The 1844 Manuscripts: Wages of Labor
Hello all!
First, I want to re-link my “Notes on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts: Manuscript 1” piece here. There, I defend the thesis that Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts is not only Marx’s first encounter with political economy, but that it is a critique of the scientific pretensions of political economy. To that effect, I added a new conclusion to draw out the final implication of my argument: the critique of political economy begins with the concept of alienated labor. (I also added a lengthy footnote criticizing Jacques Rancière’s claim, made in his otherwise trenchant contribution to Reading Capital (1965), that Marx never poses the problem of political economy as a scientific discourse in the 1844 Manuscripts.) This final implication will play an important role in my readings of the first three sections, or opening triad, of the 1844 Manuscripts—“Wages of Labor,” “Profit of Capital,” and “Rent of Land.” This post begins with the first, “Wages of Labor.”
(“Hall of Machines at the 1844 Paris Industry Exposition,” 1844)
Wages of Labor
From the first paragraph of the first section, Marx has already begun staging the confrontation between the legendary, or mythical, discourse of the political economists and contemporary economic fact—viz., the immiseration of the worker—which, in the opening pages of “Alienated Labor,” Marx develops to distinguish his own analysis of the capitalist system of private property from that of political economy. Recall that, for Marx, political economy begins its ‘explanation’ of private property with the image of a “legendary primordial condition” that “asserts as fact or event what it should deduce.” (121) Specifically, political economy pretends to explain the capitalist system of private property by asserting the social relations that compose it as pre-given historical facts. Marx compares it to the theological ‘explanation’ of the origin of evil by the fall of man—a tautology. The specific social relation Marx addresses in the opening of “Wages of Labor” is the capital-labor relation. Towards the end of the third manuscript, in the section “Needs, Production, and Division of Labor,” Marx will pose the problem of political economy’s explanation of the relation, or unity, of capital and labor in the following terms:
[T]he economist postulates the original unity of capital and labor as the unity of capitalist and worker. This is the original paradisical condition. How these two factors, as two persons, spring at each other’s throats, is for the economist a [contingent] occurrence, which, therefore, requires only to be explained by external circumstances… (175)
For the political economist, class struggle is an accident that supervenes on the original unity of capital and labor given exterior social forces and situations. For Marx, class struggle is the constitutive dynamic of the capital-labor relation that drives the historical development of the relation. His example is the determination of wages, a process within which we can make the analytic distinction between two stages: the determination of wage-labor as a relation and the determination of the normal wage. First, wage-labor is determined by the “bitter struggle between capitalist and worker” and “the necessary victory of the capitalist.” (69) Second, wages are determined, on the terms dictated by the imperative of capital accumulation, by the norm of the lowest necessary rate compatible with the bare subsistence, or “bestial existence,” of the worker. (69)
True, this isn’t yet a theory of primitive accumulation or the origin of capitalists and proletarians. The closest we get to that in the 1844 Manuscripts is either in “Alienated Labor,” where Marx describes the necessary separation (and its reproduction) between the worker and their means of subsistence and means of production, or, more likely, in “Rent of Land,” where Marx argues (on the basis of the relation of private property implicit in feudal land ownership) for the necessary transition from feudal class relations into the capitalist social division of property owners from propertyless workers. However, what Marx establishes at the outset of “Wages of Labor” is that the wage-labor relation is determined and reproduced through an ongoing contestation between capitalist and worker regarding the rate of the remuneration of labor.
Consequently, in both “Wages of Labor” and “Alienated Labor,” Marx will criticize piecemeal reformers who advocate for raising wages to improve the conditions of working class existence and even socialists like Proudhon who “regard equality of wages as the aim of social revolution” (77) for misunderstanding the identity of wages and the capitalist system of private property:
We also observe, therefore, that wages and private property are identical, for wages, like the product or object of labor, labor itself remunerated, are only a necessary consequence of the alienation of labor. In the wage system labor appears not as an end in itself but as the servant of wages. (132)
The significance of this criticism cannot be overstated. It will be developed fully only in the third manuscript, in the section “Private Property and Communism,” where Marx polemicizes against the ‘crude communism’ which would extend the role of the worker to all instead of abolishing the role altogether. With the first two sentences of the first section of the first manuscript—
Wages are determined by the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker. The necessary victory of the capitalist. (69)
—Marx has simultaneously initiated the vitiation of the legendary discourse of political economy, taking class struggle as the necessary point of departure in the explanation of the capitalist system of private property, and the rectification of the socialist revolutionary project, grounding the case for the abolition of wage-labor itself.
Why does Marx treat the victory of the capitalist in the struggle over wages as a foregone conclusion? Two reasons: combination among capitalists is both usual and effective while combination among workers is proscribed and punished; the capitalist can always supplement their income with rent or interest even if the workers stall his industrial earnings. (69) This latter factor is what Marx identifies as the fatal, for the worker, separation of capital, landed property, and labor as the three sources of wealth and three forms of wealth: profit, rent, and wages. Recall that in the opening pages of “Alienated Labor,” Marx tells us the manuscripts began with the presupposition of political economy of “the separation of labor, capital, and land, as also of wages, profit, and rent” to demonstrate that
From political economy itself, in its own words, (...) [1] that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity; [2] that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production; [3] that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus a restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and finally [4] that the distinction between capitalist and landlord, and between agricultural laborer and industrial worker, must disappear, and the whole of society divide into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers. (120)
Setting aside the fourth conclusion—the necessary polarization of capitalist society into two classes—which is the subject matter of “Rent of Land,” we can anticipate the distribution of the remaining three demonstrations across “Wages of Labor” and “Profit of Capital.” The former concerns both the first and second conclusions—[1] the immiserating commodification of labor and [2] the immiseration of the worker proportional to their productivity. The latter concerns both the second and third conclusions—[2] the immiseration of the worker proportional to their productivity and [3] the necessary restoration of monopoly through competition. This second conclusion is precisely the “contemporary economic fact” which Marx insists on as the starting point for explaining the capitalist system of private property in “Alienated Labor”:
The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces and the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more goods he creates. The devaluation of the human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things. Labor does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods. (121)
Indeed, the second conclusion—the immiseration of the worker proportional to their productivity—is just a shorthand for the concept of alienated labor, which focuses our analysis of the capitalist system of private property on the determinate character of the labor process that reproduces capitalist society. In this sense, Marx claims to both derive the concept of alienated labor from political economy and deploy the concept of alienated labor as a critique of political economy.
Of course, the opening triad of the 1844 Manuscripts is not yet the criticism of the trinity formula of political economy—capital-profit, land-rent, labor-wages—we find inCapital vol. III, where Marx identifies the common root of all three “sources of wealth” in surplus-value or surplus-labor. However, what Marx does in the 1844 Manuscripts is pose the question of the legitimacy of the trinity formula given the necessity of immiseration for both the determination of wages and capital accumulation in the first two sections. (Likewise, in “Rent of Land,” Marx argues that the supersession of feudal property relations through the division of landed property restores monopolies of landownership for capitalists, which both proletarianizes the peasants and, through the new relation of landlord-ship under the imperative of capital accumulation, inevitably deepens the immiseration of the proletarianized workers.)
Returning to the strategic significance of the access capitalists have to interest and rent even in the event striking workers interrupt the cycle of returns made on industrial capital investments, Marx concludes: “For the worker, therefore, the separation of capital, ground rent, and labor is fatal.” (69) Capitalists and workers do not live time as the other does. (The full import of this phenomenological difference at the level of sensory experience is only articulated in the third manuscript, in the section “Private Property and Communism,” where the subject of Marx’s analysis is the impoverishment of the human sensorium under the capitalist system of private property.) An interruption of production is at worst a headache for the capitalist but suicide for the worker. Even when workers overcome the formal and informal barriers to combination, their abject dependence on the wage for the means of subsistence and their separation from the means of production means they cannot afford to interrupt the cycles of capital accumulation:
[T]he worker has the misfortune to be a living capital, a capital with needs, which forfeits its interest and consequently its livelihood during every moment that it is not at work. (...) As soon as it occurs to capital--either necessarily or voluntarily--not to exist any longer for the worker, he no longer exists for himself; he has no work, no wage, and since he exists only as a worker and not as a human being, he may as well let himself starve, be buried, etc. The worker is only a worker when he exists as capital for himself, and he only exists as capital when capital is there for him. (137)
Therefore: the necessary victory of the capitalist. If the capitalist is necessarily indifferent to the worker beyond the latter’s mere existence as a worker, it shouldn’t surprise us, Marx will argue, that political economy itself over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries becomes increasingly and explicitly indifferent to the fate of the worker in capitalist society and cynical with regard to the goal of capitalist production. Again, we’re confronted with the fact that wage-labor is itself the problem: as long as wages are the only access the worker has to means of subsistence, the struggle for higher wages necessarily resolves in favor of the capitalist. As long as the capitalist commands labor and is beholden to the imperatives of capital accumulation, Marx argues, even successful struggles for higher wages cannot ultimately circumscribe the tendency of wages towards, as Smith says, “the lowest which is compatible with common humanity”—bare survival. (69)
Across the first two sections of the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx even suggests the following definition of capital in Smith’s own language: the power of command over labor (to the end of an average rate of profit) indifferent to the fate of laborers except insofar the demand for labor is met with adequate supply. Later in the manuscripts, Marx writes:
When political economy asserts that supply and demand always balance each other, it forgets at once its own contention (the theory of population) that the supply of men always exceeds the demand, and consequently, that the disproportion between supply and demand is most strikingly expressed in the essential end of production—the existence of man. (177)
Even according to Smith himself,
The demand for men necessarily regulates the production of men, as of every other commodity. If the supply greatly exceeds the demand, then a section of the workers declines into beggary or starvation. (69)
Whenever a bourgeois economist celebrates the self-regulating mechanism of the market, the tendency towards equilibrium, the responsiveness of the market to fluctuations in demand, Marx reminds us always think of the demand for labor first, which is simply the demand for the life of the laborer, and the perennial destitution of the employed, the newly unemployed, and the now-unemployable whenever the supply of labor exceeds that demand.
Here, Marx is reading the Malthusian theory of population back into Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Marx’s argument, in short, is that for Smith, even in “the most opulent state of society” (76), the demand for labor plummets as the rate of profit does and “[t]he excess [labor supply] would have to die.” (74) This is how Marx concludes his demonstration that even for Smith, the immiseration of the worker is a necessary consequence of capitalist society whether the wealth of the society in question is diminishing (“declining state”), increasing (“progressive state”), or fully realized (“most opulent state”). (76) This demonstration comprises the first half of “Wages of Labor.” The second consists primarily of quotes from socialist economists and social scientists detailing the immiseration of the working class—for Marx, the necessary consequence of the capitalist system of private property that political economy, as both ‘scientific’ theory and moral defense of this system, unwittingly indicates but cannot avow.
Marx sets up his demonstration that, according to Smith, the immiseration of the worker is a necessary consequence of the capitalist system of private property regardless of the state of society (declining, progressive, most opulent) by enumerating a series of disadvantages the workers suffer in the capital-labor relation in any of these states: (1) the difficulty the worker faces in finding new work given the tendency towards specialization (and de-skilling) in the deepening division of labor; (2) the compulsion to accept any new demand made by their employer under threat of unemployment (and, at worst, starvation); (3) the constant fluctuation of wages that ensures the stability of average rates of profit for capital; (4) the constant fluctuation of the means of subsistence (wages rise to meet the rising cost of the means of subsistence or the workers starve; wages fall to meet the falling cost of the means of subsistence because the worker can earn less without starving); (5) wage rates vary for different kinds of labor more than the profits for different employments of capital. (70-71) It is this last disadvantage which attests to the brutal indifference of capital to laborers:
In work, all the natural, spiritual, and social differences of individual activity appear and are differently remunerated, while dead capital maintains an unvarying performance and is indifferent to real individual activity. (71)
The ‘indifference of capital,’ the grand theme of the first two sections, is a strange indifference. We know that capital cannot be indifferent to labor. On the one hand, capital requires the internal differentiation of the workforce as the social division of labor deepens and even requires the differentiation of the proletariat into workers and non-workers given fluctuating demand for labor. On the other, capital also requires the homogenization of labor—its subsumption under the relation of wage labor, its reduction to ‘one-sided’ labor as it becomes increasingly specialized, and even its eventual de-differentiation through deskilling. What Marx calls the indifference of capital is not capital’s indifference towards labor per se, or to the existence and employment of the working class in the process of capital accumulation, but of the indifference of capital towards individual laborers. Capital is indifferent both to the survival of the individual laborer, so long as the working class is reproduced and dying hands are replaced by new hands, and to their misery outside of the work relation:
Political economy thus does not recognize the unoccupied worker, the working man so far as he is outside this work relationship. Swindlers, thieves, beggars, the unemployed, the starving, poverty-stricken and criminal working man, are figures which do not exist for political economy, but only for other eyes; for doctors, judges, gravediggers, beadles, etc. They are ghostly figures outside the domain of political economy. The needs of the worker are thus reduced to the need to maintain him during work, so that the race of workers does not die out. Consequently, wages have exactly the same significance as the maintenance of any other productive instrument, and as the consumption of capital in general so that it can reproduce itself with interest. They are like the oil which is applied to a wheel to keep it running. Wages thus form part of the necessary costs of capital and of the capitalist, and they must not exceed this necessary amount. (138)
This concern with the obliteration of the individual under the capitalist system of private property endures through the conclusion of the third manuscript, where, in the section titled “Money,” communism is synonymous with the emergence of truly individual lives.
Returning to “Wages of Labor,” Marx claims to have demonstrated that for a capitalist society in any state:
“The worker does not necessarily gain when the capitalist gains, but he necessarily loses with him.” (70)
“[W]here the worker and capitalist both suffer, the worker suffers in his existence while the capitalist suffers in the profit on his dead mammon.” (71)
From the labor side of the wage-relation, the worker’s life is a constant struggle on two fronts: first, a struggle for wages requisite to purchase the means of subsistence needed to survive, and second, a struggle to obtain any work whatever. (71) The threat of unemployment, or failure on the second front of struggle, necessarily constrains the struggle waged on the first. Concisely, the threat of unemployment disciplines the labor force, who are compelled to accept the normalization of wages towards bare subsistence.
First scenario
In the first scenario (declining state), the wealth of society is diminishing:
[T]he worker suffers most, for although the working class cannot gain as much as the class of property owners in a prosperous state of society, none suffers so cruelly from its decline as the working class. (71)
Second scenario
In the second scenario (progressive state), the wealth of society is increasing. The situation of the worker appears favorable at first, since competition among capitalists for labor raises wages. However, under the capitalist system of private property, Marx argues that even rising wages ends in misery:
Thus, even in the state of society which is most favorable to the worker, the inevitable result for the worker is [1] overwork and premature death, [2] reduction to a machine, [3] enslavement to capital which accumulates in menacing opposition to him, [4] renewed competition, and [5] beggary or starvation for a part of the workers. (73)
Briefly, we can consider each of these consequences in turn. First, “Rising wages awake in the worker the same desire for enrichment as the capitalist, but he can only satisfy it by the sacrifice of his body and spirit.” (73) That is, rising wages leads to overwork among the workers “in the service of avarice” and “in so doing they shorten their lives” (71). (The production of envy in capitalist society is the subject of two sections in the third manuscript, “Private Property and Communism” and “Needs, Production, and Division of Labor.” There we find Marx’s critique of the moral judgments passed by political economy on the ‘avarice’ of the workers and proletarian luxury.) This shortening of the lifespan of the worker has an indirect benefit for the working class as a whole, as it leads to a demand for replacing each expiring generation in succession: “This class must always sacrifice a part of itself, in order not to be ruined as a whole.” (71) Second, as a consequence of the deepening division of labor on the one hand and increase in capital investment in the means of production on the other in the progressive state of society, the worker is either forced to specialize to the point of being unemployable in any other line of work or ‘de-skilled’ by the introduction of labor-saving machinery that reduces the activity of labor to repetitive gestures dictated by the pace and shape of labor necessary to maximize the productive output of the machinery. Marx:
Likewise, the division of labor makes him increasingly one-sided and dependent, and introduces competition not only from other men but also from machines. Since the worker has been reduced to a machine, the machine can compete with him. (73)
Already, we see one way in which rising wages, which assumes competition among capitalists for labor in the progressive state of society, leads to intensified competition among laborers for access to work. Third, if Smith and the political economists are correct that “capital is accumulated labor,” the more productive the labor process is “more of the worker’s product is taken from him as an alien possession” and “his means of [subsistence] and his [own] activity are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the capitalist.” (72) This consequence won’t be fully developed until “Alienated Labor.” For now it’s enough to note in passing that Marx has already introduced the first and second kinds of alienation: increasing alienation of the worker from their product, as the wage is the worker’s only access to means of subsistence, and alienation of the worker from the activity of work, as the worker is condemned to compete even for the opportunity to work and earn a wage given their separation of the means of production.
Having already connected the fourth consequence of ‘renewed competition’ to the deepening of the division of labor and the progressive introduction of labor-saving machinery, Marx also remarks that the rising productivity of industry (assumed in the ‘progressive state’ in which wages rise) leads to an overproduction of both workers and products—workers no one will employ and products no one will buy.1 Furthermore, increased competition among capitalists necessarily results in the concentration of capital, or the ruin of small capitalists by large capitalists and the proletarianization of the former. (72-73) Because of the tendency toward monopolization of capital, capitalist competition for labor decreases, and given the expansion of the ranks of the proletariat with the fall of the middle capitalists into the working class, competition among workers for work “has become greater, more abnormal, and more violent.” (73) Therefore the progressive state of a society in which wealth is increasing results in the fifth consequence: “putting a great part of the workers our of work or in reducing their wages to the most wretched minimum.” (73)
The problem of the second scenario
The difficulty of reading this second scenario in particular is significant. First, it’s a chaotic knot of conditionals: if higher wages then overwork, if increased productivity then increased capital accumulation, if increased capital accumulation then increased alienation of worker from product and work, if increased capital accumulation then deepening of the division of labor and introduction of labor-saving machinery, if increased competition among capitalists then the increased concentration of capital, if the increased concentration of capital then the creation of new monopolies and the proletarianization of the small capitalists, etc. At least we know this knot necessarily unravels into mass immiseration! Second, it’s not immediately clear where we should distinguish between Marx’s explication of the implications in Smith’s analysis of wages and Marx’s own arguments against the socialists (like Proudhon) who hold equality of wages as the goal of social revolution. Perhaps this problem has no real solution in the text. After all, we know the 1844 Manuscripts (or Paris Notebooks) were never intended or prepared for publication. Even in the plan for publication Marx introduces in the “Preface,” the manuscripts were meant only to be published “in a number of independent brochures” which he would “endeavor, in a separate work, to present [as an] interconnected whole, to show the relationships between the parts.” (63) For us, as for Marx, the 1844 Manuscripts can only be the search for a critical system or systematic critique.
For the sake of advancing our own reading, however, I want to return briefly to Marx’s explanation of the derivation and significance of the concept of alienated labor:
We have, of course, derived the concept of alienated labor (alienated life) from political economy, from an analysis of the movement of private property. But the analysis of this concept shows that although private property appears to be the basis and cause of alienated labor, it is rather a consequence of the latter, just as the gods are fundamentally not the cause but the product of confusions of human reason. At a later stage, however, there is a reciprocal influence. (131)
What this passage suggests is a shift in the ground of critique. Recall that for Marx political economy necessarily neglects an analysis of the labor process, which prevents it from apprehending the formation of the capitalist system of private property, because this analysis would require the political economist to recognize the necessity of immiseration for the worker in capitalist society. This would, of course, undermine the moral mission of political economy. Consequently, political economy must fail as a scientific discourse. It is only possible to explain the capitalist system of private property if you apprehend it in the moment of its formation and reproduction inside of the labor process. However, political economy does indicate the necessity of immiseration in its analysis of ‘the movement of private property.’ This is the indication Marx develops through a close reading of Smith in the second scenario—the consequences of the progressive state of capitalist society for the worker—we have just reconstructed above.
Indeed, Marx does seem to derive the concept of alienated labor in this second scenario, specifically in the third consequence of the progressive state of society, ‘enslavement to capital which accumulates in menacing opposition’ to the worker in proportion to their productivity. With the derivation of the concept of alienated labor from political economy, everything changes. In the last quoted passage, we learn that alienated labor, which appears to be an effect of the movement of private property, in fact explains that movement. Alienated labor, which appears to be just another consequence of the capitalist system of private property in the second scenario, is revealed to be the real process in which this system is produced and reproduced. For Marx, unlike the political economists, private property does not explain itself. It is revealed to be a consequence of determinate historical transformations made in the labor process. The critique of political economy cannot consist in demonstrating the necessity of the immiseration of the working class given ‘the movement of private property’ presented by political economy. This is all Marx has accomplished in “Wages of Labor.” The critique of political economy can only consist in demonstrating the necessity of ‘the movement of private property’ presented by political economy and the immiseration of the working class given the alienation of labor. Again: only the concept of alienated labor enables us to apprehend the necessary unity of capitalist property relations and immiseration. Though the second scenario is a criticism of Smith in his own idiom—and perhaps a critique of Proudhon in Smith’s idiom—it is not yet a critique of political economy.
If the critique of political economy only begins with the concept of alienated labor, it’s because the concept explains the necessary unity of capitalist property relations and the immiseration of the working class as results of determinate historical transformations made in the labor process. In contrast to the political economists, who treat capitalist property relations as a static generality and historical given, Marx deploys the concept of alienated labor to develop a genetic account of capitalist property relations. This is why Marx is more than the bad conscience of political economy even in the 1844 Manuscripts. The grounds of critique have shifted: it is no longer sufficient to trumpet the hypocrisy of the political economists who sermonize about the moralizing effects of an immoral system. Our new critical task is to explain both the historical emergence of that system and those sermons, both capitalist property relations and the limitations of political economy as a science of those relations. Critique has to be more than ‘gotchas,’ those don’t cut. Regardless of the fact Marx never prepared these manuscripts for publication, the message, at once scientific and revolutionary, is clear: capitalism did not fall from heaven and it can fall to us.
Third scenario
In the third scenario (most opulent state), the wealth of society is fully realized. Here, Marx quotes Adam Smith directly, who concedes that in a country with the “full complement of riches” both wages of labor and profits of capital would fall, intensifying the competition for employment to the point of reducing wages “to what was barely sufficient to keep up the number of laborers, and, the country being already fully peopled, that number could never be augmented.” (qtd. in 74) Marx completes the scenario by making the implicit, proto-Malthusian consequence of Smith’s theory explicit: “The excess would have to die.” (Ibid.)
Conclusions
These scenarios leave us with two conclusions, each of which is presented in Smith’s own idiom and each of which Marx claims are necessarily entailed by Smith’s theories even if Smith is unaware of them. The first conclusion:
Thus, in a declining state of society, increasing misery of the worker; in a progressive state, complicated misery; and in the final state, stationary misery. Since, however, according to Smith a society is not happy in which the majority suffers, and since the wealthiest state of society leads to suffering for the majority, while the economic system (in general, a society of private interests) leads to this wealthiest state, it follows that social misery is the goal of the economy. (74)
The second section, “Profit of Capital,” will arrive at this conclusion by different means as Marx takes up Smith’s false opposition of competition to monopoly in private enterprise.
To arrive at the second conclusion, Marx has us “adopt entirely the viewpoint of the [political] economist” in order to measure the violent oscillations between contradictory claims “he” makes about what belongs in theory to the workers and what belongs in practice to them. (cf. 74-75) In theory, the political economist tells us the whole product of labor belongs to the worker. In practice, he “adds immediately” that the worker receives only the smallest, most indispensable part of the product—only as much is necessary for workers to survive as workers and reproduce the working class. In theory, the political economist tells us everything is bought with labor and capital is only accumulated labor. In practice, he “adds immediately” that workers can nonetheless not buy anything except insofar as they sell their lives away for insufficient wages.2 In theory, the political economist tells us it’s through labor alone—“man’s active property”—is the value of natural products increased. In practice, the political economist describes that the landowner and capitalist stand above the workers as “idle gods” prescribing laws for them. In theory, the political economist tells us “labor is the only unchanging price of things.” In practice, however, he concedes that “nothing is more (…) subject to greater fluctuations than the price of labor.” In theory, labor is given the whole world. In practice, workers are merely fed to it. But the political economist is even grateful. In his theory, labor, through its deepening social division and intensification, also gives the whole world—both the prosperity of a society and its degree of civilization.3 The fact that workers suffer poverty, slums, mutilation, unemployment, and starvation only confirms the authenticity of labor’s gift. Isn’t that what defines a true gift, the impossibility of recompense?
We have arrived at Marx’s second conclusion:
Although, according to the economists, the interest of the worker is never opposed to the interest of society, society is always and necessarily opposed to the interest of the worker. (75)
Having learned that Marx takes the category, or unit of analysis, ‘a society’ from Smith, this conclusion shouldn’t surprise us. In each of the three scenarios—the declining, progressive, and most opulent states—the category of ‘society’ assumed capitalist social relations as a given (all of the conditions that wage-labor assumes, for starters). To the extent, however, that Smith fails to distinguish between capitalist society and non-capitalist societies, Marx argues that Smith not only inadvertently argues that capitalist society is necessarily opposed to the interest of the worker but that
[L]abor itself, not only in present conditions but universally in so far as its purpose is merely the increase of wealth, is harmful and deleterious, and that this conclusion follows from the economist’s own argument, though he is unaware of it. (76)
Clearly, Marx’s argument is a critique specifically of capitalist society: so far as Smith assumes capitalist social relations as an invariant given across any society, any society is opposed to the interests of the worker and labor itself is harmful to the worker. However, in the 1844 Manuscripts, the capitalist system of private property—a system in which private property owners are driven by the imperative to accumulate capital, workers are separated from the means of subsistence and production, and social relations are universally mediated by money—is for Marx a historical explication of a property relation that was implicit in pre-capitalist societies. If, as we’ve seen, alienated labor explains private property relations, and the development of capitalist property relations out of these, labor can’t only be alienated in the capitalist production process. (Marx describes feudal landownership, for example, in the language of alienation.4) The inseparability of alienated labor from private property relations in any society is also suggested in Marx’s argument that political economy—specifically Adam Smith—discovers the category of ‘labor’ as such as “the subjective essence of private property” only under the condition that the relation of private property has developed into industrial capitalism.5 This is also suggested by Marx’s definition of the second kind of alienation, which he describes in terms not necessarily specific to capitalist society as an alienation of the worker from their own productive activity under conditions in which they are forced to work (by direct or indirect compulsion) to survive for the sake of an ‘alien’ purpose (producing wealth for others) and lack access to work (i.e., to the means of production) outside of this work relation.6 To what extent Marx’s criticism of alienated labor in the 1844 Manuscripts is specific to capitalist society and whether Marx had already developed a theoretical precursor to his later concept of ‘abstract labor’ are questions that exceed the scope of this post. To draw this reflection on Marx’s conclusions produced by his criticism of Smith by Smith’s own theory—of wages and labor, of capital and labor, of social wealth—to a close, it is enough to remark that Smith himself inadvertently makes a trenchant critique of labor under capitalist private property relations (or, perhaps, under any private property relations) even if that critique is compromised by being grounded in the vitiated assumptions of political economy.
Postscript: haunting political economy
The last problem Marx takes up in “Wages of Labor” is political economy’s constitutive neglect of and indifference to proletarian life:
It is self-evident that political economy treats the proletarian, i.e. one who lives, without capital or rent, simply from labor, and from one-sided, abstract labor, merely as a worker. It can, therefore, propound the thesis that he, like a horse, must receive just as much as will enable him to work. Political economy does not deal with him in his free time, as a human being, but leaves this aspect to the criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the work-house beadle. (76)
Consequently, the rest of this section is comprised of long quotes from Schulz, Pecquer, Loudon, and Buret on the lives of proletarians so far as they live outside of the work relationship, those ‘ghostly figures outside the domain of political economy.’ Marx does not need to haunt political economy himself, but only record the movements of armies of apparitions that occasionally flicker in the periphery of political economy’s field of vision—‘accidental’ collateral to the movements of private property in the most moral of societies: “(…) in spite of the saving of time through the improvements in machinery the duration of slave labor in factories has increased for a large number of people (…)”; “(…) such continued, uniform work is, by its nature (and this is confirmed by investigation), harmful to the spirit no less than the body (…)”; “(…) high mortality of factory workers (…)”; “(…) the capitalists can acquire the labor of the lower classes, even of children, very easily and cheaply, and use it instead of making use of machinery (…)”; “(…) the evil that millions of men are only able to gain a bare living by exhausting, physically injurious, and morally and spiritually crippling labor; that they must even consider themselves fortunate to have the misfortune to find such work (…)”; “(…) this economic order condemns men to such abject occupations, to such desolate and bitter degradation, that by comparison savagery appears a royal condition (…)”; “(…) the numbers of the poor increase with their poverty, and it is in the most extreme state of want that human beings crowd in the greatest number to contend for the right to suffer (…)”; “(…) [industry] has expended the lives of those who composed its army with the same indifference as the great conquerors (…)”; “(…) soldiers of this army support the burdens which are placed on them neither from devotion nor from duty, but only to escape the hard fate of hunger (…)”; “(…) industry, which has called them together, only allows them to live when it needs them; as soon as it can dispense with them, it abandons them without the slightest concern (…)”; “(…) one can see workers who work strenuously and without interruption for sixteen hours a day, and who barely manage to earn the right not to die (…).”
Marx: “Finally, just as the accumulation of capital increases the amount of industry, and thus the number of workers, so as a result of this accumulation the same volume of industry produces a greater quantity of products which leads to overproduction…” (p. 73)
Marx, referring to a passage in Smith: “While the ground rent of the idle landowner usually amounts to one-third of the produce of the land, and the profit of the busy capitalist amounts to double the rate of interest, the surplus which the worker earns in the most favorable case is so little that two of his four children are condemned to die of hunger.” (p. 75)
Marx: “Although the division of labor increases the productive power of labor and the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and makes him into a machine. Although labor promotes the accumulation of capital and thus the growing prosperity of society, it makes the worker increasingly dependent upon the capitalist, exposes him to greater competition, and drives him into the hectic course of overproduction followed by a corresponding slump.” (Ibid.)
Marx: “Already in feudal landownership the ownership of the soil appears as an alien power ruling over men.” (114)
Marx makes this argument in the third manuscript, in the section “Private Property and Labor.” (pp. 147-151)
Marx: “What constitutes the alienation of labor? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not part of his nature; and that, consequently, he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labor. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs. Its alien character is clearly shown by the fact that as soon as there is no physical or other compulsion it is avoided like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification.” (pp. 124-125)