Wages before capitalism.
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One sometimes asks what of wages prior to capitalism?
There were those in previous societies who received wages for work, while society was founded on slavery, serfdom, or other related systems.
They were paid, i.e. for filling posts (bureaucratic imperial China), putting out fires, architectural projects using either slaves or freemen, etc.
Yet these were not wage-slavery societies. Even so, they were paid for their labour, whilst the purchaser enjoyed the fruits or benefited from the service (its “surplus value”).
How are we to pigeon-hole this role?
Well, the key thing is how central to the existence of that society wages were. For example, a Saxon peasant getting paid to work over summer, but who still had access to his own land and the commons/waste is very different from a nineteenth century agricultural labourer (and even there, some very strange and convoluted customs and practices limited the labour markets).
ISTR somewhere Marx mentions mercenaries as the first proletarians, but obviously, they would be part and parcel of the chattel slave antique societies or feudalisms they sold their labour power in.
They were marginal to the reproduction of the social system.
The expression Prole comes from the Roman Society, and it was when the father had to sell his children in exchange for an economic remuneration
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