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Karl Marx, wage theorist

Apparently, sports owners are not doing a very good job of exploiting their workers.

It appears that Los Angeles Angels center fielder Mike Trout will be living above the subsistence level that Karl Marx said is the level at which capitalists pay workers.

Marx wrote in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:

Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker. Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than can the worker without the capitalist. Combination among the capitalists is customary and effective; workers’ combination is prohibited and painful in its consequences for them. Besides, the landowner and the capitalist can make use of industrial advantages to augment their revenues; the worker has neither rent nor interest on capital to supplement his industrial income...

The lowest and the only necessary wage rate is that providing for the subsistence of the worker for the duration of his work and as much more as is necessary for him to support a family and for the race of labourers not to die out...

Thus in the gravitation of market price to natural price it is the worker who loses most of all and necessarily. And it is just the capacity of the capitalist to direct his capital into another channel which either renders the worker, who is restricted to some particular branch of labour, destitute, or forces him to submit to every demand of this capitalist.

ESPN is reporting that Trout is finalizing a contract with the Angels that will pay him nearly $36 million a year. It is a 12-year deal worth in total more than $430 million.

This follows a  $330 million deal Bryce Harper signed with the Philadelphia Phillies on March 2.

-RW