WAGE-LABOUR AND WAGE-GOODS 65 or traders who sell the agricultural products, or for the big landlord or rich peasant who has a surplus to offer for sale in the open market. The traders and merchants may not necessarily pass back the higher profits to the poorer peasants, either wholly or partially. And if we analyse the position crop by crop and state by state, surplus-earning landlords and rich peasants, we would discover, do not constitute more than 10 to 15 percent of the total agrarian community. It is this minority of the peasantry, together with the trading class, who would straightaway benefit, other things remaining the same. from an increase in farm prices. Whether the rest of the agrarian community, including the landless labour, would gain, either in the same proportion or at all, from the shift in farm prices would depend upon a number of circumstances. At the root of the matter is the distinction between the value of wage-labour, the value created by wage-labour, and the price of wage-labour. In a basically free enterprise economy, irrespective of whether its overwhelming characteristics are feudal or capitalistic, the value of wage-labour is represented by the subsistence of labour. The value created by w^gc-labour would be, we all know, the entire net output. The price actually offered to wage-labour could however be somewhat altogether different; for instance, in many countries, including our own, the rate of exploitation has assumed an absurd and extreme form, and the price of wage-labour has been pushed down to below subsistence; those in control of the basic means of production, such as land in agriculture, are not prepared to offer wage-labour even the minimum wherewithal for survival. When we describe the fact that more than 50 percent of the rural population in India lives below the so-called "line of poverty" we merely express the reality of the price of wage-labour being kept below the level of subsistence in the countryside. The price of wage-labour could thus be even less than the value of wage-labour. The lower limit of ihis price is therefore, in one sense, open-ended. There is no such open-endedness as far as the upper limit is concerned, which is set by the value created by wage-labour. As long as the principal means of production remain alienated from wage-labour, it is inconceivable that the price of wage-labour would even approach anywhere near this upper limit. Would the price of wage-labour at least equal the level of subsistence? The answer would depend upon the level and movement of another price—that of wage-goods, which wage-labour