WorkKarl Marx

Wage Labour and Capital

Marx's economics for a working-class audience, serialised in his revolutionary newspaper until Prussia shut it down — and quietly corrected by Engels forty years on.

by Karl Marx59 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Lohnarbeit und Kapital
First published: 1849(aged 31)
Original language: German

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Overview

Before it was ever printed, this argument was a set of talks Marx gave to a German workers' club in Brussels in December 1847 — an attempt to explain, without jargon, how the wage is fixed and why the bargain between worker and employer is not the fair exchange it appears to be. The talks became Wage Labour and Capital, which Marx ran as a serial in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the Cologne newspaper he edited through the revolution of 1848–49. Labour, the articles argue, is a commodity like any other: the worker sells it for a price that settles, over time, near what it costs to keep him alive and working, while the value he makes beyond that goes to capital — so wages and profit move against each other, and the worker's freedom to sell his labour is the very form of his dependence. The serial never finished. In May 1849 the Prussian authorities shut the paper down and expelled Marx, and the argument broke off mid-course. Its second life came from Engels: in 1891, eight years after Marx's death, he reissued the pamphlet and used his introduction to change it, replacing Marx's word "labour" with "labour-power" throughout — the very distinction, absent in 1849, on which the whole theory of Capital would later turn. He said plainly that he was altering Marx's text, and why.

Key concepts

What does Marx mean by 'capital' in this pamphlet?

Not simply money or machines, but a social relation. Capital is accumulated, past labour that functions to command living labour, and it exists only where one class owns the means of production and another must sell its work to survive. A pile of tools on a desert island is not capital; it becomes capital only inside that relationship between classes.

What is 'wage labour'?

The condition of the worker who owns no means of production and so must sell his capacity to work for a wage in order to live. Marx treats this labour as a commodity, bought and sold like any other. Its price, the wage, tends over time toward what it costs to keep the worker alive and able to keep working, no more.

What part does competition among workers play in wages?

It drives them down. Because workers must sell their labour to eat, they underbid one another for jobs, and the resulting competition presses the wage toward bare subsistence. Machinery worsens this by throwing hands out of work and swelling the ranks competing for the rest. For Marx this is why the worker's freedom to sell his labour is also the form of his dependence.

Why does the pamphlet's text differ from Marx's 1849 original?

Because Engels edited it. When he reissued the pamphlet in 1891, eight years after Marx's death, he replaced the word 'labour' with 'labour-power' throughout, a distinction Marx had not yet drawn in 1849 but which became the foundation of Capital. Engels said openly that he was altering Marx's text, and why. The version most readers meet is therefore the corrected one.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Wage Bargain Undone

Why is the exchange between worker and employer, which looks like a free and fair trade, actually the very form of the worker's dependence? What the wage really buys is the question.

Marx explains to a workers' club that labour is a commodity, sold near the cost of keeping the worker alive and able to work, while the value produced beyond that goes to capital — so wages and profit move against each other, and the freedom to sell one's labour is itself a bondage. Serialised in his revolutionary newspaper until Prussia shut it down in 1849, the argument broke off unfinished. Engels reissued it in 1891, replacing labour with labour-power throughout — the distinction on which Capital would later turn.

wages
wage labor
capital
labor
labor power
profit
competition
exchange value
surplus value
class struggle
production

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Within this work

passages held: 59
distinct concepts: 119
by passages held, corpus-wide: #223

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: capital with labor.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 9 pairings. 20 shared passages in all. 9 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
capital	labor	3
capital	production	3
capital	competition	2
capital	wage labor	2
competition	labor	2
labor power	wages	2
political economy	wage labor	2
political economy	wages	2
production	wage labor	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts)
His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.
DE
1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)
Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.
DE
1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik)
Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.
DE
1845 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach)
Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.
DE
1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei)
Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.
DE
1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital) you are here DE
1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte)
Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.
DE
1858 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie)
Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.
DE
1865 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit)
A pair of lectures rather than a book — Marx answering a fellow member at the General Council of the International in 1865, in English. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898, and it became the shortest way into the economics of Capital.
DE
1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital)
The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.
DE

— or open another of their works