Das Kapital

Wages cross borders, but not as simple numbers to convert — and in a few brief pages, Marx extends his analysis to the international scale, exposing the structural basis of global wage inequality. Comparing wages across countries is not a matter of converting currency. A higher nominal wage in one country may represent less real labour-cost per unit of output than a lower nominal wage elsewhere, if the first country's workers are more productive or work more intensively. A proper comparison requires normalising for working-day length, labour intensity, and productivity — reducing everything to a common measure of actual labour performed per unit of time. The law of value operates differently at the international level. Within a country, individual differences in labour intensity average out into a national standard. But between countries, these national averages are not automatically equalised. More intense or more productive national labour produces more value in the same time and receives a correspondingly higher money wage — without this wage representing a smaller rate of exploitation. High-wage countries can simultaneously be high-surplus countries. More consequentially: on the world market, more productive nations sell their commodities below the labour-time those commodities would require in less productive countries. The less developed country imports a coat that took 3 hours to produce in England and treats it as worth the 6 hours it would have taken at home. Value flows systematically from less to more developed economies through the structure of international trade — not through fraud but through the operation of the law of value across an uneven world. The chapter closes Part VI and sets the stage for accumulation, where these international inequalities become self-reinforcing.