Part 10 (1/2)
Value is defined as follows by Herr Duehring ”Value is what economic goods and activities will fetch in exchange.” What they will fetch is shown ”by the price or some other equivalent, wages for example.” In other words Value is price. Or not to do Herr Duehring an injury and to show the absolute absurdity of his definition in his own language, ”Value is prices.” On page 19 he says ”Value and its prices expressed in money” and he also affirms that the same value has very different prices and therefore has different values. If Hegel had not died long ago he would hang himself out of pure jealousy, for, with all his theology, he could not have produced this value which has as many different values as it has prices. One would have to possess the confidence of Herr Duehring to begin a new and more profound treatment of political economy with the declaration that there is no difference between value and price except that one is expressed in terms of money and the other is not.
(After gentle raillery of Duehring's statements Engels proceeds.)
The actual, practical value of an object according to Herr Duehring consists in two things, first in the amount of human labor contained in it and secondly in a forcibly imposed tax. In other words value as it exists to-day is a monopoly price. If all wares have this monopoly price, as according to this theory, only two things are possible.
Either every buyer, as buyer, loses what he made as seller, for prices have only changed their names, they are really the same, everything remains as it was and the much talked of exchange value is merely imaginary, or the imposed cost represents real values, values produced by the working value-making cla.s.s, but taken by the monopolising cla.s.s, and this sum of values is simply unpaid labor. In this latter case we come, in spite of the force theory, and the compulsory taxation theory and the special exchange value theory back again to the Marxian theory of value.
The fixing of the value of a commodity by wages which is frequently confused by Adam Smith with the fixing of value by the time expended in labor has been, since the time of Ricardo, denounced by political economists and only to-day persists in popular economics. It is now the sycophants of the existing capitalistic system who declare that value is fixed by wages and therefore declare the profits of the capitalists to be higher kind of wages, wages of abstinence, in that the capitalist has not dissipated his capital, wages of superintendence, premiums on risks, etc. Herr Duehring only differs from them in that he calls profits robbery. In other words Herr Duehring founds his socialism on the worst teachings of the popular economists. His popular economics and his socialism stand or fall together.
It is clear that what a workman accomplishes and what he costs are different matters from what a machine makes and what it costs. The value which a workman makes in a day of twelve hours has nothing in common with the value of the means of life which he consumes in this working day and the periods of rest in connection with it. There may be one, three, four or seven hours of labor time incorporated in these means of livelihood according to the stage of the productivity of labor. Let us take seven hours as the necessary time for the production of them. Then Herr Duehring and the vulgar economists declare that the product of twelve hours labor has the value of the product of seven hours labor or in other words twelve is equal to seven. To make the matter more explicit, a peasant produces say twenty hectolitres of wheat in a year. During this time he consumes a sum of values which may be expressed by fifteen hectolitres. Then the twenty hectolitres have the same value as the fifteen in the same market under identical conditions. In other words 20 equals 15. And this is called political economy!
The entire development of human society from the position of savagery began from the day when the labor of a family resulted in the production of more than was necessity for its support, from the day when a part of the labor was no longer expended on mere means of living but was transformed into means of production. A surplus of labor product over and above the cost of the maintenance of labor, and the creation and increase of a social production and reserve fund out of this surplus was and is the foundation of all social, political and intellectual development. In history up to the present time this fund has been the property of a certain superior cla.s.s which has, with its possession, also the political mastery and the spiritual supremacy.
The approaching social revolution will make this social production and reserve fund that is the entire ma.s.s of raw material, instruments of production, and means of life for the first time really social property, in that it will put an end to its monopolisation by the superior cla.s.s and make it the common possession of the entire society.
It is one of two things. Suppose value shows itself in the cost of maintenance of the necessary labor, that is in present society in wages. If such is the case every worker gets the value of his product in wages and the robbery of the working cla.s.s by the capitalistic cla.s.s is an impossibility. Let it be granted that the cost of maintaining a worker in a given society is three marks. Then the daily product of the worker is, according to the popular economist, of the value of three marks. Now let us consider that the capitalist who employs this worker takes a profit on this product and sells it for four marks. Other capitalists do the same thing. But thereupon the worker can no longer maintain himself with three marks a day, it will cost him four marks. Other conditions remaining the same, wages expressed in terms of the means of life must remain the same and wages expressed in gold will rise therefore from three to four marks daily.
What the capitalists gain in the form of profit on the working cla.s.s they have to return in the form of wages. So we are just where we were at the beginning. If wages signify value, no plunder of the working cla.s.s by the capitalist is possible. But the creation of a surplus is impossible if, according to our hypothesis the workers consume as much as they produce. And since the capitalists produce no value it is impossible to see how they can live. And if such a surplus of production over consumption does exist, if such a production and reserve fund exists in the hands of the capitalists there is no other explanation possible than that the working cla.s.s uses only enough values for its own maintenance and turns over the rest of the goods which it produces to the capitalist.
On the other hand, if this production and reserve fund actually exists in the hands of the capitalist cla.s.s, if it has really come into existence through the piling up of profits, (we will leave rent out of the question for the present); it necessarily comes from the acc.u.mulated profits of the capitalist cla.s.s taken from the working cla.s.s over and above the sums paid by the capitalist cla.s.s to the working cla.s.s in the form of wages. Value therefore does not depend upon wages, but upon amount of labor. The working cla.s.s renders to the capitalist cla.s.s a greater amount of value than it receives in wages and thus the profit of capital as of all other forms of the appropriation of unpaid for products of labor is to be explained on the simple ground of the surplus value discovered by Marx.
_VI. Simple and Compound Labor._
(The argument of Duehring against which Engels here directs his efforts may be best summed up in Duehring's concluding words ”Marx in his utterances on value cannot escape the lurking ghost of highly skilled labor. The prevalent notion of the intellectual cla.s.ses has been a hindrance to him in this matter, for according to this idea it is an enormity to reckon the labor time of a barrow pusher and an architect as economic equivalents.”)
Engels thereupon says ”the pa.s.sage in the works of Marx which caused this outbreak on the part of Duehring is very short.” Marx is examining the question as to the basis of the value of commodities and answers it by the statement that it is the amount of human labor contained in them. ”This” he goes on ”is the expression of that simple labor force which belongs to the average human being without any special development. Skilled labor is a power or rather a multiple of simple labor, so that a small amount of skilled labor is equivalent to a larger amount of unskilled labor. Practice shows that this reduction to the terms of unskilled labor takes place. A commodity may be the product of skilled labor, its value may be equivalent to a product of unskilled labor skilled labor. The proportion in which different forms of labor are reduced to their general standard in unskilled labor is established by a social process going on behind the backs of the producers, and appears to them merely customary.”
Here Marx is only dealing with the value of commodities, that is of objects produced and exchanged by private producers in a society consisting of private producers producing for their own profit. He is therefore not concerned here with ”absolute value” whatever that may be but only with the value which is realised in a given form of society. This value under the given social conditions is shaped and measured by the human labor incorporated in the commodities and this human labor shows itself as the expression of simple human energy. But every piece of work is not merely an expression of simple labor force.
Very many labor products require the expenditure of more or less time, money, trouble, and acquired skill or knowledge. Do these kinds of compound labor show at the same period of time the same commodity values as simple labor, are they the expression of merely simple labor force? Evidently not. The product of an hour of compound labor is a commodity of higher, double or three times the value of a product of an hour of simple labor. The value of the product of compound labor can in this comparison be expressed through the measure of simple labor; and this reduction of compound labor is carried on by means of a social progress behind the back of the producer, by means of which can here be established according to the theory of value but not explained.
The thing which Marx states here is a simple fact which happens every day before our eyes in the present capitalistic society.
(After some invective and satire hurled at Duehring Engels proceeds:)
Let us examine with regard to equality of value a little more closely.
All labor time is of equal value, that of the barrow pusher and that of the architect. Therefore labor time and consequently labor itself has a value. But labor is the creator of all values. It is the only thing which gives the original products of nature a value in the economic sense. Value in itself is nothing but the expression in a given object of necessary, social, human labor. One might just as well speak of and fix a value to labor as speak of the value of value, of the weight, not of a specific body, but of gravity itself. Herr Duehring calls people like Owen, St. Simon and Fourier, social alchemists. When he invents a value for labor time, that is for labor, he shows that he is far below these same alchemists.
For Socialism, which will emanc.i.p.ate human labor force from its place as a commodity, the understanding that labor has no value and can have none is a matter of the greatest importance. With an understanding of it, all attempts made by Herr Duehring by means of his crude worker-socialism (Arbeitersozialismus) to regulate the division of the means of existence, as a kind of higher wages, fall to the ground.
From it there follows the broader view, since it is controlled by purely economic motives, that distribution regulates itself in the interests of production, and production is advanced in the greatest degree by a method of distribution which permits all the social departments to develop, maintain, and express their capacities to the fullest possible extent. To the ideas of the intellectuals which have come into Herr Duehring's possession, it must always seem to be an enormity that it will abolish barrow pus.h.i.+ng and architecture simultaneously as professions, and that the man who has given half an hour to architecture will also push the cart a little until his work as architect is again in demand. It would be a pretty sort of socialism which perpetuated the business of barrow-pus.h.i.+ng.
If the equality of value of labor time has the significance that workers produce equal products in equal periods of time it is evidently false, unless an average is first taken. Of two workmen at the same branch of industry the value of the product of their labor time will differ according to the intensity of labor and their respective ability. No scheme of economic equality, at least on our planet, can remedy this unfortunate state of affairs. What then is left of the equality of all and every sort of labor? Nothing but high sounding phrases which have no economic value, nothing but the evident inability of Herr Duehring to distinguish between the fixing of value by labor and the fixing of value by the wages of labor, only the ukase, which is the foundation of the new social economy, that wages shall be equal for equal amounts of labor time. Really the old French communists and Weitling had much better grounds for their equality of wages theories.
How then do we solve the whole weighty question of the higher wages of compound labor? In a society of private producers, private individuals or their families have to bear the cost of creating intellectual workers. An intellectual slave always commanded a better price, an intellectual wage worker gets higher wages. In an organized socialist society, society bears the cost and to it therefore belong the fruits, the greater value produced by intellectual labor. The laborer himself has no further claim. Whence it follows that there are many difficulties connected with the beloved claim of the worker for the full product of his toil.
_VII. Capital and Surplus Value._
(”Marx does not have the usual economic idea of capital that it is means of production already produced, but he seeks to endow it with a special dialectic history in the metamorphosis of a historical idea.
Capital is expressed in gold, it creates an historical period which has its beginning in the sixteenth century and the establishment of a world-market. Any keen economic a.n.a.lysis is impossible with such a notion. Such barren conceptions which are half historical and half logical destroys the possibility of any proper discrimination with respect to the matter.” These remarks of Duehring are answered as follows by Engels:)
According to Marx, then, capital manifested itself as gold at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is just as if anybody were to say that specie had expressed itself as cattle for three thousand years, because formerly cattle had performed the gold functions along with others. Only Herr Duehring could be guilty of such a crude and distorted expression. Marx in his a.n.a.lysis of the economic forms in which the process of the circulation of commodities takes places simply declares gold to be the last form. ”This last product of the circulation of commodities is the form in which capital first appears.
Historically capital comes with the possession of property in the form of money, as h.o.a.rds of money, merchant-capital, and usury-capital....