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Karl Marx
Wage Labour and Capital
Effect of Capitalist Competition on the Capitalist Class
the Middle Class and the Working Class
We thus see how the method of production and the means
of production are constantly enlarged, revolutionized, how division of
labor necessarily draws after it greater division of labor, the employment
of machinery greater employment of machinery, work upon a large scale work
upon a still greater scale. This is the law that continually throws capitalist
production out of its old ruts and compels capital to strain ever more
the productive forces of labor for the very reason that it has already
strained them – the law that grants it no respite, and constantly shouts
in its ear: March! march! This is no other law than that which, within
the periodical fluctuations of commerce, necessarily adjusts the price
of a commodity to its cost of production.
No matter how powerful the means of production which a capitalist
may bring into the field, competition will make their adoption general;
and from the moment that they have been generally adopted, the sole result
of the greater productiveness of his capital will be that he must furnish
at the same price, 10, 20, 100 times as much as before. But since he must
find a market for, perhaps, 1,000 times as much, in order to outweigh the
lower selling price by the greater quantity of the sale; since now a more
extensive sale is necessary not only to gain a greater profit, but also
in order to replace the cost of production (the instrument of production
itself grows always more costly, as we have seen), and since this more
extensive sale has become a question of life and death not only for him,
but also for his rivals, the old struggle must begin again, and it is all
the more violent the more powerful the means of production already invented
are. The division of labor and the application of machinery will therefore
take a fresh start, and upon an even greater scale.
Whatever be the power of the means of production which are employed,
competition seeks to rob capital of the golden fruits of this power by
reducing the price of commodities to the cost of production; in the same
measure in which production is cheapened - i.e., in the same measure in
which more can be produced with the same amount of labor – it compels
by a law which is irresistible a still greater cheapening of production,
the sale of ever greater masses of product for smaller prices. Thus the
capitalist will have gained nothing more by his efforts than the obligation
to furnish a greater product in the same labor-time; in a word, more difficult
conditions for the profitable employment of his capital. While competition,
therefore, constantly pursues him with its law of the cost of production
and turns against himself every weapon that he forges against his rivals,
the capitalist continually seeks to get the best of competition by restlessly
introducing further subdivision of labor and new machines, which, though
more expensive, enable him to produce more cheaply, instead of waiting
until the new machines shall have been rendered obsolete by competition.
If we now conceive this feverish agitation as it operates in the
market of the whole world, we shall be in a position to comprehend how
the growth, accumulation, and concentration of capital bring in their train
an ever more detailed subdivision of labor, an ever greater improvement
of old machines, and a constant application of new machine – a process
which goes on uninterruptedly, with feverish haste, and upon an ever more
gigantic scale.
But what effect do these conditions, which are inseparable from
the growth of productive capital, have upon the determination of wages?
The greater division of labor enables one laborer to accomplish
the work of five, 10, or 20 laborers; it therefore increases competition
among the laborers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The laborers compete
not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by
one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in
this manner by the division of labor, which is introduced and steadily
improved by capital.
Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labor
increases, is the labor simplified. The special skill of the laborer becomes
worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production,
with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible
to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover,
it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the
work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its
acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the
price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production.
Therefore, in the same manner in which labor becomes more unsatisfactory,
more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease.
The laborer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given
time by performing more labor, either by working a great number of hours,
or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by
want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labor.
The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this
simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow
workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer
themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does; so that, in the
last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class.
Machinery produces the same effects, but upon a much larger scale.
It supplants skilled laborers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children;
where newly introduced, it throws workers upon the streets in great masses;
and as it becomes more highly developed and more productive it discards
them in additional though smaller numbers.
We have hastily sketched in broad outlines the industrial war
of capitalists among themselves. This war has the peculiarity that the
battles in it are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of
workers. The generals (the capitalists) vie with one another as to who
can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers.
The economists tell us, to be sure, that those laborers who have
been rendered superfluous by machinery find new venues of employment. They
dare not assert directly that the same laborers that have been discharged
find situations in new branches of labor. Facts cry out too loudly against
this lie. Strictly speaking, they only maintain that new means of employment
will be found for other sections of the working class; for example, for
that portion of the young generation of laborers who were about to enter
upon that branch of industry which had just been abolished. Of course,
this is a great satisfaction to the disabled laborers. There will be no
lack of fresh exploitable blood and muscle for the Messrs. Capitalists
– the dead may bury their dead. This consolation seems to be intended
more for the comfort of the capitalists themselves than their laborers.
If the whole class of the wage-laborer were to be annihilated by machinery,
how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labor, ceases
to be capital!
But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of
employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were
waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually
find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment
will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would
be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how
modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more
subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then,
could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery
find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
An exception to the law has been adduced, namely, the workers
who are employed in the manufacture of machinery itself. As soon as there
is in industry a greater demand for and a greater consumption of machinery,
it is said that the number of machines must necessarily increase; consequently,
also, the manufacture of machines; consequently, also, the employment of
workers in machine manufacture; – and the workers employed in this branch
of industry are skilled, even educated, workers.
Since the year 1840 this assertion, which even before that date
was only half-true, has lost all semblance of truth; for the most diverse
machines are now applied to the manufacture of the machines themselves
on quite as extensive a scale as in the manufacture of cotton yarn, and
the laborers employed in machine factories can but play the role of very
stupid machines alongside of the highly ingenious machines.
But in place of the man who has been dismissed by the machine,
the factory may employ, perhaps, three children and one woman! And must
not the wages of the man have previously sufficed for the three children
and one woman? Must not the minimum wages have sufficed for the preservation
and propagation of the race? What, then, do these beloved bourgeois phrases
prove? Nothing more than that now four times as many workers' lives are
used up as there were previously, in order to obtain the livelihood of
one working family.
To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends
the division of labor and the application of machinery; the more the division
of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition
extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
In addition, the working class is also recruited from the higher
strata of society; a mass of small business men and of people living upon
the interest of their capitals is precipitated into the ranks of the working
class, and they will have nothing else to do than to stretch out their
arms alongside of the arms of the workers. Thus the forest of outstretched
arms, begging for work, grows ever thicker, while the arms themselves grow
every leaner.
It is evident that the small manufacturer cannot survive in a
struggle in which the first condition of success is production upon an
ever greater scale. It is evident that the small manufacturers and thereby
increasing the number of candidates for the proletariat – all this requires
no further elucidation.
Finally, in the same measure in which the capitalists are compelled,
by the movement described above, to exploit the already existing gigantic
means of production on an ever-increasing scale, and for this purpose to
set in motion all the mainsprings of credit, in the same measure do they
increase the industrial earthquakes, in the midst of which the commercial
world can preserve itself only by sacrificing a portion of its wealth,
its products, and even its forces of production, to the gods of the lower
world – in short, the crises increase. They become more frequent and more
violent, if for no other reason, than for this alone, that in the same
measure in which the mass of products grows, and there the needs for extensive
markets, in the same measure does the world market shrink ever more, and
ever fewer markets remain to be exploited, since every previous crisis
has subjected to the commerce of the world a hitherto unconquered or but
superficially exploited market.
But capital not only lives upon labor. Like a master, at once
distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses
of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.
We thus see that if capital grows rapidly, competition among the
workers grows with even greater rapidity – i.e., the means of employment
and subsistence for the working class decrease in proportion even more
rapidly; but, this notwithstanding, the rapid growth of capital is the
most favorable condition for wage-labor.
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