10 - Chains and Invisible Threads

Summary

Marx’s account of wage-labour is permeated with neo-Roman republican vocabulary. But Marx, in contrast to some interpretations of the tradition, also stressed the structural dimensions of domination and its relationship to exploitation. In this chapter, I focus on Marx’s account of the periods before, during and after the agreement of the labour contract. Marx held that workers were structurally dominated by the capitalist class because their ownership of the means of production meant that propertyless workers had no choice but to work for a capitalist master. Marx argued that this enabled the capitalist and capitalist class’s exploitation of the workers in the bargaining and setting of the labour contract. Finally, Marx detailed how once the labour contract had been agreed workers were subjected to the interpersonal domination of the individual capitalist inside the factory workplace. Together, these three moments of domination undermined the worker’s liberty and, according to Marx, made them a slave of the individual capitalist and the capitalist class. Marx thus maintained that the putatively free wage-labour contract amounted to wage-slavery.