Wage Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit

Marx’s critique of capitalism is rooted in the idea that it is an inherently exploitative system that perpetuates—and continually increases—wealth and political inequality. However, he is just as concerned with how it creates working conditions that leave laborers alienated from their work and each other.

For Marx, work is fundamental to existence as a human being; it “is the active expression of the labourer’s own life” and their “life activity” (WLaC, 11). This is because work should be an opportunity to express creativity, ingenuity, and practiced skills and abilities, it should be a space to collaborate with others toward an end goal, and it should be a process that is not only fulfilling, satisfying, and rewarding, but one that allows the worker to put something of themselves into the world through the work they do. However, as Marx sees it, all of this is at best distorted, and at worst completely corrupted, under the capitalist mode of production.

One reason for this alienation is that labor itself becomes a commodity and the worker is separated from the product of their labor. According to Marx, something becomes a commodity when it is produced in order to fill a social want—i.e., it is produced with the intent of being sold in the market—and it must be “subordinate to the division of labour within society” (47). Labor power itself fills this definition, and because its value can be made commensurate with any other commodity through exchange, it too becomes a commodity. The consequence of this is that by selling their labor power to the capitalist, the worker divorces themselves from the products of their labor: They are not producing them for immediate, individual use, and have relinquished their ownership rights to anything they produce. This agreement fundamentally transforms the purpose and essence of work from “life-activity” into a sacrifice of time and body that must be made in order to survive. As Marx puts it, “Life for him begins where this activity ceases” (WLaC, 12).

On top of this, because capitalism inherently requires constant, perpetual growth, capitalists are always seeking new ways to improve efficiency and reduce the cost of labor. One way they achieve this is through the division of labor, and another is through the introduction of new or improved technology. In both cases, the result is the same: Labor becomes simpler and more repetitive; the physical and mental satisfaction that can and should be achieved through work is stripped away and replaced with tedium. Rather than making work easier, technology often has the effect of making work harder, and workers are reduced to cogs in an increasingly larger machine—a point that is emphasized by Marx through the fact that when calculating cost of production, capitalists consider workers in much the same vein as raw materials and instruments of labor.

This leads into the final way workers are alienated under the capitalist mode of production: They are alienated from their fellow working human beings. This is because in the mode of capitalist production, everything becomes a competition. Capitalists must compete to increase production while lowering costs to ensure their own survival in the market. This is often accomplished by reducing workers by replacing them with machines or through reducing the skill level of work through the division of labor. In both cases, competition among workers increases, which generally has the overall effect of decreasing wages. Moreover, through their participation in the system (which they cannot avoid), workers ensure their own continued subjugation by playing a vital role in its reproduction.