High wages are a transitory monopoly that disappears once new production methods spread.

Evidence

It is an obvious reflection that so-called high wages are a transitory form of remuneration. Adaptation to the new methods of production and work cannot take place simply through social compulsion. This is a “prejudice” which is widespread in Europe and even more so in Japan, which cannot fail before long to have serious consequences for the physical and psychic health of the workers. It is, furthermore, a prejudice which has its roots only in the endemic unemployment which has been a feature of the post-war period. If the situation were “normal”, the apparatus of coercion needed to obtain the desired result would involve more than just high wages. Coercion has therefore to be ingeniously combined with persuasion and consent. This effect can be achieved, in forms proper to the society in question, by higher remuneration such as to permit a particular living standard which can maintain and restore the strength that has been worn down by the new form of toil. But no sooner have the new methods of work and production been generalised and diffused, the new type of worker been created universally and the apparatus of material production further perfected, no sooner has this happened than the excessive “turnover” has automatically to be restricted by widespread unemployment, and high wages disappear. … In reality American high-wage industry is still exploiting a monopoly granted to it by the fact that it has the initiative with the new methods. Monopoly wages correspond to monopoly profits. But the monopoly will necessarily be first limited and then destroyed by the further diffusion of the new methods both within the United States and abroad (compare the Japanese phenomenon of low-priced goods), and high wages will disappear along with enormous profits. Also it is well known that high wages are of necessity connected with a labour aristocracy and are not granted to all American workers. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1141

Categorization

• XREF: This touches the same American high-wage / labour-aristocracy analysis that later critical work on Fordism and empire draws on; connects to how economic dominance is tied to capital-intensive industrial method advantage.