READ AND DISCUSS:

Marx later wrote much more extensively and rigorously about capitalist economics. Nevertheless, the paragraphs quoted above usefully outline how the working class is exploited in pursuit of capitalist profit.

Reading the paragraphs from the Communist Manifesto quoted above,

1. The Manifesto describes a member of the working class – a ‘proletarian’ - as being people “who live only so long as they find work”. Some people with professional jobs might prefer to call themselves ‘middle-class’ rather than ‘working-class’. But why might a Marxist say that they are really just better-paid members of the proletariat?

2. Marx and Engels describe how “the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.” How well does that describe the work that you – or your friends and family – have to do?

3. What are the three ways described in the Manifesto that capitalist employers use to increase the ‘burden of toil’, and therefore their rate of profit?

4. The Manifesto discusses how capitalists were bringing women and children into the workforce too, especially where it provided an opportunity to pay lower wages. Do you know what the ‘gender pay gap’ is in your area?

Trade Union Struggle

In the middle paragraph above, the Manifesto explains how the capitalists try to reduce wages - “the cost of production of a workman” - to the minimum required just to keep their workforce fit enough to work, plus whatever is needed to make sure they are able to raise the next generation of workers too. But, through trade union organisation, wages can be pushed higher, as Marx explained in two lectures that he gave to the First International in 1865, later published as ‘Value, Price and Profit ²¹’ (as well as under the title 'Wages, Price and Profit'):

“The limits of the working day being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages; and that wages being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to such a prolongation of the working day as is compatible with the physical forces of the labourer … between the two limits of the maximum rate of profit an immense scale of variations is possible. The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction. The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.

The very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. … By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.

At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects … Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class.”

5. Can you summarise what Marx was saying here about the role of the trade unions in fighting capitalist exploitation?