Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/45

 as profit. For instance, if when trade is good, wages rise five per cent.percent [sic], and profits on the other hand thirty per cent.percent [sic], then the proportional or relative wage has not increased but declined.

Thus if the receipt of the laborer increase with the rapid growth of capital, yet at the same time there is a widening of the social gulf which separates the laborer from the capitalist, and also an increase in the power of capital over labor and in the dependence of labor upon capital.

The meaning of the statement that the laborer has an interest in the rapid increase of capital is merely this; the faster the laborer increases his master’s dominion, the richer will be the crumbs that he will get from his table; and the greater the number of laborers that can be employed and called into existence, the greater will be the number of slaves dependent upon capital.

We have thus seen that even for the working class,  however much it may improve the material condition of the laborer, cannot abolish the opposition between his interests and those of the bourgeois or capitalist class. Profit and wages remain just as much as ever in inverse proportion.

When capital is increasing fast, wages may rise, but the profit of capital will rise much faster. The material position of the laborer has improved, but it is at the expense of his social position. The social gulf which separates him from the capitalist has widened.