Labour-Power

What does the worker sell?

It is commonly said that the worker sells "labour" and receives a wage in return. Marx too wrote this in Wage Labour and Capital (1849). But put that way, a problem cannot be solved. If labour is a commodity and all commodities exchange at their value, the worker should receive the whole value of his labour as wages and nothing should be left for the capitalist. Yet profit arises. The Ricardian school, the last offshoot of classical economics, largely foundered, Engels wrote, on the insolubility of this contradiction.

Marx's answer was that what the worker sells is not labour but labour-power. Engels corrected the point when he republished Wage Labour and Capital in 1891 and explained why in his introduction: "My alterations all turn on one point. According to the original, the worker sells his labour to the capitalist for wages; according to the present text, he sells his labour-power." This, he added, was no mere quibbling over words but one of the most important points in the whole of political economy.

Nach dem Original verkauft der Arbeiter für den Arbeitslohn dem Kapitalisten seine Arbeit; nach dem jetzigen Text seine Arbeitskraft.

What is labour-power?

In chapter 4 of Capital, volume I, Marx asks how money becomes capital. If all commodities exchange at their value, value cannot grow in circulation. So the owner of money must find on the market "a commodity whose use-value itself possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labour, and hence a creation of value". And he finds one: the capacity for labour, labour-power.

Und der Geldbesitzer findet auf dem Markt eine solche spezifische Ware vor - das Arbeitsvermögen oder die Arbeitskraft.

Marx's definition: "By labour-power or capacity for labour we understand the aggregate of the physical and mental capabilities existing in the body, the living personality, of a human being, which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind." Labour-power is the capacity to work; labour is its actual use. What a job-seeker offers is the former; what actually takes place in the factory is the latter.

What must happen for labour-power to become a commodity?

Labour-power does not become a commodity in every society. A slave is sold whole, body and all, not his labour-power, and a peasant with his own land has no need to sell his. Marx named two conditions. The worker must be "free in a double sense": "free in the double sense that as a free person he disposes of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, is rid and free of all the things needed for the realisation of his labour-power."

frei in dem Doppelsinn, daß er als freie Person über seine Arbeitskraft als seine Ware verfügt, daß er andrerseits andre Waren nicht zu verkaufen hat, los und ledig, frei ist von allen zur Verwirklichung seiner Arbeitskraft nötigen Sachen.

Only someone released from personal bondage can sell labour-power, and only someone who has lost the means of production cannot live without selling it. Marx stressed that this condition is made by history, not nature: this one historical condition "comprises a world history". How peasants were driven from the land and made propertyless is treated at the end of volume I under primitive accumulation.

How is the value of labour-power determined?

Labour-power, being a commodity, has a value. "The value of labour-power, like that of every other commodity, is determined by the labour time necessary for the production, and so also the reproduction, of this specific article." Labour-power exists only in a living individual, so producing it means feeding, clothing and resting that individual so that he can work again the next day. The value of labour-power is therefore the value of the means of subsistence needed to maintain the worker.

Die zur Produktion der Arbeitskraft notwendige Arbeitszeit löst sich also auf in die zur Produktion dieser Lebensmittel notwendige Arbeitszeit, oder der Wert der Arbeitskraft ist der Wert der zur Erhaltung ihres Besitzers notwendigen Lebensmittel.

Two more things enter. Since the worker is mortal, the cost of raising children must be included if labour-power is to keep coming onto the market; so must the cost of education and training for skills. Above all, Marx stressed that what counts as "necessary" means of subsistence is not fixed by a biological minimum. It depends on the level of culture of the country and on the conditions and habits under which its working class was formed. "In contrast to other commodities, therefore, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element."

Im Gegensatz zu den andren Waren enthält also die Wertbestimmung der Arbeitskraft ein historisches und moralisches Element.

Why does the value of labour-power differ from the value labour creates?

A small example (an assumption): if the means of subsistence a worker and family need for a day take 4 hours of social labour to produce, a day's labour-power is worth 4 hours. The capitalist pays this value in full as wages and buys the labour-power. But what he has bought is the right to use it for a day, so the worker works not 4 hours but 8. In the first 4 he produces the value of his wage (necessary labour); in the other 4 he works for the capitalist without payment (surplus labour).

In Marx's own example a day's value of labour-power corresponds to half a working day, but that in no way prevents the worker from working a whole day. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent and not one law of commodity exchange has been broken, yet surplus value arises. This is Marx's answer to the riddle of surplus value.

Why do wages look like the price of labour?

The value of labour-power appears in the form of wages, and wages look like "the price of labour", payment for the whole working day. Marx analysed this appearance in chapter 17 of volume I: "The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour."

Die Form des Arbeitslohns löscht also jede Spur der Teilung des Arbeitstags in notwendige Arbeit und Mehrarbeit, in bezahlte und unbezahlte Arbeit aus. Alle Arbeit erscheint als bezahlte Arbeit.

Under corvée the days the serf works his own field and the days he works the lord's are visibly separate. Under slavery, conversely, even the part of the day in which the slave replaces the value of his own subsistence appears as labour for his master. Under wage labour even the unpaid part appears paid. Under slavery, Marx said, the property relation conceals the truth; under wage labour the money relation does.

How far do market freedom and equality go?

The sale of labour-power is formally a free and equal contract. Marx mocked the sphere of circulation in which labour-power is bought and sold as "a very Eden of the innate rights of man": "What alone rules here is Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham." But once the contract is made and the two parties enter the sphere of production, their bearing changes. The capitalist strides ahead smirking and intent on business; the worker follows, timid and holding back, "like one who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing to expect but a tanning".

Die Sphäre der Zirkulation oder des Warenaustausches, innerhalb deren Schranken Kauf und Verkauf der Arbeitskraft sich bewegt, war in der Tat ein wahres Eden der angebornen Menschenrechte.

What are the debates?

The concept has drawn criticism and extension. The British economist Ian Steedman argued that Marx's concept of labour-power was in truth very similar to Ricardo's and Smith's and said nothing really new. The reply is that Marx's value of labour-power, unlike the classical "natural price of labour", is not a level towards which market forces gravitate automatically. Marx assumed labour-power sold at its value only to show that even then the worker is exploited, and he knew that in practice labour-power can trade durably above or below its value.

The Dutch labour historian Marcel van der Linden called two of Marx's assumptions dubious: that labour must be offered for sale by its bearer and owner, and that the seller sells nothing else. History, he argued, abounds in intermediaries selling other people's labour, in packages of labour together with tools, and in slaves doing wage labour on a third party's estate.

Marxist feminists have stressed that labour-power is reproduced daily in the home. Domestic labour, done mainly by women, forms, maintains and restores labour-power without a wage and so constitutes a vast "free gift" to the capitalist economy. This line of thought led to the Wages for Housework campaign and to social reproduction theory. Labour-power is also compared with the mainstream concept of human capital. In volume II of Capital Marx mocked economists who called labour-power the worker's "capital": labour-power is the worker's property, he wrote, and acts as (variable) capital only in the hands of its buyer, the capitalist.