This text was written by Marx and published in 1865. Much like Wage Labour and Capital, the text overlaps with parts of Capital. You can read the text here.
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Previous texts
- The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War
- How to Be a Good Communist
- The Wretched of the Earth (1, 2-3, 4, 5-)
- The Foundations of Leninism
- Decolonization is not a metaphor
- Marxism and the National Question
- China Has Billionaires
- Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism
- Wage Labour and Capital
Is there any particular reason that Marx did not mention potential reasons for the capitalist in the USA paying greater average wages compared to the British capitalist? Such as gathering labor aristocrat allies against the labor underclasses[slaves and certain foreigners]? Especially since this was published in 1865.
You might be in luck. While I can’t say why Marx didn’t mention the reasons why he didn’t do that,
He did mention why U.S wage laborer earned relative higher, compared to their British and European counterparts, in Chapter 33 of Capital
We have seen that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free {settler} colony, on the contrary, consists in this — that the bulk of the {indigenous}soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.[10] This is the secret both of the prosperity of the colonies and of their inveterate vice — opposition to the establishment of capital. “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.” [11]
In other words, in a world of Euro-Amerikan petty bourgeoisie settler proprietors, why be a wage laborer? Hence, to attract more wage laborers, a transitional above-average wage was put into place, by necessity.
Only when
the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil
by growing Capital is in major process, will Capital thus reduce and later equalize the wage of wage laborers to what it is in Europe
I don’t remember them talking about the US condition but they did talk about the bourgeoisification of the english working class in correspondence.
After that affair one might almost believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish utterly before it can evolve in a new and viable form. And yet it is not possible to foresee what the new form will look like. It seems to me, by the way, that there is in fact a connection between Jones’ new move, seen in conjunction with previous more or less successful attempts at such an alliance, and the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat.
