Everyone speaks of the wage as the price of labour. Marx starts by showing that the phrase cannot work. If the value of a twelve-hour day were set by the labour in it, the answer would be twelve hours, which is an empty circle. Labour must also exist before it can be sold, and if the labourer could give it an existence of its own, he would be selling a product, not labour. Pay him six shillings for twelve hours that make six shillings and no surplus-value is left, so capital disappears. Pay him less and unequal quantities of labour are exchanged, which no law of value can state. What stands in front of the money-owner is the labourer, and what he sells is labour-power. Classical economists took "price of labour" from daily life. Asking what fixed the price, they ended, without noticing, at the value of labour-power.
Then Marx puts figures through the wage form. Take a twelve-hour day, with the daily value of labour-power at three shillings, the product of six hours. The worker is paid three shillings, and the pay reads as the value of twelve hours' labour. Yet those twelve hours create six shillings. Labour that makes six shillings seems to be worth three. Half of the day is unpaid, but the wage hides the line between paid and unpaid time. Older systems show the line. The serf's days for himself and for his lord fall in different places and times. The slave's whole day looks like work for his master. Under wages, even the unpaid hours look paid. The property relation hides the slave's work for himself, and the money relation hides the wage labourer's unrequited work.
He ends by asking why people believe it. The deal looks like any sale, and the labourer is paid after he has worked. When his pay moves from three shillings to four or two, he still gives twelve hours, so every change looks like a change in the price of his day. That misled Adam Smith. The capitalist wants the most labour for the least money and explains his profit as buying under value and selling over it. He never sees that if he really paid for the value of labour, no capital would exist. Marx's verdict on the economists is short: they come close to the true relation of things and cannot name it while they stay inside their bourgeois skin.
Coming Up in Chapter 20
Marx turns to pay by the day, the week and the hour. A worker earns three shillings a day. On a ten-hour day, an hour of his labour is paid at three and three-fifths pence. Stretch the day to twelve hours and the hour drops to threepence, though the daily wage has not moved at all. Pay can even rise while each hour gets cheaper.
