The wages-fund doctrine was a staple of what Marx called vulgar political economy. It offered a pseudo-scientific explanation of why it was futile or even counter-productive for workers to form into trade unions to demand higher wages.
In *Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital *(1825) Thomas Hodgskin refuted the doctrine with the counter-claim that "the effects attributed to a stock of commodities, under the name of circulating capital, are caused by co-existing labour." In the late 1860, John Stuart Mill's friend, William Thornton, also refuted the wages-fund doctrine. His arguments persuaded Mill to recant the doctrine. The wages-fund doctrine was defunct. Or was it? John Cairnes attempted to rescue the doctrine from Thornton's refutation. In the course of his rebuttal, he employed the *ceteris paribus* clause liberally (that's a pun). Alfred Marshall adopted the *ceteris paribus* clause as a mainstay of static marginal utility analysis. Superficially, the "other things being the same" clause may seem innocuous, even vacuous. But it is precisely its ambiguity and vacuity that has made it a vehicle for resurrecting the reactionary zombie of the wages-fund. In "*Ceteris paribus*, Dr. Jekyll tans his own Hyde <http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2014/09/ceteris-paribus-dr-jekyll-tans-his-own.html>" I review some recent discussion of the *ceteris paribus* clause and re-examine the role of the ambiguous clause in the debate between Thornton and Cairnes over the wages-fund doctrine. -- Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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