The Communist Manifesto: Crises and Wages

In the next pages of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels turn to the two things that worried workers most: sudden crashes and low pay.

“Modern society is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers he has called up by his spells.Every few years a commercial crisis returns, each time more threatening.In these crises a strange epidemic breaks out, one that would have seemed absurd in any earlier age: the epidemic of over-production.Factories close and people go hungry, not because there is too little, but because there is too much industry and too much commerce.

Meanwhile the worker must sell himself piece by piece, like any other article of commerce.Because of machinery, the work loses all individual character, and the worker becomes a mere part of the machine.So wages fall to the cost of keeping the worker alive, and the more boring the work becomes, the lower the wage.

The average price of wage labour is the minimum wage, just enough for a bare existence.We do not want to take away what a worker earns in order to live; we want to end a system in which the worker lives only to increase capital.”

They predicted that these crises would grow worse and worse until the workers rose up.