Iron Law of Wages

A Law Needed to Hold Up a Conclusion

Lassalle's political strategy was simple: trade-union struggle over wages wins nothing, so the workers must use universal suffrage to move the state to finance producers' co-operatives and walk out of wage labour altogether. For that conclusion to stand, wage struggle has to be pointless in principle: the proof was assigned to the 'iron and cruel law'.

The content was not his invention. That wages converge on subsistence is in Turgot and Ricardo, and the population pressure behind it is Malthus's. What Lassalle added was the name: 'iron' comes from Goethe's poem Das Göttliche and its 'great, eternal iron laws'.

Marx's Three Lines of Attack

Part II of the Critique goes after the clause promising to abolish the wage system 'together with the iron law of wages'.

First, only the word is his. '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".' The word, Marx adds, is a label by which the true believers recognise one another.

Second, accept the grounding and the conclusion inverts. Take the law with Lassalle's stamp on it and you must take his substantiation too: the Malthusian theory of population. But if that theory is correct, the law survives the abolition of wage labour a hundred times over, because it then governs not the wage system alone but every social system. Economists had been arguing on exactly that basis for fifty years that socialism cannot abolish poverty but only spread it evenly over the whole surface of society.

Third, it misidentifies what wages are the price of. The understanding established in the party after Lassalle's death was that wages are not the value or price of labour but a masked form of the value or price of labour power. With that correction the whole bourgeois conception of wages, and all the criticism directed at it, went overboard. And the programme, written afterwards, returned to Lassalle's dogma.

Marx closes with an image: it is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken into rebellion, one still in thrall to obsolete notions inscribed on the programme of the rebellion, 'Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum!'

Gone From the Programme

Lassalle's law disappears from the Erfurt Programme of 1891, which Kautsky and Bernstein wrote to clear out the Lassallean formulas left standing at Gotha in 1875. The Critique itself was published in that same year, in the middle of the revision debate.

Why It Still Has to Be Handled

The observation that wages are pressed toward subsistence has not gone away. What has to go is treating it as a law of nature. Read wages as the price of labour power and that price contains a historical and moral element and moves with the balance of class forces: a relation, not a law, and therefore something to fight over. Where Lassalle's law made wage struggle meaningless and called in the state to fill the gap, Marx's correction restores wage struggle while insisting that it does not by itself carry anyone past the wage system.