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The article deals with the analyses proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of the movement of wages within the dynamics of capitalism, and the question of the “impoverishment” of workers, particularly between the 1840s and the 1860s. It shows that while Engels never clearly predicted “absolute” or “relative” impoverishment, Marx, in his writings of the 1860s and after, maintains the thesis of a decline in “relative wages”, but that he no longer predicted a decline in real wages over a long period of time and did not formulate any “law” of “increasing misery” for the proletariat.