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Marx's Wage Theory in Historical Perspective: Its Origins, Development, and Interpretation, by Kenneth Lapides. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1998. $59.95; paper, $8.95. Pp. x, 275.
The "historical perspective" that Lapides recounts begins with the preclassical (before Adam Smith) debates over what the level of wages should be. Classical political economy (Smith to John Stuart Mill) shifts the focus from prescription to description, or the search for economic laws that determine wages. In its turn, the classical spirit of scientific inquiry gives way to the apologist wage fund doctrine. This is the claim, which dominates controversy over wages in the 19th century, that the total sum that can be paid in wages is fixed at any given time. Lapides argues convincingly that it held such sway for so long because it preached submissiveness to the working class (unions, it implies, are pointless, since higher wages for some just necessitate unemployment or lower wages for others). Against this backdrop, Marx's explanation of wages truly represents, as Lapides says, "a revolution in wage theory." J. S. Mill's "recantation" of the wage fund doctrine leaves economics with no theory of wages (and also follows the publication of Capital). Marx not only supplies an alternative theory to the wage fund doctrine, but a theory that supports working-class activism.
In the second half of the book, Lapides examines Marx's theory chronologically, devoting a chapter to each phase of its development. Two final chapters consider the controversies over "immiseration" and Marx's plan. Regarding the former, Lapides shows that the view that real wages decline with the progress of capitalism appears well before Marx in the early 19th century (when it corresponds to actual circumstances). Since, as he also shows, there is no trace of this view in Marx's mature work, the real question is: how did it come to be so widely attributed to Marx? Lapides explains how Marx's...