It’s Martin Luther King Day in the US. King was never a Marxist. The term “class war” was never used by him. He equated "Communism" with the Soviet Union and “the denial of human freedom and totalitarianism.” However, his vision was of no want, no disharmony, no violence, no slavery, no white supremacy, no injustice, and no inequality. King called for ”a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation.” This vision is not antagonistic to the communist vision of a classless and stateless society where each person lives according to his or her needs. In an address to the National Maritime Union in 1962, he pointed out that both Negroes and seamen “were brought frequently to their job in chains.” In 1961, he reminded delegates to the United Automobile Workers union convention that both sets of fighters stood up for their rights by sitting down. At the 1961 AFL-CIO convention, King told delegates, “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community.” In union speech after union speech, he made the point that while life for Black Americans was hard, ”millions of poor White Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive.” and that fighters for justice in any of its forms will be met with fierce resistance from the economic and political power structure. He said concessions, whether wage gains, the weekend, the eight-hour day, voting rights, or non-segregated hotels and restaurants, will only be made begrudgingly. What they are forced “to give to us with one hand, they will snatch back with the other hand.” It was one thing for blacks to win the right to sit at a lunch counter. It was another thing for black and other poor people to get the money to buy a lunch. He argued that "No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the market place his capacities are declared to be worthless to society."
"A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years," King told the Southern Christian Leadership Council in 1967, "will 'thingify' them – make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together" Consistent with Marx and contrary to moralists, King argued that "the roots" of the economic injustice he sought to overcome "are in the system rather in men or faulty operations" King in this final essay, titled "A Testament of Hope," wrote "Naive and unsophisticated though we may be, the poor and despised of the twentieth century will revolutionize this era. In our 'arrogance, lawlessness, and ingratitude,' we will fight for human justice, brotherhood, secure peace, and abundance for all."
At his death in 1968, when he was calling with urgency for an end to poverty in our nation, there were 25.4 million poor Americans including 11 million poor children and the US GDP was $4.13 trillion. Today there are 46.2 million poor people including 16.1 million poor children and the GDP is three times larger. Twenty million of our neighbors are living in extreme poverty including 7.3 million children. The number of poor children – 16.1 million – exceeds the entire combined populations of Haiti and Liberia, two of the poorest countries on earth. The number of extremely poor children – 7.3 million – in our nation is greater than the population of Sierra Leone. The number of poor children under five – 5.0 million – exceeds the entire population of the state of South Carolina or Louisiana or Alabama.
Wage Slavery
"What is slavery?"
"involuntary work"
"Why do you work"
"because I have to put food on the table"
"so you do have to work"
"yes"
"In what way is that voluntary?"
Slavery is not simply "involuntary work", though. It isn't work that makes it slavery. People have to work to survive. Everyone does. But in capitalism, there is a class of people who profit off of this. This is wage slavery, because you are beholden to a capitalist class. You are not working to survive, you are working for a capitalist who you hope will let you survive. The problem is that one specific group of the population is required to work under the command of, and for the profit of, another specific group of the population. It's not just that one must work but that one is forced to accept work under the terms offered by the employer including subordination to their management and them owning the entire product. Slavery is a social relation. Wage slavery is a slavery to the capitalist class as a whole, not simply to its individual members.
A wage is paid to a worker in exchange for their labour. Labour, and hence the worker is turned into a commodity to be bought and sold in a market. If you have to work, if the alternative is starvation, and you are paid little more than it takes to survive, you are a obvious wage slave. Wage slaves are far more profitable than slaves. They cost nothing for the down-payment and later you can replace them from the thousands of unemployed. Why is it "slavery"? Because the way your ability to toil is put to use by the employer and what you produced is owned by the employer. You have to do what the employer tells you to do or you're threatened with dismissal. Your employer owns that part of your life. You become the employer's tool, a human resource, little different from his machinery or his raw materials.
The capitalist say to workers, "We own this land, this machinery, but they are useless to us without labor, or labor power. On the other hand, you have the labor power, or ability to work, but that labor power is no use to you unless you have access to the land and machines which we own, but can't operate ourselves. Very well, we will make a deal with you. If you will agree to work for us, and let us keep all you produce, we will pay you back enough to enable you to live and raise a family. Experience demonstrates, and our experts estimate, that in two hours you can produce what you need to live and raise a family. We will allow you to keep for yourself what you produce in those two hours of labor, provided you will continue for six more hours, we to keep for ourselves everything you produce in these additional six hours. We own, and do no work, but we keep the bulk of what you produce. You work, but own nothing; you produce all, but you keep just a small fraction of the things you produce. Fair enough?" The worker is not likely to be much concerned about fairness and so he is likely to say, in effect, "Very well, you own me and my life, because you own that whereon my life, and the lives of my loved ones, depend. I have no choice but to accept your terms, even if they do seem like the terms of highway robbers."
Minimum and Living Wages
Karl Marx, explained that under capitalism, workers, who own only their ability to work, stand like all other commodities: up for sale on the market. In essence, a wage is our market price at any given moment. For the capitalist class, hiring labor power is just another cost of production. They therefore seek the lowest possible costs in order to realize the greatest margin of profit. It’s quite simple: all other things being equal, lower wages equals higher profits.
Under capitalism, labour is indispensable to creating profit. Workers must therefore be maintained like all other elements of production.A legally mandated minimum wage is just the legal form that guarantees a certain minimum level of wages for at least one layer of the working class. It is a form of market regulation, an effort to stave off growing discontent. A living wage differs from a minimum wage in that a minimum wage is simply a legislated fixed amount. On the other hand, a living wage to present a decent standard of living is little more than a legally set real wage, tied to inflation.That is, the purchasing power of wages are tied to the real prices of other commodities. For example, as food prices rise, so do wages. A living wage maintains the standard of living and provides economic stability for working people. What’s a “living wage”? It is enough to ensure low paid workers earn enough to provide for themselves and their families.Presumably what they have in mind is a wage that would allow a worker to afford decent housing, enough proper food, new clothes, to go on holiday and run a car. It’s an old demand of reformists going back to the ILP in the 1920s. Getting employers to increase the wages is easier said than done. The unions haven’t been able to do it, otherwise they would have been done so. But let’s assume for a moment that a law forcing them to do this was passed. What would happen? There would be some unintended consequences. We would point out that even if implemented, wouldn’t have had the expected effects. Stephanie Luce on the Labor Notes website describes that "...20 years ago a “living wage” campaign by pastors and union organizers in Baltimore caught the attention of activists around the country. It looked like a way to address the fact that so many people were working but were still poor. Living wage activists have accomplished a lot since then, winning more than 125 living wage ordinances in cities and counties, three city minimum wages, and state and federal minimum wage increases. Eight states have indexed their minimum wage to inflation because of activist pressure, and campaigns to raise and index state minimums are underway in 10 more states...Yet the number of workers earning poverty wages remains as high as ever....And even the “living wages” the movement has won are not enough to bring a worker out of poverty, especially since many low-wage workers are involuntarily part-time."
Under normal conditions of capitalism even a “fair day’s wage” is only what the market fetches i.e. the minimum necessary cost of labor power for any particular field of work. It is impossible to simply reform capitalism to make it more “fair”. At its core, capitalism is a system of exploitation of labor for profit. This makes a living wage for all an impossibility, as it would bring out all the contradictions of capitalism. Minimum and living wage legislation cannot repeal the law of profits any more effectively than they can repeal the law of gravity
In Marx's 1844 Economic and Philospohical Manuscripts he writes:-
"An enforced increase in wages (disregarding the other difficulties and especially that such an anomaly could only be maintained by force ) would be nothing more than a better remuneration of slaves , and would not restore , either to the worker or to the work , their human significance and worth Even the equality of incomes which Proudhon demands would only change the relation of the present-day worker to his work into a relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist"Marx was so irritated by the demand for a minimum wage by the French Workers Party that he wrote to Sorge "Guesde found it necessary to throw to the French workers notwithstanding my protest, such as fixing the minimum wage by law, etc. (I told him: “If the French proletariat is still so childish as to require such bait, it is not worth while drawing up any program whatever”)"
Inside capitalism, the costing of labour is a lop-sided relationship in as much as it is the capitalist-owner who that dictates the cost of labour. However, the spectre of social unrest has forced many government to "nationalise" the system of wage, meaning that the determination of the amount of wage could no longer be left in the hands of the private employers. The State intervened by imposing the landmark “minimum wage law”, and other labor laws pertaining to working hours, overtime, holidays, etc. that made significant adjustments on the cost of wage. The State made uniform the increase in the minimum amount of wage by edict. But through the years, as inflation continues to erode the value of their earnings, the reduction in their purchasing power, the system of regulated wage was no longer working in their favor. The nationalisation of the wage system thought by many would work for their welfare is now the same instrument used by the capitalists to push back the cost of wage to a bare subsistence level. To justify the system of regulated wage is to openly admit ignorance of Marx. The transfer of the wage system from a private to a public concern is no different from the clamor to nationalise the industries that made the State the employer. That supposition did not solve the problem because the State as the sole employer failed to deliver what the wage earners thought as their liberation from the yoke of capitalist exploitation. The State was perceived as the exploiter of its own people because it promised many things only heaven could provide. The system of regulated wage only worsened the problem of unemployment. Far too many workers have no choice but to take minimum wage jobs, no choice that is, but to live in poverty. Although the effect of establishing living wage laws improve the lot of small numbers of people here and there there are now more workers in poverty whilst in work, out of work or with no hope of work anytime soon, if at all. In Germany legal minimum wage agreements only cover slightly more than half the population and can be easily circumvented.
While socialists support every material and social gain won by workers under capitalism, at the same time we realise that these limited gains are not an end in itself. Under pressure from below, the ruling class offers a crumb here and there in order to keep order. We think working people deserve more than crumbs. Of course a higher-wage, whilst the system persists, is something to strive for, but the current idea of certain local authorities and private companies paying a ‘living-wage’, on a voluntary basis, leaves out of consideration those who are not so employed and those who are unemployed. YES to a minimum wage increase! YES to a living wage increase! But the story cannot end there. The idea that a certain level of wage is necessary to live and that the government-set minimum-wage is insufficient, pre-supposes wage-slavery and the continuation of capitalism. A living-wage might reduce the gap between low-paid and higher-paid workers, but this would just be a change within the working class – what we call the “redistribution of poverty” – which would not affect the gap between the income of the working class and that of the capitalist class. Socialism is not about redistributing income and wealth from the rich worker to the poor worker, but about establishing a society that would not be divided into rich and poor.
Marx urged working people "not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market." It is the socialist's objective that "Instead of the conservative motto `A fair day's wages for a fair day's work,' " as Marx pointed out, workers "ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: `Abolition of the wages system.' "
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