of the seapien and the miners. With the miners the wages were, in 1886, on a level with 1860, and in 1891 they, were 50 per cent, higher! This cannot be called an assured advance. In the case of the workers in the building trade, and the woollen and the iron industries, the increase of wages since 1860 falls far below the average. Bowley, therefore, wishes us to believe that the wages of all the unorganised workers of England rose 40 per cent, in the same period in which those of the excellently-organised iron workers only rose 25 per cent.!
But let us take the figures as they stand. What do they prove? Even according to this quite exceptionally optimistic view, wages form an ever-diminishing portion of the national income. In the period 1860–74 they form on the average 45 per cent, of the national income, in the period 1877–91 only 42⅔ per cent. Let us assume, for lack of more reliable figures, the sum total of the incomes subject to income tax and not arising from wages to be equal to the total amount of surplus value. Thus the latter was in 1860 less than the total amount of the wages by 16 million pounds; in 1891, however, the sum total of the surplus value was greater than that of the wages by 80 million pounds.
That shows a very palpable increase of exploitation. The rate of surplus, value, i.e., the rate of exploitation of the worker, would, according to this, have risen from 96 per cent, to 112 per cent. As a matter of fact, according to Bowley's figures, that is the extent to which exploitation has risen in the organised trades. The exploitation of the mass of the unorganised must have increased to an even greater extent.
We do not attach any very great importance to these figures. But as far as they prove anything at all they do not speak against the assumption of the increasing exploitation of labour, which Marx, by another method, and by an enquiry into the laws of the capitalist mode of production, has proved in a manner not yet confuted. Now it may be said: Granted that exploitation increases, but the wages rise as well, if not at the same rate as surplus value, how is, then, the worker going to feel the increasing exploitation, if it is not patent to his eye, but must be discovered by means of a lengthened enquiry? The mass of the workers neither carry on statistical researches, nor ponder over the theory of value and surplus value.
That may easily be so. And yet there are means by which the increase of their exploitation is made evident to them. To the same extent as the profits rise, does the mode of living of the bourgeoisie improve. But the classes are not divided by Chinese walls. The increasing luxury of the upper classes trickles gradually through into the lower, awakes in them new needs and new demands, to the satisfaction of which, however, the slow rise in the wages is inadequate. The bourgeoisie bewails the disappearance of unpretentiousness on the part of the lower orders, their increasing covetousness,
