1 Accumulating misery. Wages, productivity and immiseration of workers Maurizio Donato ° The notable attention paid in recent years to the changes in income distribution (Milanovic 2011, Piketty 2014, Deaton 2015) can be used correctly if the increasing inequalities are considered as a consequence and not as a cause of the crisis. In particular, consider together the trends of labour productivity and that of real wages, gives us an indirect indicator of the growth in labour exploitation that did not prevent the outbreak of the crisis still unresolved. Wages at the subsistence level For Karl Marx, the word 'misery' does not indicate absolute poverty, having clarified in the Book 1 of Capital (in particular in sections 3 and 4 of chapter 23) that the law of the immiseration of the working class is not contradicted by the possibility that workers' wages grow during capital accumulation, at least to a certain extent. In his analysis, Marx distinguishes three definitions of wage. First, and at a more immediate level, the wage represents the amount of money a worker receives from his employer: it is the nominal or 'monetary' wage. But, in a world where the capitalists are able to decide on quantity and production prices, we can not content ourselves with considering nominal wages, but we must consider the amount of goods and services that wages are able to buy, that is, real wages. Fig. 1 Average Hourly Earning of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees: Total Private Year-over-Year Usa (1964 – 2012) source: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) What is shown in Figure 1 is the rate of change in nominal wages of workers in the US: fifteen years of ° University of Teramo, Faculty of Law, May, 24, 2017, draft, comments welcome, mdonato@unite.it