Vol. 72/No. 50      December 22, 2008

Reader Wendy Banen asked the Militant to “explain more on the ‘wages system.’” Kim O’Brien wrote, “Won’t we still be paid by the hour, a wage, until some time after the revolution?" (See letters below).

Frederick Engels, who together with Karl Marx laid the foundation for the modern working-class movement, explained in a series of articles later printed as The Wages System that what is involved is not solely the question of getting paid wages.

Engels pointed out that “labour is, besides the earth, the only source of wealth; capital itself is nothing but the stored-up produce of labour.”

“The workman gives to the Capitalist his full day’s working power,” he wrote. “The workman gives as much, the capitalist gives as little, as the nature of the bargain will admit.” That is as true today as it was when Engels wrote the series.

“It appears that the capitalist buys their labour with money, and that for money they sell him their labour. What they actually sell to the capitalist for money is their labour-power,” Marx said in Wage-Labour and Capital. Under capitalism labor power is just another commodity like sugar; “the first is measured by the clock,” Marx notes, “the other by the scales.”

Unlike the chattel slave, sold to his owner once and for all, the modern wage slaves auction themselves off to the highest bidder for 8, 10, or 15 hours a day or a week at a time. Since the capitalist pays wages out of the value of what the worker produces, the less paid to the worker, the more the capitalist makes and vice versa.

No worker needs to be taught that “it is in the interest of the individual capitalist, as well as of the capitalist class generally, to reduce wages as much as possible,” Engels wrote.

When workers and bosses battle over who gets how much, the capitalist can afford to wait and live upon his capital. Workers are forced to take whatever the capitalists offer. As Engels pointed out, “Labour is not only handicapped, it has to drag a cannon-ball riveted to its foot.”

“It is only with the fear of the Trades Union before his eyes that the capitalist can be made to part with the full market value of his labourer’s working power,” Engels wrote. The unions don’t “upset” the law of wages, he said, they enforce it.

Without a fight for higher wages, there will never be a proletarian revolution. But without the conscious goal of taking power, replacing the capitalist government with a workers and farmers government, and using that power to eliminate the wages system forever, any gains made will be temporary.

As the worldwide economic crisis unfolds, communists get a receptive hearing today from more and more workers to the necessity of making a revolution and overturning the wages system as the only realistic road forward.

The Cuban Revolution helps point the way. As workers there took control of both the government and production after they overthrew the Batista dictatorship in 1959, they began to learn how to work together to organize society. Workers still receive wages, but decisions are not made based on filling the bank accounts of capitalists, but on meeting the needs of society.

That is a beginning. Ernesto Che Guevara, a leader of the Cuban Revolution, promoted volunteer labor, done outside the normal workday for free, as a key to further undermining the wages system.

No one can predict the speed with which these changes will take place in the United States or anywhere else after workers take power out of the hands of the capitalists. That will depend on the consciousness and organization of the working class, on the ability to increase production, and on the spread of the revolutionary movement around the world.
 
 
Related articles:
Letters
‘Trade unions necessary for working classes in struggle against capital’  
 
 
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