Living Wage, Labour and Capital

Abstract

In a time when the most conspicuous displays of wealth accompany even more conspicuous displays of poverty, it would seem that something is amiss in existing systems for distributing value. What an interrogation of the governing laws of motion of capitalist society reveals, however, is that in these growing disparities in social and economic inequalities, capital is working according to plan. Against the totalising tendencies of capital, which seek to subsume the conditions of work, life, and politics under a logic of insurmountable domination, are spaces of resistance played out in the terrain of wages. This thesis establishes a grounding to move beyond what is currently thought to be possible for wage labour. It is a work of selfclarification in understanding how capitalism operates today in terms of the constitution of value in the wage relation, the ways in which existing ideas of wages presented in political economy are politically challenged, and what happens when that challenge is made. One such challenge is the international political movement for a living wage which contests what is socially necessary and immanently possible for workers. Motivated by principles of equality and justice, this reclamation of wages on the terms and territory of the worker offers an interesting site to explore how the content of wage demands are negotiated with established systems of value and the theoretical principles which reproduce the command of the capital relation. Forms of local and relational organising adopted by living wage campaigns permit a social critique of wage labour to be constructed from the particular experiences of one site, serving as an indicator for the problems and possibilities for contesting wages in our immediate, material reality. The ultimate provocation of this thesis concerns the ways in which politics that seeks to redress conditions of inequality and exploitation under the capital relation are corrupted and undermined by operations of exclusion. Beyond this, however, it is argued that there exists a demand for equality at the heart of the living wage claim that is always in contradiction with the logic of capital.