Immiseration thesis

In Karl Marx's early writings of the 1840s, he was influenced by David Ricardo's theory of wages, which held that wages tended down to a subsistence minimum.[1] This was the "Iron law of wages" coined by the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. For example, Marx wrote in On the Question of Free Trade (1847) that:

Thus, as means are constantly being found for the maintenance of labor on cheaper and more wretched food, the minimum of wages is constantly sinking."

— Karl Marx, On the Question of Free Trade (1847).[2]

This implied an absolute decline in living standards. However, Marx changed his position in the 1850s.[1] In the first volume of Capital he instead suggested instead a relative immiseration of workers vis-à-vis capital occurred. Concerning the evolution of the worker's conditions, he wrote that:

Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker [...] All means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become a means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment, they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process [...], they transform his life into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. But all methods of the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation, and every extension of accumulation becomes, conversely, a means for the development of these methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse [...] Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.

— Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), Volume One, Chapter 25, Section 4 (Emphasis added).[3] Text on Wikisource

Marx argued that, in accordance with the labour theory of value, capitalist competition would necessitate the gradual replacement of workers with machines, allowing an increase in productivity, but with less overall value for each product produced, as more products can be made in a given amount of time. This process forms part of the general law of capitalist accumulation, in which the proportion of "constant capital" increases relative to "variable capital" (i.e. workers) in the production process over time. Marx also noted that this movement is not merely an abstract relation, but that it is a result of class struggle, and it could be temporarily stopped should wages dip below an amount that the proletariat deem acceptable.

• Capitalist mode of production
• Crisis theory
• Technological unemployment
• Unfree labour
• Wage labour
• Wage slavery