On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:34:50 +1100 Bill Bartlett
<billbartlett at dodo.com.au> writes:
> At 9:53 PM -0800 12/1/04, joanna bujes wrote:
> >Jim F quotes:
> >
> >"The iron law of wages is also simple and logical. It says that
> wages will
> >tend to stabilize at or about subsistence level. That seemed
> inevitable
> >to Ricardo, since while workers are necessary, and so have to be
> kept
> >alive, they have no hope of any better treatment since they are
> >infinitely available, replaceable, and generally interchangeable."
> >
> >...but at the point where the wage reaches a subsistence level,
> what
> >is it that will fuel an expansionary capitalist economy?
>
> Sub-subsistence wages? ;-)
>
> It is necessary to keep in mind that "subsistence" is necessarily
> relative. Subsistence wages are the minimum wages necessary to
> reproduce the supply of labourers. Furthermore, if the development
> of
> industry requires labourers with a minimum standard of education,
> then subsistence wages must be sufficient to sustain that. This has
> quite wide implication, it means for example that if industry as a
> whole requires a minimum level of economic and political stability
> and higher living standard to operate properly, as modern industry
> certainly does, then it stands to reason that "subsistence wages"
> must be sufficient to sustain that.
That was Marx's view of the matter. He drew upon Ricardo's analysis of wages but emphasized that "subsistence wages" are relative to the level of material and cultural development of a given country, so presumably what might qualify as a subsistence wage in the US or UK might be regarded as affluence in the Third World. Also, Marx emphasized that Ricardo's "iron law of wages" was really a statement of tendency, and could generate countervailing tendencies (i.e. workers experiencing decreasing wages might organize to resist more or less successfully such a trend). Furthermore, Marx rejected Ricardo's analysis of this law in terms of the supply of labor being generated simply through the biological reproduction of workers. Marx emphasized the importance of what he called the "reserve army of the unemployed" which was something that capitalism continously generates both through the sloughing off of surplus workers from industrial production as well as through the transformation of non-proletarian strata (i.e. peasants and the petit bourgeoisie) into proletarians. Nevertheless, given those ammendments, Marx did see something like the "iron law of wages" as operative under capitalism, and like Ricardo he percieved a linkage between this law and free trade.
>
> Thus subsistence level wages shouldn't be interpreted narrowly as
> some absolute measure of the bare minimum cost of feeding a
> labourer,
> if the labourer requires a long education and a stable social
> environment to be able to perform the work properly, then
> subsistence
> wages are whatever it takes to make that happen.
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
> ___________________________________
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>
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