On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 14:20:48 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>
>
> Jim Farmelant wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> >
>
> The phrase itself is misleading, especially considering Marx's
> savage
> attack on its use in the Gotha Programme, where he calls its use an
> unprincipled surrender to Lassalle's partisans.
Sure! For Marx any such laws were simply statements of general tendency to which there existed countervailing tendencies. The same applies to the law of falling rates of profit. Marx certainly asserted the existence of such a law as a statement of general tendency but immediately acknowledge the existence of countervailing tendencies which would tend to constrain the decline of profit rates. In other words, Marx had a more dialectical understanding of political economy than either of the two writers that Marx drew upon: Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
And in the case of Ricardo's "iron law of wages," whereas Ricardo tended to emphasize the role of biological reproduction and fertility rates as the forces driving the generation of labor supply, Marx emphasize socio-economic factors. Thus, for Ricardo, a rise in wages would over time be attenuated by an increase in the fertility of working class families such that the resulting increase in the number of workers would drive down wage rates. (See: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/ricardo-wages.html).
In other words, Ricardo adopted a form of reasoning that was not unlike that of his friend and rival Thomas Malthus. Marx on the contrary rejected that sort of biologistic approach to understanding the reproduction of the labor supply under capitalism.
Marx did subscribe to a view that was not unlike Ricardo's in certain respects. Thus in *The Poverty of Philosophy*, he wrote:
"To sum up: Labour, being itself a commodity, is measured as such
by the labour-time needed to produce the labour-commodity. And
what is needed to produce this labour-commodity? Just enough
labour time to produce the objects indispensable to the
continued maintenance of labour, that is, to keep the worker
alive and in a condition to propagate his race. The natural
price of labour is no other than the wage minimum*"
And Engels, many years later added a footnote to this text in which he wrote:
"*The thesis that the 'natural,' i.e., normal, price of labour
power coincides with the wage minimum, i.e. with the equivalent
in value of the means of subsistence absolutely indispensable
for the life and procreation of the worker, was first put
forward by me in *Sketches for a Critique of Political Economy*
(*Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher* [*Franco-German Annuals*],
Paris, 1844) and in *The Condition of the Working-Class in
England in 1844*. As seen here, Marx at the time accepted
the thesis. Lassalle took it over from both of us. Although,
however, in reality wages have a constant tendency to approach
the minimum, the above thesis is nevertheless incorrect. The
fact that labour is regularly and on the average paid below its
value cannot alter its value. In *Capital*, Marx has put the
above thesis right (Section on the Buying and Selling of
Labour Power) and also (Chapter 25: *The General Law of
Capitalist Accumulation*) analysed the circumstances which
permit capitalist production to depress the price of labour
power more and more below its value."
And in *Critique of the Gotha Program*, Marx wrote: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- So, in future, the German Workers' party has got to believe in Lassalle's "iron law of wages"! That this may not be lost, the nonsense is perpetrated of speaking of the "abolition of the wage system" (it should read: system of wage labor), "together with the iron law of wages". If I abolish wage labor, then naturally I abolish its laws also, whether they are of "iron" or sponge. But Lassalle's attack on wage labor turns almost solely on this so-called law. In order, therefore, to prove that Lassalle's sect has conquered, the "wage system" must be abolished "together with the iron law of wages" and not without it.
It is well known that nothing of the "iron law of wages" is Lassalle's except the word "iron" borrowed from Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws". [1] The word "iron" is a label by which the true believers recognize one another. But if I take the law with Lassalle's stamp on it, and consequently in his sense, then I must also take it with his substantiation for it. And what is that? As Lange already showed, shortly after Lassalle's death, it is the Malthusian theory of population (preached by Lange himself). But if this theory is correct, then again I cannot abolish the law even if I abolish wage labor a hundred times over, because the law then governs not only the system of wage labor but every social system. Basing themselves directly on this, the economists have been proving for 50 years and more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in nature, but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneously over the whole surface of society!
But all this is not the main thing. Quite apart from the false Lassallean formulation of the law, the truly outrageous retrogression consists in the following:
Since Lassalle's death, there has asserted itself in our party the scientific understanding that 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. Thereby, the whole bourgeois conception of wages hitherto, as well as all the criticism hitherto directed against this conception, was thrown overboard once and for all. It was made clear that the wage worker has permission to work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter's co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labor by extending the working day, or by developing the productivity—that is, increasing the intensity or labor power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labor is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labor develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment. And after this understanding has gained more and more ground in our party, some return to Lassalle's dogma although they must have known that Lassalle did not know what wages were, but, following in the wake of the bourgeois economists, took the appearance for the essence of the matter.
It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim F.
>
> Carrol
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!