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What did Marx mean by ‘abolish the wages system’?
The exploitation inherent in the wage system was more obvious in Marx's time, but has essentially remained the same — and today it's far easier to imagine a world without wages entirely, where goods and services are free, explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
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A LETTER to the Morning Star early last year asked what “abolition of the wages system” (a phrase used by both Marx and Engels) might entail.
There are two questions here: how that abolition might be achieved and what a society that replaces it might look like. But before suggesting the answers, let’s first examine in more depth what the “wages system” is.
For Marx’s readers the answer would probably have been obvious — the “wages system” is another word for capitalism, a situation in which capitalists own the means of production (raw materials, machinery, factories, means of distribution and exchange), exploit the “labour power” of workers, extracting more from them in the way of work than the workers themselves receive in wages (their “surplus value”) and then sell the commodities they produce on a market, realising that value as a profit.
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MML director MEIRIAN JUMP outlines the recently refreshed library’s busy autumn schedule that ranges from book sales, archival exploration, community work with online education and the ever popular site tours
Class struggle is the motor of history but the direction and detail of change at any time and place is the outcome of many factors, suggests the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
Dignity is important to all humans, argues the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School, but it does not come about automatically. In a less than perfect world, dignity can accompany suffering, but the collective dignity of working people is achieved through acting together to change the world.
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School