Surplus labor

“ If he does not, his remuneration is not, strictly speaking, wages, for the furnishing of surplus-labor by the worker is a condition sine qua non of wages. When his compensation is split up into wages and supplementary remuneration under the form of profit-sharing or under any other form, the workingman does not furnish less surplus-labor, less unpaid labor ”

“ Cutting the ring is simply this: to take the surplus product away from capital and give it to labor; so instantly you have remedied the evil and relieved the pain. How so? Because labor now becomes able to consume the entire product of industry. Labor can consume it, because labor has the money to buy it. Before this, as we have seen, labor got only part of the money, and so could buy only part of the product ”

“ By demanding for labor such remuneration as will allow the laborer to share in the profits resulting from his toil, [Pg 461] either by treating it as an investment in the business in which it is employed, or by the payment of such compensation as will allow a surplus for investment—refusing to wear out their lives in procuring a bare subsistence. ”

“ By this process capital and labor are constantly being divorced, and the ranks of your workmen are left to contain only those whose necessities hold them there.
In the condition of things with us, bestowing upon [Pg 240] labor all the emoluments of industry, it becomes the most advantageous pursuit of life. With wages at a uniform and fixed sum, from which there can be no deviation except to increase, the working man proceeds to lay by his surplus, until, in a reasonable time, it can be made to do service in adding to the fruits of his toil. ”

“ By scientific management, the best machinery, and the elimination of all possible waste, we find that they produce eighty million dollars worth of goods an hour. A portion of this we have to set aside to pay for the raw materials which they do not produce, and for the upkeep of the plant, and for margin of error—what our great corporations call a surplus. We find that we have fifty million dollars per hour left, and that means that we can pay for labor five dollars per hour, or twenty dollars for the regular four-hour day. This is our standard wage, received by all able-bodied workers. ”

“ Perhaps a certain number of yards of cotton cloth, for instance, when sold, actually pay for the wages of laborers and leave a surplus, which the employer appropriates. Perhaps six hours of labor per diem might enable the laborer to create products enough to support himself and to rear up an average family ”

“ There are, occasionally, branches of industry which are being gradually superseded by something else, and, in those, until production accommodates itself to demand, wages are depressed; which is an evil, but a [67] temporary one, and would admit of great alleviation even in the present system of social economy. A diminution thus produced of the reward of labor in some particular employment is the effect and the evidence of increased remuneration, or of a new source of remuneration, in some other; the total and the average remuneration being undiminished, or even increased. ”

“ And just as the value of other commodities is determined by the amount of social labor necessary on an average for their reproduction, so the value of labor-power is likewise determined. Wages tend to a point at which they will cover the average cost of the necessary means of subsistence for the workers and their families, in any given time and place, under the conditions and according to the standards of living generally prevailing. Trade union action, for example, may force wages above that point, or undue stress in the competitive labor market may force wages below it. ”

“ Realization of PROFITS was the sole consideration for continuing production. When profits ceased, industry ceased, or the scale of wages went down until there was a sufficient margin of surplus value to induce the proprietor to again open the factory doors. ”

“ In wage-labour, on the contrary, even surplus labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage-labourer. ”

“ The excess is ‘surplus value.’ This surplus value in primitive industry is appropriated wholly by the employer, but in industry more highly developed is apportioned out among the different classes of capitalists in the shape of ground rent, interest, manufacturers’ profits, and commercial profit. ”

“ But within these limits may be played an important rôle, and the secret of surplus value lies in the simple plan of giving the labourer as little as he is able to live on, and working him as long as he is able to stand. A labourer works 12 hours a day because he cannot work longer and work permanently and well, and he gets three shillings a day of wages, because three shillings will buy him the necessities he requires. ”

“ Did they demand more, the competition of others would prevent them from getting employment. Did he offer less, none would accept the terms, as they could obtain greater results by working for themselves. Thus, although the employer wishes to pay as little as possible, and the employee to receive as much as possible, wages will be fixed by the value or produce of such labor to the laborers themselves. If wages are temporarily carried either above or below this line, a tendency to carry them back at once arises. ”

“ Instead of laborers competing with each other for employment, and in their competition cutting down wages to the point of bare subsistence, employers would everywhere be competing for laborers, and wages would rise to the fair earnings of labor. For into the labor market would have entered the greatest of all competitors for the employment of labor, a competitor whose demand cannot be satisfied until want is satisfied—the demand of labor itself. ”

“ It is every bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of surplus-labour-time, as nothing but materialised surplus-labour, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour, as nothing but materialised labour. ”

“ After such complete reversal of the chronological order, the assumption, that is, of first the existence of private property with wage labour, and then, at a later stage, such level of labour productivity as makes exploitation possible at all, he now assumes [Pg 197] labour productivity to progress with equal speed in all spheres, the surplus product to contain precisely the same amount of value in all branches of industry, and to be divided among precisely the same number of people. ”

“ For, in all those cases in which the laborer is his own employer and takes directly the produce of his labor as its reward, it is plain enough that wages are not drawn from capital, but result directly as the product of the labor. If, for instance, I devote my labor to gathering birds’ eggs or picking wild berries, the eggs or berries I thus get are my wages. Surely no one will contend that in such a case wages are drawn from capital. There is no capital in the case. An absolutely naked man, thrown on an island where no human being has before trod, may gather birds’ eggs or pick berries. ”

“ The wages system is the lever of the labourer's exploitation, because it enables the capitalist to appropriate the entire surplus value created by the labourer—i.e., the value he creates over and above what is necessary to recruit his labouring powers withal.
Now surplus value, as we have seen, is of two kinds, absolute and relative. Absolute surplus value is got by lengthening the term of surplus labour; relative surplus value by shortening the term of necessary labour, which is chiefly done by inventions that cheapen the necessaries of life. ”

“ The laborer and his fellows, therefore, resort to the policy of uniting in such numbers in a refusal to work at the reduced rate that the demand for labor becomes very much greater than the supply, and then they take advantage of the necessities of the capitalists and society to secure a restoration of the old rate of wages, and perhaps an increase upon it. ”

“ On the basis of this mode of production, the laborer’s cost of production consists of the sum of the means of subsistence (or their price in money) which on the average are requisite to enable him to work, to maintain in him this capacity for work, and to replace him at his departure, by reason of age, sickness, or death, with another laborer—that is to say, to propagate the working class in required numbers. ”

“ Your middle-class statisticians will tell you, for instance, that the average wages of factory families in Lancashire have risen. They forget that instead of the labour of the man, the head of the family, his wife and perhaps three or four children are now thrown under the Juggernaut wheels of capital, and that the rise of the aggregate wages does not correspond to the aggregate surplus labour extracted from the family. ”

“ We should then be able to alter the conditions of labour, and after securing to all the workers a fair remuneration according to the value of their work, and equalising and reducing the hours of toil, the surplus would pass into the coffers of the State, and we could use it in public works, and in bestowing pensions on the aged and infirm. ”

“ They invest them productively; that is, expend them in employing labour. In other words, having a purchasing power belonging to them, more than they know what to do with, they make over the surplus of it for the general benefit of the labouring class. ”

“ Within the vitals of the economic system upon which it subsists the plutocracy has found a source of never-ending torment in the form of a constantly increasing surplus.
2. The Knotty Problem of Surplus
The present system of industry is so organized that the worker is always paid less in wages than he creates in product. A part of this difference between product and wages goes to the upkeep and expansion of the industry in which the worker is employed. Another part in the form of interest, dividends, rents, royalties and profits, goes to the owners of the land and productive machinery. ”

“ We live at present under the rule of capitalist production, under which a large and steadily increasing class of the population can live only by working for wages for the owners of the means of production—the tools, the machines, the raw materials and the means of subsistence. ”

“ For, owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into Capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living. ”

“ This is clear, because wages are kept down wholly by the surplus supply of labour in every trade. The moment the surplus is used up, or nearly so, by more men being required on account of shorter hours, competition among the men becomes less ”

“ Thus, under conditions which admit of no explanation consistent with the current theory, do we find high interest coinciding with high wages, and low interest with low wages—capital seemingly scarce when labor is scarce, and abundant when labor is abundant. ”

“ And, so, where production is carried on by the division of labor between individuals, an increase in the power of producing one of the things sought by production in the aggregate adds to the power of obtaining others, and will increase the production of the others, to an extent determined by the proportion which the saving of labor bears to the total amount of labor expended, and by the relative strength of desires. I am unable to think of any form of wealth, the demand for which would not be increased by a saving in the labor required to produce the others. ”

“ If even the entire working class should follow the example of the strikers, so that all commodities, in so far as they are products of labor, should grow dearer to an extent corresponding to the rise in wages, there would still remain an improvement of the condition of the working class at the cost of the interest paid on capital and the profits of enterprise. ”

“ We cannot let pass without qualification the assertion that there is a considerable difference between the laborer's wages and the means of subsistence requisite for his scant maintenance. It is exactly this point, the rate of wages, upon which practically the whole great social question turns. ”

“ When he and his family have been fed from the produce of the farm (and perhaps clothed with materials grown thereon, and manufactured in the family) he may, in respect of the supplementary remuneration derived from the sale of the surplus produce, be compared to those labourers who, deriving their subsistence from an independent source, can afford to sell their labour at any price which is to their minds worth the exertion. ”

“ But the effects of an increase in the supply of labor in the sense of a growth in the numbers of the population are far more dubious. Unaccompanied by an increase in the demand for labor, it must result in a diminished remuneration for the individual worker. ”

“ But the increase in wages, and the opening of new avenues of employment which would result from the appropriation of rent to public purposes, would not merely stop these wastes and relieve society of these442 enormous losses; new power would be added to labor. It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. ”

“ What is it produces surplus value, and thus provides profit, interest, rent, commissions, &c.—labour applied to natural objects under the control of the capitalist class who take all the value produced less the mere average subsistence wages of the labourer. Yet to provide more wealth we are to cut off the supply of labour by breeding no labourers. ”