Marx's Wage Labour and Capital

Wage Labour and Capital (Chapter 9) discusses capitalism’s constant expansion. Each individual business strives to survive against other businesses. And in order to gain the upper hand, most businesses would exploit more workers and invest in more efficient machinery, anything to decrease the cost and increase the productivity. The businesses that cannot keep up will eventually be the ones that close down. Thus capitalism is growing bigger and bigger due to the many businesses attempting to maintain against others. This all connects to the idea of vampirization, where the businesses are the vampires and the workers would be the victims of the vampires. In order to survive, capitalist (business owners) would have to “suck” the labor of all their workers. Those who take full advantage of each worker would obviously be the one that comes out more successful. The more labor it sucks from the workers, the greater it becomes. And just like a vampire, it is a necessity for a capitalist to continue to keep expanding and exploiting workers, or else the other capitalists would outrun their business and take them out of the competition. Without the workers, the business would no longer live; similar to how a vampire would die if cannot suck the blood of a human.

In addition to capitalism expansion, Marx also talks about the competition between workers. Each individual proletarian in a capitalist country wants to triumph over each other when it’s between being the employed or unemployed. Workers began to take lower wages, work more efficiently, accept worse conditions, etc. Then eventually, a group of people would be willing to take even lower wages, work even more efficiently, and work regardless of what the conditions are. It is simply a battle amongst all the workers in each profession. But it is also a battle between each individual worker and himself/herself. That is because the first group of workers tries to underbid the people who are now working for less, and they begin to take wages that are even lower. Therefore, the first group of workers is essentially competing against themselves, since they are now not only underbidding the second group, but they are also underbidding their initial wages that they set up. This cycle is very similar to eBay or any other auctions. All the bidders are just trying to win the auction by offering a higher price. And as they are outbidding the other bidders, they are also outbidding themselves. In the end, the only real winner is the person who put up the item for auction/the capitalist. In both eBay and jobs, the workers/bidders cannot gain any more that they started with. The capitalist/seller is just trying to see how much they can milk from the workers/bidders’ desire without losing any more than they were expecting to when they started.

Another way that eBay connects to Marx’s ideas is that in Wage Labour and Capital, Marx talks about the replacement of workers by machinery. Since machines are much more effective than workers and will temporarily bring greater profits, it would be obvious for a capitalist to invest in machinery. In eBay, there is a program named JBid that helps the buyer put in their bids within the last 3 seconds, thus replacing the traditional “Refresh. Click. Bid.” At first, JBid is very effective in terms of winning auctions, just like how machines are at first great for bringing in profit. But eventually everyone will have JBid/the machinery, and at that point, they are only helpful in evening out the playing field. This idea also connects to “Why does capitalism go through cycles of booms and slumps?” article that we read in class. In it, it states: “Companies may benefit from investing in new technology in the short term because they can undercut their competitors. But once the other companies catch up, this advantage is lost, and bosses must try and find new ways of increasing their profits.”