Wage-Labor and Capital (Lothrop)/Wage-Labor and Capital/Chapter 1

by Karl Marx

Wage-Labor and Capital

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Chapter I

Preliminary

From various quarters we have been reproached for neglecting to portray the economic conditions which form the material basis of the present struggles between classes and nations. With set purpose we have hitherto touched upon these conditions only when they forced themselves upon the surface of the political conflicts.

It was necessary, beyond everything else, to follow the development of the class struggle in the history of our own day, and to prove empirically, by the actual and daily new-created historical material, that with the subjugation of the working class, accomplished in the days of February and March, the opponents of that class—the bourgeois republicans in France, and the bourgeois and peasant classes, who were fighting feudal absolutism throughout the whole continent of Europe—were simultaneously conquered ; that the victory of the “moderate republic” in France sounded, at the same time, the fall of the nations which had responded to the February revolution with heroic wars of independence; and finally, that by the victory over the revolutionary workingmen, Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the English-Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragi-comedy in Berlin in November, 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland into submission—these were the chief events in which the European class struggle between bourgeoisie and working class was summed up, and from which we proved that every revolutionary uprising, however remote from the class struggle its object might appear, must of necessity fail until the revolutionary working class will have conquered, that every social reform must remain a Utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic counter-revolution will have been pitted against each other in a world-wide war. In our presentation, as in reality, Belgium and Switzerland were tragicomic caricaturish genre pictures in the great historic tableau, the one the model State of the bourgeois monarchy, the other the model State of the bourgeois republic; both of them States that flatter themselves to be just as free from the class struggle as from the European revolution.^[1]

But now, after our readers have seen the class struggle of the year 1848 develop into colossal political proportions, it is time to examine more closely the economic conditions themselves upon which is founded on the existence of the capitalist class and its class rule, as well as the slavery of the workers.

We shall present in three great divisions:

I. The relation of wage-labor to capital, the slavery of the worker, the sway of the capitalist.

II. The inevitable ruin of the middle classes and the so-called commons^[2] under the present system.

III. The commercial subjugation and exploitation of the bourgeois classes of the various European nations by the despot of the world market — England.^[3]

We shall seek to portray this as simply and popularly as possible, and shall not presuppose a knowledge of even the most elementary notions of political economy. We wish to be understood by the workers. And, moreover, there prevails in Germany the most remarkable ignorance and confusion of ideas in regard to the simplest economic relations, from the patented defenders of existing conditions, down to the socialistic wonder-workers and the unrecognized political geniuses, in which divided Germany is even richer than in duodecimo princelings. We therefore proceed first to the consideration of the first problem.

1. It must be remembered that this was written over fifty years ago. To-day, the class struggle in Switzerland, and especially in Belgium, has reached that degree of development where it compels recognition from even the most superficial observers of political and industrial life. — Translator.
2. Peculiar to Europe, and originating in the rank of the freeman or burgher of feudal times; citoyen, common, and Bürger are equivalent terms. — Translator.
3. As stated by Engels in the Introduction, the series of articles on Wage-Labor and Capital remained incomplete; the pamphlet is confined almost exclusively to a consideration of the first “great division’: the relation of wage-labor to capital. — Translator.