High wages compel the state to regulate workers’ private spending

Evidence

But high wages are a double-edged weapon. It is necessary for the worker to spend his extra money “rationally” to maintain, renew and, if possible, increase his muscular-nervous efficiency and not to corrode or destroy it. Thus the struggle against alcohol, the most dangerous agent of destruction of labouring power, becomes a function of the state. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1120

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s biopolitics — the state’s management of population health as an economic necessity — carried forward into exclusionary governance.

Related

• High wages require state discipline to keep workers spending rationally (similarity 0.93)