3 - Economic Growth and the Falling Real-Wage Trend

Summary

Introduction

To this day one frequently encounters an unwillingness to take seriously Marx's pronouncements regarding the tendency of the commodity wage to decline, the “law of immizeration” under capitalism (Sowell 1960; Dobb 1982: 90; Ramirez 1986; Lapides 1994, 1998; Howard 2000: 1040). Some Marxologists admit a secular decline in the value of labor power, but insist that it reflects increasing productivity cheapening the costs of wage goods (such decline being consistent even with rising commodity wages); or they allow only a relative decline in real wages compared with the return to property. Certainly, some confusion has been created by Marx's famous statement that “in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” (MECW 35: 639), for it can be read to imply increasing “immizeration” despite rising real wages. Rosdolsky maintains that if by the “accumulation of misery,” Marx referred to the working class as a whole, “one would have to suppose that [he] expected this ‘ignorant, brutalized and morally degraded’ working class [to which he referred in our present context] to establish socialism – something which might perhaps be asserted by Bakunin, but not by Marx!” (1980: 303–4); and he argues further that any downward pressure on wages may be passed on to underdeveloped areas of the world (307f). Similarly, for Mandel: “l'idée selon laquelle les salaries réels des travailleurs avaient tendance à baisser de plus en plus est totalement étrangère à l'œoeuvre de Marx” (1962: 180).