The Mechanics of Population Growth and the Falling Wage Trend

E. The Mechanics of Population Growth and the Falling Wage Trend

Consider Marx’s standard assumption in the discussion of surplus value that “the worker sells [the employer] labour capacity at its value;” that is “he receives an average daily wage which enables him to continue living in his customary man- ner as a worker, hence that he is in the same normal state of health the day afterwards as the day before (leaving aside the degeneration brought about naturally through age or through the kind of work he does); that his labour capacity is reproduced or preserved, hence can be valorised again in the same way as on the previous day, over

a definite normal period of time, e.g. 20 years” (MECW 30: 183). 29 This assump- tion allows only for the reproduction of labor power, which taken literally, precludes analysis of a growing economy. But Marx intended specifically to set aside fluctua- tions around the average (see note 29), not to preclude a systematic excess allowing for population growth. Indeed, we have encountered the explicit acceptance of the orthodox position in this regard – that “[i]n analysing capitalist production, one must actually proceed from this assumption,” referring to above-subsistence wages (189; above, p. 370). And although Marx disclaims any intention to elaborate – “we do not yet need to investigate how capitalist production itself contributes to the growth of population” – yet he proceeds to provide further insight into the mechanism envisaged. Apart from increase in the participation rate – the entry of previously independent craftsmen and of women and children into the labor force – “[c]apital also produces an absolute increase in the number of people, above all of the working class. The population can only grow absolutely, leaving aside the operations we have just mentioned, if not only more children are born but more children grow up, can be nourished until they are old enough to work” (302). And

a constant commodity wage adequate to assure such provision was compatible with

a reduced value of the wage considering the increase in productivity characterizing capitalist activity: “The development of the productive forces under the r´egime of capital increases the quantity of means of subsistence annually produced and cheapens them to such an extent that the average wage can be calculated to allow

29 See also MECW 30 : 194–5 on the presupposition throughout the discussion of the generation of surplus value “that the worker sells his labour capacity at its value, i.e. that the price of

labour, or the wage, corresponds to the value of the labour capacity. As we have repeatedly stated, this assumption underlies the whole investigation. The question of how far the wage itself can rise above a fall below its value belongs in the chapter on wages. . . . ”

As an aside on the workday, Marx notes that “[i]f . . . a 13-hour working day replaces one of 12 hours, this must be estimated as the average working day of a labour capacity which is used up over, e.g. 15 years, whereas in the other case the average working day is that of a labour capacity which is used up in 20 years” (194).

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the reproduction of the workers on a larger scale, even though the wage itself falls in value, represents a smaller quantity of materialized labour time.” 30 The argument is in line with the Grundrisse (see Chapter 8.D). Marx does not tell us by what mechanism the “average wage can be calculated to allow the reproduction of the workers on a larger scale.” The terminology might

be said to imply a one-sided diktat by monoposonistic employers; but that the competitive labor market was intended cannot be ruled out. But if the real wage, however determined, suffices to encourage the appropriate growth rate of popula- tion it can surely no longer be asserted that population growth “costs the capitalist nothing” (above, p. 370). Beyond this there is the apparently severe problem that in some contexts Marx formally rejected the orthodox (Ricardo-Malthus) link- age of population growth to capital accumulation. Consider a reaction to the key passage from Ricardo on this matter: “Notwithstanding the tendency of wages to conform to their natural rate, their market rate may, in an improving society, for an indefinite period, be constantly above it; for no sooner may the impulse, which an increased capital gives to a new demand for labour be obeyed, than another increase of capital may produce the same effect; and thus, if the increase of capital

be gradual and constant, the demand for labour may give a continued stimulus to an increase of people” [1951–73 1: 94–5] (cited MECW 32: 169). Marx objected: “From the capitalist standpoint, everything is seen upside down. The number of the labouring population and the degree of the productivity of labour determine both the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of the population. Here, on the contrary, it appears that capital determines the population.”

The solution is apparent. Marx did indeed accept that “[i]n analysing capitalist production, one must actually proceed from [the] assumption” of a commod- ity wage exceeding subsistence, and that capital “produces an absolute increase in the number of people,” but he rejected the apologetic interpretation of the phe- nomenon ascribed to orthodoxy. Essentially, while the capital growth rate deter- mines the growth rate of population, the potential for capital accumulation lies in the magnitude of the surplus – unpaid labor time of course – which surplus depends specifically on labor’s productivity. He himself notes that Ricardo some- times got this crucial detail right, as when he “admitted” that “the accumulation of capital . . . must in all cases depend on the productive powers of labour” (Ricardo 1951–73 1: 98; cited 170). The correct perspective for Marx, one that refuses to attribute productivity and the potential for accumulation – and thus growth of population – to “capital,” is elaborated further; the apologetic assertion “[t]hat labour depends on the growth of capital signifies nothing more than, on the one hand, the tautology that the increase in the means of subsistence and the means

30 Marx adds: “The wage level may even sink, if only the magnitude of the wage’s level does not fall in exactly the same proportion as the productive power of labour rises” (MECW 30 : 302). This

assertion is unclear, but may refer to an allowance for a fall in the commodity wage, provided that its lower level still allows some scope to accommodate ongoing population increase.

E. The Mechanics of Population Growth and the Falling Wage Trend 377 of employment of the population depends on the productivity of the population’s

own labour and, secondly, expressed in capitalist terms, that it depends on the fact that the population’s own product confronts them as alien property and that as

a consequence, their own productivity confronts them as the productivity of the things which they create” (379–80). The bourgeois perspective in fact led to the ludicrous implication that “the worker must appropriate the smallest possible part of his product in order that the largest possible part may confront him as capital;

he must surrender as much as possible to the capitalist gratis, in order that the latter’s means of purchasing his labour anew – with what has been taken away from the worker without compensation – may increase as much as possible” (380; also MECW 34: 323–4).

We have seen that absolute population growth is represented by Marx as responding to a real wage high enough to assure “not only [that] more children are born but [that] more children grow up . . . ” (above, p. 375). The emphasis is on a reduced mortality rate. Marx even allows that “[i]f too small a part [of surplus labor] is embodied in luxuries then the accumulation of capital . . . will proceed more rapidly than increase in population, and the rate of profit will fall . . . ” (MECW 32: 381), in which case the wage trend would be upwards. But this is certainly not the standard pattern envisaged; the trend is downward with labor supply growth exceed- ing that of labor demand. First, various social and industrial pressures encourage early marriage independently of the magnitude of the commodity wage as such (even, in principle, consistently with a reduced wage): “ . . . the life-situation in which capital places the working class, its conglomeration, its deprivation of all the other pleasures of life, the utter impossibility of attaining a higher social stand- ing and maintaining a certain decorum, the vacuity of their lives, the mixing of the sexes in the workshop, the isolation of the worker himself, all these things

impel marriage at an early age” (MECW 30: 302). 31 In fact, the social conditions in question are such that “reproduction” accelerates as the real wage falls, poverty breeding population: “The wretched human being reproduces more rapidly than the travailleur dans ses conditions naturelles – because the conditions for his repro- duction are of infinitesimal size. Poverty pullulates; just as in the animal kingdom, the smaller the class the more massive its reproduction” (MECW 34: 165). This is

a theme repeated in Capital, as we have seen above (Chapter 3, p. 94). Beyond all this, a deskilling process encourages the birth rate – again consistently

with a declining commodity wage: “The curtailment and practically the abolition of the necessary period of apprenticeship, the early age at which children can themselves step forward as producers, the shortening therefore of the period during which they must be provided for, increases the stimulus to a more rapid production

31 See also a discussion of Barton on the dependency of population on employment opportunities independently of the wage (MECW 32: 205). It is unclear how far Marx himself subscribes; he

appears skeptical.

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of human beings. If the average age of working-class generations declines, there is always available on the market a superfluous and constantly increasing mass of short- lived generations and that is all that capitalist production needs” (MECW 30: 302; emphasis added).

Here we have allusion to features of absolute immizeration, with increasing popu- lation, reflecting rising marriage and birth rates, playing a central role. A summary statement – following Colins 1857 – “that a country is the richer, the more proletar- ians it has, and that the growth of wealth is displayed by the increase of poverty,” 32 might be read not as alluding to a fall in the real wage but to an increase in the numbers subject to low wages; but elsewhere there is explicit reference to the “con- tradiction between the growing wealth of the English ‘nation’ and the “growing misery of the worker” (MECW 32: 394).

At this point we revert to the participation rate that we earlier set aside (above, p. 369). The emphasis is on the family wage: “The population numbers working under capital as wage labourers or the number of labour capacities available on the market can grow without absolute growth in the total population or even in the working population alone. If for example members of working-class families, such as women and children, are pressed into capital’s service, and they were not in this position before, the number of wage labourers has increased . . . without any increase in the variable part of capital, that part which is exchanged for labour” (MECW 30: 189). This trend too is equivalent to a fall in the value of labor power in the sense of the real wage: “The family might receive the same wage from which they lived previously. But they would have to provide more labour for the same wage.” Beyond this, the work force may grow with entry of “independent handicraftsmen, allotment-holding peasants, and lastly small capitalists” – a process reflecting “the centralisation brought about by capitalist production” (190).

Yet, the fact remains that population increase was taken for granted as a fea- ture of capitalist development even in this context, the higher participation rate and new entry into the capitalist sector represented as encouraging the net cap- ital accumulation required to support population expansion: “This would at the same time produce an increase in surplus labour and surplus value and therefore potentially the increase in capital necessary to support the absolute growth of the population.” 33

There is much else pointing to what in effect is the endogenization of population growth. For Marx repeats the argument of the Grundrisse (see Chapter 8, p. 249) that it is “as much the tendency of capital to enlarge the working population as

32 Marx adds that “[o]n the other hand, there is a relative growth in the number of people not dependent on manual labour, and although the mass of workers grows, the population of

the social strata they have to provide for materially through their labour grows in the same proportion (Colins, Sismondi, etc.)” (MECW 30: 302–3). 33 As before, detailed discussion is left for consideration “under Accumulation.”

E. The Mechanics of Population Growth and the Falling Wage Trend 379 it is to posit a part of that population as a surplus population, = a population

which is initially useless, until such time as capital can utilise it. (Surplus popula- tion and surplus capital.) It is as much the tendency of capital to render human labour superfluous, as to drive it on without limit. It must increase the number of simultaneous working days in order to increase the surplus; but equally, it must transcend it as necessary labour in order to posit it as surplus labour” (MECW 34:

16, from MECW 28: 325–6). Marx adds: “All the contractions expressed, but not understood in modern population theory are, therefore, already latent here” (17). And he makes the point that “Ricardo, in speaking of machinery, correctly states that capital makes a redundant population,” but adds his own gloss: “It has the ten- dency both to increase the population absolutely and to posit an ever-increasing part of the latter as surplus population” (18).

Before he explains the mechanism whereby capital – more specifically “machin- ery” – generates population growth Marx, again drawing from the Grundrisse, appends a remark relating to the reverse dependency of technical progress on pop- ulation size: “And indeed we see that the reduction in necessary labour presupposes cooperation, hence also the materials of labour, on a mass scale, and that the pop- ulation is thus itself a means of positing surplus population, just as on the other hand – at a given rate of surplus labour – it sets a limit to the amount of labour that can be exploited simultaneously” (16; MECW 28: 326–7). Again: “the increase in population increases the productive power of labour, by making possible division of labour, cooperation, etc. Increase in population is a natural power of labour for which nothing is paid” (17). 34

The relationship is thus a mutual one – population size encourages technical change, and technical change encourages growth of population. As for the latter relationship, this works by way of reduction in the value of labor power, enducing

a higher demand for labor: “ . . . relative surplus value directly increases the rate of gratis labour, and lessens the absolute wage, thus making it possible to exploit more workers at the same time with the same variable capital at the increased rate of exploitation. It makes it possible to draw in more labour capacities with the same wage payment (also through the introduction of female and child labour) and thus has an impact on the population absolutely . . . ” (10). “The very process by which necessary labour is reduced makes it possible to set to work new necessary labour;

i.e. the production of workers becomes cheaper, more workers can be produced in the same time in the measure to which the proportion of necessary labour time becomes smaller, or the time required for the production of the living labour capacities is reduced” (17).

As a final instance of endogenized population growth we refer to a striking passage which asserts not only that “machines make possible the absolute growth of population,” but that the capital-conversion process itself is encouraged by the

34 The passage is preceded by the standard parallel with the division of the “single working day” which the capitalist seeks to lengthen while shortening the “necessary” segment (see note 22).

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extent of mechanization already achieved. Thus in contrast with “[n]atural agents [which] add nothing to value . . . machines invariably add their own value to the already existing value,” and this in two ways: “1) in so far as their existence facilitates the further transformation of circulating into fixed capital, and makes it possible to carry on this transformation on an ever growing scale, they increase not only riches but also the value which is added by past labour to the product of the annual labour; 2) since machines make possible the absolute growth of population and with it the growth of the mass of the annual labour, they increase the value of the annual product in this second way” (MECW 32: 181). 35