Written:
Unknown
First Published: Unknown
Source: Great Soviet
Encyclopedia
Translated: Unknown
Transcription/Markup:
Steve Palmer
Proofread:Unknown
Copyleft: Internet
Archive(marxists.org) 2014. Permission
is
granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of
the Creative Commons License.
(in
German, Lohnarbeit und
Kapital), a work by Karl Marx that offers a profound analysis
of the
relations of production in bourgeois society.
Wage
Labor and Capital
was first published as a series of lead editorials in the
newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung on Apr. 5–8 and
11, 1849, but
publication was interrupted by the suppression of the newspaper,
causing the
text to remain incomplete. It was first published as a separate
pamphlet, but
without the author’s participation, in 1880.
The
original articles were based on
a series of lectures given by Marx in December 1847 to the German
Workers’
Society in Brussels. First translated into Russian by the Emancipation
of Labor
group and published in Geneva in 1883, the work may be found in the
sixth
volume of the second Russian edition of Marx and Engels’ complete
works; Marx’
manuscript “Wages,” which served as the preliminary draft for his
lectures, is
also to be found there.
Wage
Labor and Capital
was the first published work by Marx to make a scientific
inquiry into the capitalist mode of production, concentrating primarily
on the
basic relationship of production in bourgeois society—that between wage
labor
and capital. Marx criticized bourgeois political economy for regarding
capital
not as a social relationship but merely as the sum of those things that
function as the means of production and thus as a perpetual economic
category.
Capital is “the production relationship of bourgeois society” (K. Marx
and F.
Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 6, p. 442) and
represents a historical
category intrinsic to the capitalist socioeconomic formation.
In
Wage Labor and Capital,
Marx analyzes wages and the laws that determine wage levels, examines
the
process of capital accumulation, demonstrates that the interests of
wage labor
and capital are diametrically opposed, and shows how the rapid growth
of
capital creates the preconditions for the revolutionary transformation
of
society. Still using the terminology of bourgeois political economy,
Marx
examines the main feature of labor power as a commodity, that is, its
capacity
to create value greater than its own cost. Thus Marx was approaching a
resolution of the problem of surplus value, a problem actually worked
out
theoretically by Marx during the 1850’s and 1860’s.
In
1891 a new edition of Wage
Labor and Capital appeared, edited and with an introduction
by Engels. This
edition was intended to aid agitation among the workers. Engels made a
number
of additions and changes in the text of the edition in order to make
Marx’ 1849
discussion of economic problems consistent with his later, more mature
views.
In his introduction Engels wrote: “My alterations all turn on one
point.
According to the original, the worker sells his labor
to the capitalist
for a wage; according to the present text, what he sells is his labor power”
(ibid., vol. 22, p. 205). The ideas presented in Wage
Labor and Capital
were developed further in later works by Marx and Engels, especially in
Marx’ Kapital.
V. S. VYGODSKII