It is easy to understand that the gold miner who secures a raise in wages from $2.00 to $3.00 a day, leaves less surplus value for the mine-owner. He receives back more of his product. And the aim of Socialists or revolutionary workmen and women is to become owners of their entire product.
Confessed economists have repeatedly claimed that a rise in wages was no benefit to the proletariat. They insisted that the capitalists would raise prices on the necessities of life, so that the workers would be just where they were before.
But in Value, Price and Profit, Chapter II, page 17, Marx says: "How could that rise of wages affect the prices of commodities? Only by affecting the actual proportion between the demand for, and the supply of, these commodities."
"It is perfectly true, that, considered as a whole, the working class spends, and must spend, its income upon necessaries. A general rise in the rate of wages would, therefore, produce a rise in the demand for, and consequently (temporarily) in the market prices of, necessaries.
"The capitalists who produce these necessaries would be compensated for the risen wages by the rising market prices of the commodities."
Note, Marx says that temporarily the prices on necessaries would probably rise, owing to the increased demand for food, clothing and better houses; not because the capitalists decided to raise prices. And then note what begins to follow immediately:
