Wage labour is a distinctive feature of capitalism but not necessarily all wage labour can be considered as ‘free labour’, neither is it true that capitalism is inimical to unfree labour. Marx sarcastically mentioned that a worker is doubly free in the sense s/he is free to sell labour power as her/his own commodity and also free of all means of production by which s/he could have valorised her/his own labour. In other words, the worker unlike a slave or a serf is free to choose his or her exploiter but cannot get rid of exploitation altogether by choice.

Slavery is something where one human being entirely becomes a property of another human being. A worker in capitalist enterprise on the other hand is not a property of his employer rather the worker sells labour power, which is the only commodity s/he owns. The selling of labour power is an assumed separation of the commodity labour power from the bodily existence of the worker. And in an exchange, freedom simply means that an owner of a commodity can sell it to the highest bidder. Several conditions are created within capitalism by segmenting labour markets such that even the freedom to choose her/his own master or selling labour power to the highest bidder is grossly violated. In fact, the estrangement of freedom even within the market has no moral conflict with the nineteenth century liberal idea that individual freedom signifies choice of work just as it allows everyone to cast a vote. But an exchange should ideally imply reciprocal transfer of equivalent values.

Following this classical premise, Marx also assumed wage paid to the worker as equivalent to the value of labour power, that does not however mean it has to be so and in most of the cases it is actually not so rather wages are paid lower than the value of labour power. But Marx was inclined to make a theoretical point in Capital and that is even if the worker is paid a wage equivalent to the value of labour power, then also surplus value is generated through exploitation since the worker is paid for what he sells but at the same time the worker is forced to offer more than what s/he sells. The actual expenditure of labour contains higher value than the value of labour power and the surplus value is being appropriated by the capitalist. The notion of free labour within capitalism in the broader sense is nothing but a liberal myth, but in a limited sense it implies the freedom to choose one’s own exploiter!

SLAVERY AND WAGE LABOUR

One of the persisting myths about capitalism is that it is a system which necessarily replaces unfree labour by free labour. On the contrary capitalism always existed with petty-producers, subcontracted devalued labour, labour by chattel, slave labour, bonded labour, debt slave and various other forms of proletariat and only at a particular juncture of history did some of the workers’ rights attain juridical recognition. In spite of assuming wage as equivalent to the value of labour power, Marx was very much aware of this crude reality and this is possibly the reason he vividly narrated the use and role of women and child labour, long hours of work, plantation slaves and use of debt bondage and truck system in the development of capitalism in England in Capital I.

The classical economists both Adam Smith and Malthus held the view that unfree labour is inefficient and hence inconsistent with capitalism. They believed that a competition driven by higher productivity also requires skilled labour and there could hardly be any incentive for an unfree labour in acquiring necessary skills. But Smith was wrong on this count as history showed that slaves created many things and performed well not because of any incentive but because of fear of punishment or death.

Capitalism learnt from the past and used slavery whenever possible without any moral hesitation, used fear as a negative stimulus to extract the most from the modern worker. The struggle to define the working day was essentially a protracted class war and it was meant to differentiate a worker from a slave that the worker is not supposed to sell himself to the employer but only agreed to sell a part of the day’s labour. But this long battle seems not yet over. The dystopia of ‘unfree labour’ peeps into the real world even in the twenty-first century through a different language of capitalist work ethic.

We need to recall that actually capitalism did replace slavery to a large extent because employers wanted labour force to be more flexible. Slaves were like fixed costs which beyond a point became uneconomic and the same human being in a life time can’t be amenable to emerging new tools. Most importantly capitalism could get rid of the cost of maintaining the slave and their family. They needed the work or labour and not the body of the worker anymore. Also with the advance of commodity economy, distribution has to be based on exchange values. Slaves only possess use values. They can be used to do something but they do not have the power to buy. For the expansion of market, certain rules of equality and freedom have to be there and at the same time workers who would receive wages in exchange of their work could be potential buyers of the commodities produced. Hence the replacement of slavery by wage labour didn’t invoke any moral value but simply advanced the cause of higher profitability.

CLASS STRUGGLE AND WORKERS’ RIGHTS

Recourse to unfree labour has bounced back with a vengeance. Limiting the working day to eight or ten hours is seen as a privilege. Extending working hours allowed capital earlier to increase absolute surplus value. Due to limits imposed by working class movement on the working hours in a day, which was subsequently legitimised in most of the countries, the capitalists felt their hands tied-up. Continuing with the same production process they could appropriate more surplus by making workers work for longer hours. But that couldn’t happen anymore. Capitalism had to reorganise its production process using new technology by increasing the intensity of work and extract more surplus value in limited hours of work. This was the class response of the capitalist class, the ‘real subsumption’ in which it actually replaced the old production process by the new one which is capitalist in all its presuppositions. This is the regime of relative surplus value which the capitalist class had to adopt because the workers emerged as a collective subject and could protect its own terms of employment.

Neoliberalism is a counter revolution ushered by global capitalism. It once again opened the door of extracting both absolute and relative surplus value. Global capital got access to the huge reserve army of labour mostly available in the global South. Fragmentation of production, deriving gains out of global arbitrage of labour and rising uncertainty once again legitimises longer working hours. It is the fear of punishment and jobloss rather than Smithian stimulus through incentives that largely drives the engine of absolute surplus value. On the other hand, having control over new technology and machines, capital can pose itself as the torch bearer of knowledge led productivity growth. Through establishing property rights on evolving collective knowledge and social wisdom, capital also enhances its bounty of relative surplus value which it has always done by separating mental and physical labour.

The unfree labour is back. What it shows once again is that the only morality that works for capitalism is the unending thirst for accumulation. All other concerns are subordinate to that and whatever rights workers could achieve in the past are products of class struggle and not a gift of humanitarian ethics. This is what Marx underlined in his long chapter on working day in Capital: ‘There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalist, and collective labour, i.e., the working class.’

Editor: Zhong Yao、Zheng Yifan

From: https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2023/0507_pd/capitalism-and-unfree-labour（2023-5-7）