THE HISTORICAL DIALECTIC of the Wage-Labor and/versus the Capital Categories.

 

THE

HISTORICAL

DIALECTIC

of

the

Wage-Labor 

and/versus

the Capital

 

Categories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Reader,

 

 

 

In ancient times, in ancient civilizations, long before the “capital” social relation of social reproduction and the “wage-labor” social relation of social reproduction coalesce into the predominant social relation of societal self-re-production of modernity, of industrial capitalism, there was a prehistory of the capital social relation – there existed socially-marginal, socially-subordinate, “antediluvian forms” [Marx] of capital – e.g., merchant’s capital and usurers’ capital.

 

Just so, also in ancient times, in ancient civilizations, there existed a pre-history of ‘protoic’, socially-marginal, ‘‘‘antediluvian’’’ forms of wage-labor, that were, initially, unhinged from those “antediluvian” capital-forms and their monetary-profits-creation.

 

The relative sub-species categories of this ‘protoic’ wage-labor relative-species category include:

 

1.  Ancient Soldiers’ Wages.  The Roman military state, from circa 406 BCE, paid a retainer, called, in Latin, a «salarium» or «stipendium», to its citizen-soldiers – typically land-owning farmers – to meet their livelihood expenses while they were away from their farms, providing military services to the Roman state, which funded these salaries, not from money-capital, but from plundered tribute and taxes.  These salaries were subsistence revenues for the soldiers, and did not produce surplus-value for the Roman state to re-invest.  The Roman state merely consumed the labor-services of their soldiers, made possible by paying such salaries to their soldiers.  As land-owning farmers, these citizen-soldiers were not completely severed from means of production ownership-access, hence escaped the “modern proletarian” condition of the propertyless wage-laborer, incorporated into capital via the wage as sole legally-sanctioned means of worker-survival.  The “return on investment” r[e]aped by the Roman state via this «praxis» was not a mass of grown or crafted commodities, saleable, on markets, for a profit, but plundered goods, captives of war convertible to slaves-as-commodities for the Roman, slave-labor-based economy, and incremental land-ownership for the Roman state.  

 

2.  Wages Paid to Slave Overseers.  In the ancient Roman agricultural estates [«latifundia»], an overseer of slaves, called, in Latin, a «villicus», himself often a – highly-trusted, by the estate’s owner(s) – slave or former slave [“freedman”], was paid a wage called a «peculium»: a sum of money, and/or of property, managed by that «villicus», but still legally owned by the “slave-master” owner(s) of that «latifundium».  This wage served as part of a slave-labor economy’s psychological incentives management strategy.  The overseer, if still a slave, might save these wages to eventually buy freedom, motivating such an overseer to a draconian extraction of labor from the “overseen” field slaves, “lower” in the plantation hierarchy.  These «latifundia» were themselves ‘protoic pre-vestiges’ of later, industrial-capitalist “productive capital” [Marx], producing, e.g., massive quantities of grain agricultural commodities, mainly for Mediterranean markets, and selling those commodities, on those markets, typically at a profit.    

 

3.  Wages Paid to Ancient Day Laborers.  In ancient Athens, there existed free citizens, called «thetes», who owned no land or other means of livelihood – e.g., who were unable to farm for their livelihoods – and worked in return for a wage, paid to them daily.  Within the psychohistorically-inevitable «mentalité» born of the human-social conditions of those times, and of the ‘human phenome’ that those conditions reproduced, these «thetes» were looked down upon, by “landed” commoner citizens and “nobility” alike, with extreme derogation and disdain, as ‘almost slaves’, or ‘near slaves’.  This was because they were dependent upon others for their daily livelihoods – a condition akin to “temporary slavery”.

 

However, modern, full-form, Industrial-capitalist “wage-labor” required a long historical process which completely severed the “wage worker” from ownership-access to any means of production – agricultural, craft, industrial, etc. – so that the wage-worker became abjectly livelihood-dependent upon wage-employment by individual capitals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For more information regarding these Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free of charge, PDFs and/or JPGs of Foundation books, other texts, and images, please see:

 

www.dialectics.info

 

 

and

 

 

https://independent.academia.edu/KarlSeldon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books published by the F.E.D. Press, see –

 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

¡ENJOY!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

 

 

Miguel Detonacciones,

 

Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];

Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;

Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOU are invited to post your comments on this blog-entry below!