Germinal : Marxismo e Educação em Debate (Dec 2014)
A MARXIST CONCEPT OF SALARY
Abstract
Marx, more than once, makes clear that “the capital always does the workforce work longer than necessary for the reproduction of the value of the latter” and it is the production of surplus value. However, the legal form makes it appear that the work has in itself a value, and that the wages represent this value. The classical economic notion of salary does seem that the work has been fully paid and the legal, to define the institute also brings the idea that the salary is fair, since the measure is at least sufficient to meet the vital needs. In addition, the salary, legally speaking, is conceptualized as “consideration for work done”, and as there was a level equivalence between work and wages. The legal world, assuming that assumption leads us to further alienating abstraction when one pays, in sequence, to call into question the various forms of compensation. Already completely removed from reality, legal studies on wages lead us, in sequence, to take new forms: term of payment; forms of wage fixation and protection rules for the payment takes place. Ie, when more one studies the legal form, most distant of the essence. As Marx says, “the wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labor and over-work, paid work and unpaid work”, and the salary, “All labor appears as paid labor”. In other words, again: “In wage labor, on the contrary, even the mostwork or unpaid labor appears as paid work.”. On the other hand, the law, notably the Labour Law, is a cultural object which cannot be neglected, as it is part of life of workers and can, in a sense, paradoxical as it may seem, help formulate understandings to away from the sale, so that it is a right repeatedly attacked by the ruling class itself, to whom the legal forms in general benefit. The compensation for moral damage and moral harassment, increasingly frequent in labor law, and even compensation for social harm (“social dumping”) inhabit the labor every day to at least cause some tension in the social system political, social and legal. Are not decisions that revolutionize the production process. Not generate emancipation of the working class and, worse, can lead us to the mythology of the legal form, the tangle of rules and doctrinal trends that chase its tail and end up chaining our minds. But, especially when they are based analyzes that comprise the historical totality of the capitalist mode of production and are expressed through a revealing rationality, may even contribute to the formation of class consciousness. After all, the process of permanent revolution is by means of understandings and formulations thoughts turned to the solution of concrete problems that arise in each moment. The search for an immanent critique in all areas of power, political construction, allowing real interactions, is the food of revolutionary action, given that the construction of a new society is, as said, a process.
