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?