Piece-Wages

Reading Capital: Wages

The eleventh entry in a section-by-section reading of Marx’s Capital, covering Part Six — Chapters Nineteen through Twenty-Two. Here Marx anatomises the wage, the everyday form in which the whole machinery of exploitation hides in plain sight. The wage, he argues, makes the entire working day appear paid, dissolving the unpaid surplus hours invisibly into the paid ones; and the two great forms of the wage, by time and by the piece, each give capital its own levers. The chapter on piece-wages reads as though written about the gig economy. The objections run from the meaningfulness of ’the price of labour’ to the autonomy of piece-work to the theory of international trade.