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Whilst Ricardo himself stands upon the platform of thecapitalist, his wage-theory has become the basis of all those move-ments which, on principle, oppose the present economical develop-ment depending upon privilege and property—the starting-pointof radical as well as reactionary Socialists . For both of these themaxim cannot be dispensed with that by reason of the existingeconomical arrangement the worker cannot raise his status in anycase, but is irredeemably fettered down to the subsistence mini-mum. Only a complete upheaval of the groundwork of thisarrangement, the abolishing of privilege and property, can bringdeliverance to the working classes. But the turning of the tableswill be made possible by the fact that in the present economicalsystem the cleft between those possessing means and those withoutalways becomes wider. The expropriated at last expropriate theexpropriators.
The wage-theory of Ricardo is most clearly the foundation ofthe Communistic manifesto in which Marx and Engels first formu-lated the programme of Continental Social Democracy. Theteaching appeared here in the definitely expressed form that it wasmodern centralised industry, especially the machine, which presseddown the worker unceasingly. “By the spread of machineryand the division of labour the work of the proletarian has lost itsindependent character, and therewith all attraction for the worker.The expenses of the worker limit themselves, therefore, almostsolely to the necessaries of life, which he needs for existence andthe propagation of his race. The price of an article, consequentlyalso of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In the sameproportion that adversity of labour increases do, therefore, wagesfall.” “ The modern worker, instead of raising his status alongwith the progress of industry, always falls deeper below the condi-tion of his own class.” This teaching, which Karl Marx (21) asunconditionally supports in “Capital,” has found an eloquentdefender in Lassalle. “For you, gentlemen,” he cried to theworkers, “ always the bare necessaries of life; for the employer’sshare, all the balance remaining from the result of labour.”Lassalle does not recognise a social advance on the basis of aneconomical one; hence his scoffing at the English trade unions as“ the ineffectual experiment of the commodity Labour to demeanitself as Humanity.”