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The transition from serfdom to the system of wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from legal dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked an advance. But it was also a transition from a fixed and, as it were, a professional position of service to the community to a blind and precarious individualism. It was a transition, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from status to contract.
We see that the land nationalizer claims to remove, and the land reformer in general to abate, the evil of poverty by securing for those dependent on the fluctuating value and uncertain tenure of wage-labour an equal share in those land-values, the product of nature and social activity, which are at present monopolized by a few.
According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
Our best agricultural day-labourers are, without exception, those who cultivate some scrap of ground, or follow some petty occupation, which prevents their depending entirely on wage-labour. And so I believe it will be in the West Indies. Let the land-policy of the late Governor be followed up. Let squatting be rigidly forbidden.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.
When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character. Let us now take wage-labour.
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers.
You encounter feudalism and serfdom. To the modern world? You run against wage-labour. Ah, but, you say, we look to the future. We shall abolish wage-labour, as we have abolished slavery. We shall have an equitable society in which everybody will do productive work, and nobody will live at the cost of others.
It is this which makes the system of wage-labour so unsatisfactory in principle compared with the guilds of the town workmen in the Middle Ages and with the organized professions of to-day; and it is this which explains why trade unions of recent years have come to concern themselves more and more with questions of status rather than of wages and to regard the occupation which they represent more and more as a profession rather than a trade.
It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.
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