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Assignment #4: What are wages?

Marielis Rosado
September 21, 2016
SOC 32014
Prof. Elizabeth Bullock
What are wages?
In the reading, “What are wages? How are they determined?” by Karl Marx he talks about what he considers wages to be. He mentioned that wages are an exchange of labor power for a set amount of money that will then bring those worker commodities. As he continued in the reading he said, that money is able to be exchange to provide commodity, which means that it has a price or a cost. This could be taken as that wages equals price of labor. Karl Marx then touched based on a weaver that works for the capitalist and is given the yarn and the loom to produce the cloth. Marx says that the weaver only gets paid for the labor power, that whether the cloth sells at a higher or lower price than the weaver wage it is not the weaver’s problem. That even if the cloth does not get sold at all it is not the weaver’s problem once more, because the weaver was paid for producing that cloth only. He then compared the weaver to the loom, as he mentioned that the worker was just a tool part of that production but not the final result which is the cloth. So no matter what happens to that cloth, the weaver will still get paid for the amount of money he agreed to produce the product. Since the weaver works for the capitalist, the owner or I should say the capitalist provides the weaver with the required products to produce which in this case are the yarn and the loom, so the weaver does not have to spend their money on those products since they come with the job. If the weaver would have to buy these products, the yarn and the loom, to be able to make the cloth then he would not have the same amount of wage he gets from the capitalist as being a worker. Because the weaver would have to buy these products to produce plus also counting his labor power to make the cloth, that takes away from his wage and time which provides him with commodity. Workers sell their labor power to the capitalist to be able to live, which is their commodity. Workers will produce a product, but in reality Karl explained that what they are really producing is their wages and commodity, this is also the case for the weaver worker.