesn't specify any differences in either job categories or work behavior. We may assume, however, that he was assuming that the British firms were sending dedicated careerists to oversee such production and those overseers would be hiring mostly unskilled peasant labor to cut through forests and mountains and lay track. Such was certainly the case in the United States where large numbers of Chinese immigrant workers were used by railroad robber barons like Charles Crocker (1822-1888) and Leland Stanford (1824-1893) to drive the Central Pacific Railroad eastward to and through the Sierra Nevada mountains. In the image to the right, from the historical archives of the Central Pacific Railroad we can see both Chinese workers and the well dressed white man overseeing their work. As research by historians such as Herbert Guttman has demonstrated such peasants drafted for industrial work brought with them agrarian habits of time and work that were much more leisurely than those demanded by industrialists. Extremely low wages and often brutal oversight were often required to inculcate into such workers the habits of punctuality and work intensity desired by their employers. Under those circumstances Marx's assertions seem likely to have been accurate.

Third, with the expansion of imperial investment during the colonial period and the post-colonial growth of multinational corporate investment alluded to at the beginning of this commentary, such differences in work habits (and consequent length and intensity of labor) have proved of decisive importance time and time again. On the one hand, there are a seemingly endless number of examples where multinational firms have displaced production facilities geographically to take advantage of lower wages (and other lower costs). This was true - to choose an example in line with Marx's exposition - in the American textile industry that moved first from New England to the US Sun-belt, and then later into Mexico and Asia. On the other hand, it is also true that not every country that has extremely low wages has been able to attract such foreign investment hell-bent on escaping rising labor costs at home. Among the reasons why many pools of labor have been bypassed by such movements are precisely the work habits (and other habits of struggle) of the people there. In India, for example, workers have the nasty habit of going on strike using a sit-in that surrounds their employers and refuses to let them out until they capitulate. The same was true in South Korea, but a repressive police-state apparatus - backed up by thousands of American troops and American-trained Korean troops - kept such tactics in check until recently, thus permitting a much higher level of direct foreign investment than India (This may be hard to believe, in as much as American "high-tech" investment in India is currently very much in the news. It becomes more believable, however, when we see that such "high-tech" investment involves the hiring not of fiesty blue collar Indian workers but of middle-class, relatively well educated and well trained/tamed Indians.)

Marx's overall treatment, of course, draws our attention not only to the question of the intensity of effort of such workers hired abroad but also to that of their productivity. Lack of skill at even low skilled jobs may result in lower productivity and even render such investment unprofitable. In the current period there are a number of cases where the productivity of outsourced workers has been so low as to lead to the abandonment of such foreign investment. One example is that of technical assistance "call centers" re-located abroad. Despite newsworthy efforts by Indians to relearn English pronunciation so they can sound like Americans on the phone, the impatience of many callers with both their accents and their skill has been so great as to lead more than one company to abandon their investment and repatriate the jobs. The costs of repeated hang-ups by impatient customers, irritation with the company and the resultant bad satisfaction ratings have outweighed the reduced cost of low foreign wages.

Critical Comments on Carey

Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879) was an American publisher and economist who supported protectionist measures by the United States against the "diabolical influence" of Great Britain. Marx mocks him in part because of the contradiction between his belief in free trade and his advocacy of protectionism and in part because he sees Carey's understanding of the determinants of wages, and relative wages accross countries, as simplistic.

Foreign Direct Investment and "Free Trade"

As mentioned at the outset of this commentary, Marx's interest in the differences among wages among various countries has lately become a fairly hot topic of discussion and debate. The current debate arose amidst a larger debate about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Negotiated in secret by the United States, Canada and Mexico, then leaked to the world when it had reached draft stage, the agreement was met with widespread opposition. Literally hundreds of grassroots groups mobilized against it and created a network of opposition among themselves to fight it. In short, these activists sought to overcome the capitalist strategy of pitting workers against workers by organizing across those same divisions. There was also dissent within the legislative branches of all three governments as the draft of the agreement was posted to the Internet and became available for anyone and everyone to read.

Among the arguments against the agreement was one based on existing "national differences in wages" between the United States and Canada (minor differences) and between those countries and Mexico (major differences). The fact that wages were so much lower in Mexico than in the United States or Canada led many to argue that successful passage of NAFTA would make it easier for Canadian and U.S. corporations to move, or threaten to move, their production operations south into Mexico. Third Party candidate Ross Perot became famous for his evocation of a possible "great sucking sound" as jobs were "sucked" out of the United States into Mexico.

This aspect of the debate, which focused on the same topic as Marx does in this chapter, was, however, only part of the larger debate. Those who were worried about U.S. or Canadian corporations shifting jobs into Canada also addressed many other dimensions that bore on the issue. For example, they pointed out how even though Mexico had reasonable environmental laws, the ease with which they could be bypassed through a little bribery (la mordida) added to the allure of low wages by further reducing the costs of production. Moreover, they also pointed to the organizational weakness of Mexican labor, how the only trade unions tolerated by the Mexico government were those that had sold out to the PRI - the then dominant party in that virtually one-party state. Yes, a growth of investment would mean more jobs and an expansion of the labor force, but political repression would prevent those new workers as well as the old from fighting for their rights, higher wages better working conditions, and so on. There were many other aspects to the debate all of which suggest important ways in which Marx's discussion in this chapter needs to be extended to provide a more complete understanding of "national differences in wages" and the implications for both capitalist and working class strategies.

The defeat of the opposition to NAFTA and it successful passage by the legislatures of all three countries was soon followed by the same debate on a much larger scale: namely the debate about the new World Trade Organization (WTO) spearheaded by the United States and aimed at accelerating the freedom of movement for multinational commodity capital. Because the WTO had dozens of members rather than just three, and because it amounted to the imposition of the same set of trading rules on all its members, opposition to it and to its rules and to the implementation of those rules was soon global in scope. As in the case of NAFTA opposition forces created networks to share information and organize against the WTO. The first sign of just how broad and serious was that opposition came with the besieging of WTO meetings in Geneva, Switzerland. That siege was made up of some 20,000 protestors from both North and South. It was followed by the much more reported siege of the WTO meetings in Seattle, Washington. The "Battle of Seattle" saw some 30,000 protestors from dozens of countries converge on Seattle and successfully shut down the WTO meetings. Among those protestors were a very large number of blue collar workers from the U.S. labor movement as well as environmentalists, Left-wing party members, anarchists, university students and so on.

Once again the issue of "national wage differences" was front and center for many protestors - most obviously the labor movement - for the same reason it had been during the debate over NAFTA: the fear that freer trade with countries with very low wage rates would make it easier for multinational corporations to undermine better paid workers elsewhere. Once again, that argument was buttressed by the consideration of many other issues.

The protests at Geneva and Seattle were the first of their kind. When Marx was writing in the mid-1800s, it was only with difficulty that workers and activists were able to collaborate across national boundaries. Even throughout most of the 20th Century this was also true. There were cases of collaboration - such as opposition in the United States to the War in Vietnam, or support around the world for the anti-aparthied struggle in South Africa - but creating and using networks was a slow process. Not in these or in any other trans-border collaboration is there any record of tens of thousands of networked protestors have the capacity to organize collective demonstrations of the sort that exploded in Geneva and Seattle.

There were two key factors in these anti-WTO mobilizations. First, was the gathering of some 3,000 grassroots activists in Chiapas, Mexico in the summer of 1996 for an "Intercontinental Encounter Against Neoliberalism and For Humanity" called by the Zapatista movement that had surged out of the forests and mountains of Chiapas at the beginning of 1994 and launched a challenge to the Mexican government and an affirmation of indigenous rights that swept round the world. That intercontinental encounter consisted of almost a week of discussions and networking among activists from over 40 countries. When the encounter was over and they went home they carried with them a vision of global networking and global collaborative moblization. They began working out that vision and among its fruits were the anti-WTO protests.

Beginning with the organizing that produced the Battle of Seattle, global grassroots networking accelerated and evolved new dimensions, especially the elaboration of Internet channels of communication of which the key new form was Indymedia - websites that could post news, from a grassroots perspective almost instantly, including audio, photographic imagery and streamed video. The possibilities were demonstrated during the confrontation with WTO in Seattle when for the first time dozens of independent reporters armed with camcorders could not only circulate amidst the demonstrations but then stream their filming directly onto the web bypassing the capitalist controlled mass media. The dramatic difference between the images broadcast by the media (generally emphasizing the breaking of McDonald windows by a few) and those broadcast by Indymedia (generally showing non-violent protestors and violent police actions) was dramatic. After that Indymedia operations sprang up on the net in country after country, city after city and as mass mobilizations were mounted against other capitalist organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the G-8 meetings, Indymedia would also converge to provide alternative coverage of events.

Alongside the issue of the uses to which capitalists try to put "national differences in wages" - pitting workers against workers - and the attempt to overcome that strategy by organizing across borders, the very success of such demonstrations made visible another way in which workers were divided by those wage differentials. Although in all these large-scale demonstrations it soon became obvious that most of the demonstrators were from countries high on the international wage and income hierarchy. Traveling intercontinentally to participate in such demonstrations was something the vast majority of the world's workers could hardly afford. A cluster of villages or a city might pool its resources to send a representative but the resources required is large and the numbers sent small.

One approach to overcoming this problem has been the diffusion of protests. Instead of gathering very large numbers of people in one spot, a la Seattle, even larger numbers of people moblize for the same purpose with the same kind of target at a multiplicity of easier to reach sites around the world. The issues are the same, although often mixed with purely local ones, but the message is the same: the unity of vast numbers of people in many different countries against capitalist policies. How to make such global mobilization more effective is an on-going subject of discussion in these early years of the 21st Century.

Outsourcing

"Outsourcing" which has been widely attacked by workers in the wake of the recession of 2000-2001 and the relatively "jobless" recovery that has followed it, is not new. In the first place "outsourcing" can be either domestic or international, with the latter sometimes called "off-shoring". The term "outsourcing" has been used to refer to the phenomenon of a firm going "outside" its own structure to contract some specific function instead of doing it "in-house." It has, therefore, a micro-economic connotation. Such outside contracting has been around for a long time. If we generalize the term, as some now do, to any "going outside" then it can be, and has been, applied not only to business firms but to governments, or to any entity for which an "inside" and an "outside" can be identified.

Direct foreign investment, for example, to seek out and obtain raw materials, or the recruitment of foreign workers from outside a country (as in the case of Chinese laborers mentioned above) can be seen as kinds of "outsourcing."

The kind of outsourcing, however, which has been receiving the most attention in recent years is the off-shoring of any and all business operations in which workers are hired abroad instead of at home. This is the kind of outsourcing that has the United States labor movement up in arms, that has been facilitated by agreements such as NAFTA, organizations such as the WTO and policies such as those pursued by recent administrations both Democratic and Republican.

Central to the objections to outsourcing has been the perception of dramatic "differences in national wages" and the awareness that to a considerable extent business decisions to "off-shore" operations are based on the expectation of lower wages and lower labor costs more generally. Whether such off-shoring involves the replacement of jobs in the United States by jobs overseas, or the creation of new jobs overseas instead of new jobs at home, the process is seen as contributing not only to the joblessness of the recovery but to the general weaking of workers in the United States.

Defense of such off-shoring doesn't usually deny the wage differentials that motivate the movement, but point to the relatively small number of jobs effected, and to the way increased trade and income abroad by increasing the demand for U.S. exports tends to increase rather than decrease jobs in the U.S. Unfortunately for its proponents, there is not much data to support this quantitative argument, while the anecdotal evidence of job loss due to off-shoring is enough to keep the opposition mobilized.

There is also evidence that a certain amount of outsourcing is done not on the basis of lower wages (or other labor costs) but rather for reasons of ideology, politics or greed. This would seem to be the case for a great deal of recent government outsourcing. Even before the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq the ideology and politics of neoliberalism in that and previous administrations during the 1980s and 1990s had embraced "privatization" and the outsourcing that goes with it. With "privatization" the government either divests itself completely of some activity, handing it over to the private sector, or it contracts-out tasks that it had previously done in-house, with civil servants.

With the invasion of Iraq this issue came to the fore. First, the letting of no-bid contracts to private corporations (e.g., Halliburton) for the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraq was critiqued as a corrupt handing over of tax payer money, by the billions, to friends of the current administration (e.g., Halliburton was recently headed by Vice-president Dick Cheney). Second, the revelations of the abuses of prisoners in United States run prisons also brought the revelation that many of the abusers were guards or interrogators supplied under contract, not government employees. Instead of taking care of the people it had taken prisoner, the U.S. Army was using, at least part of the time, mercenaries to do its work for it. As the revelations of the abuse spread and deepened - profoundly irritating the Bush administration which did everything it could to keep the situation under wraps - the more the role of private guns in Iraq came to light. It soon turned that after the US and British military forces, the largest armed force in Iraq was the legion of mercenaries hired by both governments and private corporations. Further investigation revealed that this "outsourcing" was certainly not due to any attempt by the government to minimize its costs; the wages of the outsourced mercenaries were far, far higher than those of US army personnel. This recognition, of course, merely added fuel to the criticism of this kind of gravy-train outsourcing. It also suggests, once again, how many other factors need to be taken into account to extend Marx's analysis in this chapter to contemporary real-world cases.

Concepts for Review

Questions for Review

An interesting case is offered by Jack London in his essay "The Scab" (1904) - that you were supposed to study in conjuntion with Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton. He writes:

"As Mr. Casson has shown, an English nailmaker gets $3.00 per week, while an American nailmaker gets $30.00. But the English worker turns out 200 pounds of nails per week, while the American turns out 5500 pounds. If he were as "fair" as his English brother, other things being equal, he would be receiving, at the English worker's rate of pay, $82.50. As it is, he is scabbing upon his English brother to the tune of $79.50 per week."

The wage is here stated in terms of a weekly wage and I think we can assume that the length of the working week is the same for both English and American nailmakers. What differs is both the wage and the output of a given worker's effort. If we knew the number of hours in the week we could calculate the hourly wage, but we don't, so we can't. We can however calculate the difference in the piece wage for the workers in the two different countries ($3/200=$0.015/lb for the English and $30/5500=$0.0055/lb for the American). Clearly, the piece rate for the American worker is much lower, yet that worker makes tens times the weekly wage. Because London's theme is how one group of workers may scab on another by offering "more for less" he tends to attribute this wage difference to "superior energy, skill and willingness of the American worker." However, he does recognize that "a great part" of the difference may be due to "the more improved American machinery." So, two questions:

First, assuming the wage differential reflects value differentials, to what degree do you think London, or anyone, can accurately differentiate between the effect on wages of differences in productivity and the effect of differences in the intensity of labor? Second, re-reading London's comments on English labor, on what basis do you think he thought it was reasonable to give greater weight to differences in intensity?

Questions for Review, Capital, Chap. 19: Answers

3. The wage hides exploitation by making it appear that all labor is paid for, by obscuring the fact that the wage buys only what is necessary to reproduce labor power. Time wages do this through their form, e.g. an hourly wage: you work an hour you get paid for an hour, you work another hour and you get paid more, the more you work, the more you get paid. Similarly, piece wages also do this through their form: in as much as you get paid by the piece, the more pieces you produced (the more you work) the more you get paid. In both cases the real link between how much you work and how much you get paid hides the existence of surplus labor. It also hides the relationship between the wage and the reproduction of labor power. Focusing on the time or piece rate obscures the aggregate relationship which demands that these rates and the amount of work time available be such that total wages can in fact buy enough goods to reproduce the worker. The fact that some workers are not reproduced but live and die in poverty below subsistence wages, while others receive very high wages, far beyond anything one would want to call subsistence, also obscures the average class-wide situation.

6. Grades = IOU’s on future wages? The degree to which this is the case depends on the empirical relationship between the grade hierarchy and the wage hierarchy. While there is certainly no strict correspondence between the two, high grades do not guarantee high paying jobs, it is generally true that higher grades allow you to progress to higher levels of the schooling system and to acquire higher level degrees. And, there is a fair correlation between the level of degree acquired and the level of wages associated with jobs open to those with various educational degrees, e.g. Ph.D’s on the average earn much more than those with only a high school diploma. At a theoretical level, grades measure not only the acquisition of knowledge (often quickly lost) but the amount of work and self-discipline demonstrated by the student and reflected on tests, papers, etc. Moreover, obtaining higher degrees require more self-discipline and less teacher/professor-imposed discipline and thus demonstrates the suitability of the students for more "responsible" professional positions where most supervision is internalized and outside supervision is relatively indirect. Credit? Perhaps if later wages are considered payment for previous work done producing labor power. On the other hand, perhaps not, perhaps the work is never compensated for. Hide exploitation? Certainly in the short run when work is being done (producing labor power) and no real money is paid as wages. However, exploitation is analyzed by Marx in terms of the extraction of surplus value which is not the case here, immediately, but at best only later when the school work results in higher productivity and higher s/v. Then, the question is whether the forthcoming wage compensates for the earlier unpaid work? If not, then exploitation for sure.

Questions for Review, Capital, Chap. 20: Answers

2. If intensity of labor rises while time wages rates remain constant then the real wage, measured in terms of the value of commodities obtainable with the wage remains constant, but measured in relationship to the expenditure of energy the real wage clearly falls because more work is being done for the same money.

4. Time wage rates hide exploitation by making it appear that all labor is paid for, by obscuring the fact that the wage buys only what is necessary to reproduce labor power. Time wages do this through their form, e.g. an hourly wage: you work an hour you get paid for an hour, you work another hour and you get paid more, the more you work, the more you get paid. The real link between how long you work and how much you get paid hides the existence of surplus labor. It also hides the relationship between the wage and the reproduction of labor power. (basically the same answer as that to question 3, chap 19.

8. Wages as expression of working class power or weakness? When wages were at or close to biological subsistence they might well be seen as a measure of weakness. Workers were unable to force capital to pay them enough to live decently. But as long as, and everywhere that, wages are well above subsistence they measure the ability of workers to force capital to develop and to share in the fruits of that development. Moreover, wages provide the material foundation of much of workers ability to struggle with business through such things as the accumulation of collective strike funds or individual savings which allow workers to weather strikes or lock-out unemployment during periods of struggle. Wages also buy the communication and travel necessary for working class self-organization both in struggle against capital and in self-valorizing activities undertaken to build alternatives to capital. This is true both of workers in general and for particular groups of workers in particular. For example, the movement of women out of the home and into the waged labor force has provided them with a wage independent from that of their husband. Whether the motivation for acquiring a wage was independence or family necessity, the command over income strengthens women in their dealings with men —in the home and outside. Thus the demand by some women for "wages for housework" from business and the state is not only a demand that housework be recognized as a productive activity but a struggle for more power through more material resources.