Wage and Capital

“Wage labor and capital” ( Lohnarbeit und Kapital ) - Karl Marx 's work on political economy . Written on the basis of lectures given by Marx in December 1847 in the German Working Society in Brussels. First published in April 1849 in the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung . The work is devoted to the presentation of the initial provisions of Marx's theory of surplus value . We consider the wages , capital , profits from the point of view of the political economy of Marxism. The work explains in a popular form that wages are a monetary expression of the value of the labor of a worker, and wage fluctuations around the level of the costs of production of labor are explained. It is noted that capital is not the sum of items containing accumulated labor, but

bourgeois production relations, production relations of bourgeois society ^[1] .

What is decisive for the emergence of capital is not its material form, the specific goods from which it is formed, but the existence of social relations, which, by owning things, allow us to appropriate for free living labor of workers deprived of property:

Only the domination of accumulated, past, materialized labor over direct, living labor turns accumulated labor into capital ^[2] .

The initial positions of Marx's theory of surplus value are developing.

Marx notes that the capitalist's profit is the excess of the value of the product produced by the worker over the value of the means of subsistence which he receives in the form of wages. Marx emphasizes that the relative wage, its share in the capital, decreases, and the profit, the relative share of the capitalist, grows.

Profit and wages are still in inverse relationship to each other ^[3] .

The antagonism of the interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is emphasized. As labor productivity rises, the proletariat forges

gold chains, on which the bourgeoisie drags him behind him ^[3] .

.