Capitalist Wages

The transmuted form of the value or price of labor-power. The remuneration paid to the worker by the capitalist for the purchase of his labor-power manifests itself as the value or price of labor, in fact, it is the value or price of labor-power. In terms of phenomenon, in a capitalist enterprise, the capitalist buys the labor-power of workers and pays them a certain amount of money, i.e., wages, according to the labor-time or the quantity produced. This creates the illusion that working one day gets the wages for one day and producing one product gets the wages for one product. Wages appear to be the value or price of the labor the worker is paid for, and all his labor appears to be renumerated. This illusory form is caused by the capitalist relations of production themselves, which conceal the boundaries between necessary labor and surplus-labor, between paid and unpaid labor. In fact, what workers sell is labor-power rather than labor, and labor is not a commodity; the wage paid by the capitalist to the worker is in fact the value or price of his labor-power. As Marx said, wages are not what they appear to be—namely, the value, or price, of labor—but only a masked form for the value, or price, of labor-power.

The bourgeois economists, represented by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, failed to distinguish labor-power from labor, and thus regarded wages as the renumeration of labor. It was this erroneous view of classical economics that has been exploited by vulgar economists to deny the existence of capitalist relations of exploitation, holding that in a capitalist economy, labor gets wages, capital gets profits, and land gets rent, and each gets the value of what it produces. When he analyzed the capitalist relations of production, Marx has distinguished labor-power from labor, pointed out the essence of capitalist wages, made the theory of surplus-value more rigorous, which was a major contribution of Marx in the field of political economy.

There are two basic forms of capitalist wages: time-wage and piece-wage. These two forms of wages both take the value of labor-power as their basis of calculation and are essentially the same. But piece-wage is more conducive to the domination and exploitation of workers by capitalists, so that Marx said that the piece-wage is the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production.