Wage-Labor and Capital

An important treatise by Marx on political economy. An important document for the communist education of the working class. First published in form of an editorial in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 264–267 and No. 269, on April 5–8 and 11, 1849, and later as a single edition.

In August 1847, Marx and Engels initiated and founded the German Workers’ Society in Brussels to educate workers about communism through discussions and topical lectures. They believed that educating the working class about communism was of great significance, and in December, Marx gave several lectures on political economy at the society. The following year, he organized his lectures into a text to be published in a collection, but this could not be realized, and it was later published publicly in the form of an editorial. A single edition was first published in 1880, and in order to meet the needs of propaganda for the workers, Engels reissued it in 1891 with the necessary modifications and additions, seeking to harmonize his views with the later period of Marx.

In Wage-Labor and Capital, first, Marx scientifically distinguished between labor and labor-power, pointing out that under capitalist economic conditions, workers sell their labor-power rather than their labor; by clarifying that the value created by labor-power is greater than the value of labor-power itself, he unveiled the secret of the production of surplus-value and valorization of capital and thereby revealed that the essence of capital is the capitalist relations of production, and by comparing money wages, nominal wages, real wages and relative wages, he came to the scientific conclusion that wages are inversely proportional to the profits of capital. Next, focusing closely on the question “what are wages”, he emphasized that the answer to this central question was in fact an answer to the relation of capital to wage-labor, and to the essence of the slavery suffered by the workers, and on the basis of his understanding of the historical nature of the relations of production, he made the first scientific anatomy of the concept of “capital”. In his view, “the interests of capitals and the interests of wage-labor are diametrically opposed to each other” which debunked the lie propagated by bourgeois economists that “the interest of the capitalist and of the laborer is the same”, and expounded that the capitalist relations of production are based on the exploitation of the labor of the wage-laborer, thus clarified the economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles between classes and nations. Further, Marx formed a more comprehensive understanding of the reality of capitalism. He pointed out that capitalist society was formed on the basis of the productive forces of machine industry, in which a specific bourgeois social relation of production, “capital”, was dominant. “A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave.” “Capital also is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois relation of production, a relation of production of bourgeois society.” “But though every capital is a sum of commodities—i.e., of exchange values—it does not follow that every sum of commodities, of exchange values, is capital.” In this work, Marx had already begun to study the question of surplus-value, and was directly engaged in investigating the exploitative essence of the “bourgeois mode of production”, putting forward certain ideas of the theory of surplus-value, which were partly scientifically proved in Capital. In addition, this work also expounded the contradictory movement and dialectical relationship between the productive forces and the relations of production, and proved the historical inevitability of the downfall of the capitalist system through a thorough analysis of its fundamental contradictions and deep crisis.

Wage-Labor and Capital is an important document in the development history of Marxism, and the first work that expounded Marx’s economic views in a systematic and positive manner. Its anatomy of the essence of the economic relations of capitalist society has a very significant theoretical value. It had extremely far-reaching influence on the international communist movement, and was highly esteemed by the revolutionary workers of all countries in the world.