Chapter 15 had examined combinations that change labour-power’s value absolutely or relatively to surplus-value, while the means of subsistence in which its price is realized can move independently. Once labour-power’s value or price appears as wages, those laws appear as movements of wages; variations within one country can appear as simultaneous national wage differences. National comparison must therefore include the price and extent of naturally and historically developed necessities of life, training costs, women’s and children’s labour, productivity, and labour’s extensive and intensive magnitude. Reduce average day-wages for the same trade to equal working days, then translate time-wage into piece-wage, the measure of productivity and intensity. Attached note 64 cites Buchanan’s warning that wages have not necessarily risen merely because they buy more of a cheaper article: he is discussing their money expression.
Each country has an average intensity below which labour on a commodity takes more than socially necessary time and does not count as labour of normal quality. Within a country, only intensity above that national average changes the measure of value by duration alone. The world market is different. National average intensities vary and form a scale measured by universal average labour. Compared with less intense national labour, more intense national labour creates more value in the same time and expresses that value in more money.
Marx now adds a distinct world-market modification of the law of value: more productive national labour counts as more intense, provided competition does not compel the more productive nation to lower its commodity’s selling price to its value. The phrase says “counts as”; it is a social validation, not literal physical identity.
As capitalist production develops in a country, its national intensity and productivity rise above the international level. Equal working time can then yield unequal quantities of the same commodity with unequal international values, expressed in different prices and money sums. The relative value of money is lower in the more developed capitalist country. Nominal wages, labour-power’s equivalent expressed in money, may consequently be higher there. That does not prove higher real wages: it says nothing by itself about the means of subsistence placed at the worker’s disposal. Attached note 64a defers qualifications concerning productivity in particular branches of production.
Even apart from differences in money’s relative value, daily or weekly wages may be higher in one country while the relative price of labour is higher in the other. Marx defines that relative price as the wage compared both with surplus-value and with the value of the product. It is therefore not a synonym for nominal wage, real wage, unit labour cost, wage share, or the rate of surplus-value. Attached note 65 cites James Anderson against Adam Smith: apparently lower daily wages in poorer countries with cheap grain can still mean dearer labour, because the relevant question is what a definite quantity of work costs the employer. Anderson contrasts lower Scottish day-wages with generally cheaper English piece-work. Railway-commission evidence adds the inverse formulation: labour is dearer in Ireland than England because wages are lower.
J. W. Cowell, a member of the 1833 Factory Commission, reaches the following conclusion after a careful investigation of spinning.
Cowell’s quoted conclusion is that English wages are virtually lower for the capitalist than continental wages, although they may be higher for the worker. The statement is Cowell’s attributed historical evidence, cited through Ure.
In his 31 October 1866 report, Factory Inspector Alexander Redgrave compares continental states and says that, despite lower wages and much longer hours, continental labour is dearer relative to product than English labour. An English cotton-factory manager in Oldenburg reports hours from 5:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturdays included; under English overlookers workers did not quite equal English output in ten hours, and under German overlookers did still less. He reports wages often 50% lower than in England but many more hands relative to machinery, in some departments five to three. Marx then relays Redgrave’s material on Russian cotton factories, supplied by an English manager recently employed there. The phrases about a Russian soil “fruitful of all infamies,” English managers, and an allegedly unfit “native Russian capitalist” are Marx’s dated, hostile historical language; they are not current narrator claims. The passage reports overwork, day-and-night labour, shamefully low pay, and manufacture sustained by prohibition of foreign competition. Redgrave next introduces his spindle comparison, while warning that the figures were already old and assuming proportionate subsequent progress in the continental countries.
Redgrave’s historical comparison:
Spindles per factory - England: 12,600 - Switzerland: 8,000 - Austria: 7,000 - Saxony: 4,500 - Belgium: 4,000 - France: 1,500 - Prussia: 1,500
Spindles per person - France: 14 - Russia: 28 - Prussia: 37 - Bavaria: 46 - Austria: 49 - Belgium: 50 - Saxony: 50 - smaller German states: 55 - Switzerland: 55 - Great Britain: 74
Redgrave says his comparison is, for several reasons, particularly unfavourable to Britain: many British factories combine power weaving with spinning, while the count deducts no loom workers, whereas foreign factories are chiefly spinning mills. If like could be compared strictly with like, he says, his district contained many cotton spinning mills where mules with 2,200 spindles were tended by one man and two assistants, producing 220 lb of yarn a day, 400 English miles in length. The quotation is attributed to Redgrave’s 1866 inspectors’ report.
English companies building railways in Eastern Europe and Asia employed English workers alongside local workers. Practical necessity made them take national differences in labour intensity into account, without loss. Their experience was that, although wage level corresponds more or less to average intensity, relative labour-price in relation to product generally moves in the opposite direction. This is historical corroboration of the earlier claim. It does not narrow the definition of relative labour-price, which p5 gives in relation to both surplus-value and the total value of the product.
In his early 1835 “Essay on the Rate of Wages,” H. Carey tries to show that national wages are directly proportional to the productivity of national working days, then infers that wages everywhere rise and fall with productivity. Marx rejects the inference through the analysis of surplus-value, adding that Carey has merely shuffled uncritical statistical material and has not established his premise. Marx says Carey does not even claim reality accords with his theory: Carey blames state intervention for falsifying the natural economic relation and would calculate national wages as though taxes paid to the state were paid to workers. Marx asks whether those state costs are not themselves natural fruits of capitalist development. The polemic then traces Carey’s reversal. He first treats capitalist relations as eternal laws of nature and reason whose free harmony the state disturbs; later he treats England’s supposedly diabolical world-market influence as requiring state intervention to protect those laws—protectionism. Carey further reverses Ricardo: rather than theories formulating real social antagonisms, he makes the real antagonisms of England and elsewhere products of Ricardo’s theory. He finally makes trade the destroyer of capitalism’s native harmony. Marx’s escalating punchline is that one more step would reveal capital itself as the evil; his closing attack on Carey’s criticism, Bastiat, and free-trade optimists is Marx’s attributed polemical voice. Attached note 66 gives Carey’s title: “Essay on the Rate of Wages: with an Examination of the Causes of the Differences in the Conditions of the Labouring Population throughout the World,” Philadelphia, 1835.
Chapter 15 had examined combinations that change labour-power’s value absolutely or relatively to surplus-value, while the means of subsistence in which its price is realized can move independently. Once labour-power’s value or price appears as wages, those laws appear as movements of wages; variations within one country can appear as simultaneous national wage differences. National comparison must therefore include the price and extent of naturally and historically developed necessities of life, training costs, women’s and children’s labour, productivity, and labour’s extensive and intensive magnitude. Reduce average day-wages for the same trade to equal working days, then translate time-wage into piece-wage, the measure of productivity and intensity. Attached note 64 cites Buchanan’s warning that wages have not necessarily risen merely because they buy more of a cheaper article: he is discussing their money expression.
Each country has an average intensity below which labour on a commodity takes more than socially necessary time and does not count as labour of normal quality. Within a country, only intensity above that national average changes the measure of value by duration alone. The world market is different. National average intensities vary and form a scale measured by universal average labour. Compared with less intense national labour, more intense national labour creates more value in the same time and expresses that value in more money.
Marx now adds a distinct world-market modification of the law of value: more productive national labour counts as more intense, provided competition does not compel the more productive nation to lower its commodity’s selling price to its value. The phrase says “counts as”; it is a social validation, not literal physical identity.
As capitalist production develops in a country, its national intensity and productivity rise above the international level. Equal working time can then yield unequal quantities of the same commodity with unequal international values, expressed in different prices and money sums. The relative value of money is lower in the more developed capitalist country. Nominal wages, labour-power’s equivalent expressed in money, may consequently be higher there. That does not prove higher real wages: it says nothing by itself about the means of subsistence placed at the worker’s disposal. Attached note 64a defers qualifications concerning productivity in particular branches of production.
Even apart from differences in money’s relative value, daily or weekly wages may be higher in one country while the relative price of labour is higher in the other. Marx defines that relative price as the wage compared both with surplus-value and with the value of the product. It is therefore not a synonym for nominal wage, real wage, unit labour cost, wage share, or the rate of surplus-value. Attached note 65 cites James Anderson against Adam Smith: apparently lower daily wages in poorer countries with cheap grain can still mean dearer labour, because the relevant question is what a definite quantity of work costs the employer. Anderson contrasts lower Scottish day-wages with generally cheaper English piece-work. Railway-commission evidence adds the inverse formulation: labour is dearer in Ireland than England because wages are lower.
J. W. Cowell, a member of the 1833 Factory Commission, reaches the following conclusion after a careful investigation of spinning.
Cowell’s quoted conclusion is that English wages are virtually lower for the capitalist than continental wages, although they may be higher for the worker. The statement is Cowell’s attributed historical evidence, cited through Ure.
In his 31 October 1866 report, Factory Inspector Alexander Redgrave compares continental states and says that, despite lower wages and much longer hours, continental labour is dearer relative to product than English labour. An English cotton-factory manager in Oldenburg reports hours from 5:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturdays included; under English overlookers workers did not quite equal English output in ten hours, and under German overlookers did still less. He reports wages often 50% lower than in England but many more hands relative to machinery, in some departments five to three. Marx then relays Redgrave’s material on Russian cotton factories, supplied by an English manager recently employed there. The phrases about a Russian soil “fruitful of all infamies,” English managers, and an allegedly unfit “native Russian capitalist” are Marx’s dated, hostile historical language; they are not current narrator claims. The passage reports overwork, day-and-night labour, shamefully low pay, and manufacture sustained by prohibition of foreign competition. Redgrave next introduces his spindle comparison, while warning that the figures were already old and assuming proportionate subsequent progress in the continental countries.
Redgrave’s historical comparison:
Spindles per factory - England: 12,600 - Switzerland: 8,000 - Austria: 7,000 - Saxony: 4,500 - Belgium: 4,000 - France: 1,500 - Prussia: 1,500
Spindles per person - France: 14 - Russia: 28 - Prussia: 37 - Bavaria: 46 - Austria: 49 - Belgium: 50 - Saxony: 50 - smaller German states: 55 - Switzerland: 55 - Great Britain: 74
Redgrave says his comparison is, for several reasons, particularly unfavourable to Britain: many British factories combine power weaving with spinning, while the count deducts no loom workers, whereas foreign factories are chiefly spinning mills. If like could be compared strictly with like, he says, his district contained many cotton spinning mills where mules with 2,200 spindles were tended by one man and two assistants, producing 220 lb of yarn a day, 400 English miles in length. The quotation is attributed to Redgrave’s 1866 inspectors’ report.
English companies building railways in Eastern Europe and Asia employed English workers alongside local workers. Practical necessity made them take national differences in labour intensity into account, without loss. Their experience was that, although wage level corresponds more or less to average intensity, relative labour-price in relation to product generally moves in the opposite direction. This is historical corroboration of the earlier claim. It does not narrow the definition of relative labour-price, which p5 gives in relation to both surplus-value and the total value of the product.
In his early 1835 “Essay on the Rate of Wages,” H. Carey tries to show that national wages are directly proportional to the productivity of national working days, then infers that wages everywhere rise and fall with productivity. Marx rejects the inference through the analysis of surplus-value, adding that Carey has merely shuffled uncritical statistical material and has not established his premise. Marx says Carey does not even claim reality accords with his theory: Carey blames state intervention for falsifying the natural economic relation and would calculate national wages as though taxes paid to the state were paid to workers. Marx asks whether those state costs are not themselves natural fruits of capitalist development. The polemic then traces Carey’s reversal. He first treats capitalist relations as eternal laws of nature and reason whose free harmony the state disturbs; later he treats England’s supposedly diabolical world-market influence as requiring state intervention to protect those laws—protectionism. Carey further reverses Ricardo: rather than theories formulating real social antagonisms, he makes the real antagonisms of England and elsewhere products of Ricardo’s theory. He finally makes trade the destroyer of capitalism’s native harmony. Marx’s escalating punchline is that one more step would reveal capital itself as the evil; his closing attack on Carey’s criticism, Bastiat, and free-trade optimists is Marx’s attributed polemical voice. Attached note 66 gives Carey’s title: “Essay on the Rate of Wages: with an Examination of the Causes of the Differences in the Conditions of the Labouring Population throughout the World,” Philadelphia, 1835.