182 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
same time as wages, there is no change in prices, there is only a change in terms.
Further, a general rise in wages can never produce a dearness, more or less general, of commodities. In effect, if all industries employed the same number of workmen in proportion to the fixed capital or to the instruments used, a general rise in wages would produce a general reduction of profits, and the current price of commidities would undergo no alteration.
But as the relation of manual labor to fixed capital is not the same in different industries, all the indus- tries which employ relatively a greater mass of fixed capital and less workers will be forced sooner or later to reduce the prices of their commodities. In the con- trary case, where the price of their commodities is not reduced, their profit will rise above the common rate of profit. The machines are not wage-workers. There- fore, the general rise in wages will affect those indus- tries less which, compared with the others, employ more machines than workmen, But as competition always tends to level the rate of profits, those which rise above the ordinary rate can only do so temporarily. Thus, apart from some oscillations, a general rise in wages, so far from resulting, as M. Proudhon contends, in a general rise in prices would result in a partial fall, that is to say, a fall in the current price of the commodities which are manufactured chiefly by machinery,
The rise and fall of profit or wages merely expresses the proportion in which the capitalists and the workmen participate in the product of a day of labor without, in most cases, influencing the price of the product. But that “the strikes which are followed by an increase in
wages lead to a general rise in Prices, to a scarcity even,”
