Tag Archives: Marx

Chapter 20 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Time-Wages” and deals with wages paid by the hour.Wages can take various forms but the two fundamental forms are time wages or piece wages (Marx 1990: 683).In essence, the hourly wage can be calculated by the value of a day of labour-power (the subsistence wage equal to the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour-power) divided by the number of hours in a working day (Brewer 1984: 64). As the working day rises so the hourly wage rate...

Chapter 19 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Transformation of the Value (and Respectively the Price) of Labour-Power into Wages” and discusses how capitalist wages conceal the reality that the wage is a payment for the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour (Harvey 2010: 242), a subsistence wage, which is equal to the necessary part of the working day. But capitalists generally pay hourly wages so that this alleged reality is obscured (Brewer 1984: 63).The use-value that the...

Chapter 18 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Different Formulae for the Rate of Surplus-Value” and Marx discusses his basic formulae here.For Marx, the rate of surplus value is represented by these formulae:Surplus value  =  s  =  Surplus value  =  Surplus labour —————————— —— ———————————— —————————— Variable capital v Value of labour power Necessary labour The first two formulae are expressed in values, but the third is a ratio of the relevant quantities of time (Marx 1990: 669). For Marx,...

Chapter 17 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus Value” and discusses how capitalists extract surplus value in relation to wages.Marx divides the chapter into four sections: (1) Length of the Working Day and Intensity of Labour Constant. Productiveness of Labour Variable.(2) Working-Day Constant. Productiveness of Labour Constant. Intensity of Labour Variable.(3) Productiveness and Intensity of Labour Constant. Length of the...

Chapter 16 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Absolute and Relative Surplus Value” and discusses the nature of labour, surplus value and surplus labour time. This chapter begins Part 5 of Capital (which comprises Chapters 16, 17 and 18).Marx opens his chapter with a discussion of the nature of productive labour. Under the capitalist mode of production, the commodity ceases “to be the direct product of the individual, and becomes a social product, produced in common by a collective labourer,...

In the videos below.But first let us look at Marx’s theory. It is that capitalists aim at increasing their theft of surplus value from workers.They can do this in three ways: (1) by increasing the length of the working day while holding down the real wage to a subsistence level (that is, increasing absolute surplus value);(2) decreasing the price of the basic commodities making up the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour by automation, and thus reducing the real subsistence...

Marx’s views are expressed well in Value, Price and Profit, which was a series of lectures he delivered in 1865, even though it was first published in 1898: “These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labor more or...

Chapter 14 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Division of Labour and Manufacture” and examines the nature of division of labour in early manufacture from the mid-16th to the late 18th centuries.Marx divides the chapter into five sections: (1) The Dual Origin of Manufacture.(2) The Specialised Worker and his Tools(3) The Two Fundamental Forms of Manufacture(4) The Division of Labour in Manufacture, and the Division of Labour in Society(5) The Capitalist Character of Manufacture. It is...

To the Marxists everywhere, my simple challenge: Is your view that Marx’s theory of wage determination in volume 1 of Capital that real wages in capitalism can and will rise above the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour, and in the long run will keep rising, vastly improving the living standards of workers? If you say “yes,” then my refutation here of Marx’s view of a rising rate of exploitation in capitalism (from increasing surplus value extracted from workers) is...

Böhm-Bawerk, in his 1896 essay “Karl Marx and the Close of His System,” understood the problem well: “ … [sc. Marx] declares that labor … means the ‘expenditure of simple [unskilled] labor power, an average of which is possessed in his physical organism by every ordinary man, without special cultivation"; or in other words ‘simple average labor’ (I, 51, and also previously in I, 46).‘Skilled labor,’ he continues, ‘counts only as concentrated or rather multiplied unskilled labor, so that a...