University of Santa Clara - Redwood Yearbook (Santa Clara, CA)

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THE REDWOOD. lows that the only way to wealth for the individual is through his own per- sonal labor. His work will not be forc- ed upon him but will be necessary in order for him to live. They imply also the abolition of private enterprise, of commerce and industry, of banks and financial corporations. The central aim and pivotal point of Socialism is distributive justice. While it seeks to increase production by more efficient organization it makes its cen- tral thought the JUST DISTRIBU- TION OF THE PRODUCT. In what this just distribution con- sists Socialists themselves differ. Some advocate a distribution according to real needs, others say that justice de- mands distribution according to the merit of the service rendered and still others say that equality meets the de- mands of justice. With these minor divisions we need not concern our selves. Suffice it that all are unani- mous in their opinion that the present manner of distribution is unjust and therefore they advocate a radical change. To reduce our idea of Socialism to a concise statement we may now say that SOCIALISM IS THE PROPOSAL THAT ALL PROPERTY SHOULD BE NATIONALLY OWNED THAT IT MAY MORE JUSTLY BE DIS- TRIBUTED. It rests upon two as- sumptions; first, that the present man- ner, of distribution is unjust; second that Socialism is the only remedy for the frightful human calamities which attend the present order of society. For the first of these two assump- tions Karl Marx, the Socialist philo- sopher and founder of the system, brought forward in the main one great argument. With it he attempted to show that the capitalists by an unjust system of production were deriving their immense profits from the unpaid, stolen, exploited labor of the working man. This argument was no other than the famous Marxian theory of value and surplus value, which Social- ists are wont to propound as an unas- sailable axiom. It is the basic doctrine of Socialism. The knowledge of the theory of value and surplus value is the beginning of all true Socialistic knowl- edge. Following the English economists, Adam Smith (1776) and David Ricar- do (1817), Marx distinguished value into value-in-use and value-in-ex- change. Value-in-use, he said, is the capability of an economic good to sat- isfy some human want. Value-in-ex- change is the ratio in which commo- dities are exchangable for one another and is measured by price. Now Adam Smith and the orthodox economists following him had conclud- ed that the production of wealth was the result of land, capital and labor, thus recognizing labor as the only hu- man element involved. From this prern- ise Marx concluded that the exchange Cf. Indust. Rev.

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THE ECONOMIC ASPECT OF MODERN SOCIALISM HE word Socialism and its significance has been sub- ject to no end of abuse throughout its brilliant ca- reer, both by its advocates and opponents. The abuse has been caused by much misunder- standing and a greater amount of ignor- ance of the motives and aims of the true proponents. Anti-Socialists have violently attacked doctrines which have been promulgated by indiv- idual Socialists, doctrines given out by them as Socialistic but which have been in reality the illusions of their own befuddled brains. Socialists again have vituperated their opponents for thus misrepresenting the issue and hence a great amount of useless discussion has resulted. However, it has effected a closer scrutiny into this subtle issue on the part of the casual thinker. Men of thought throughout the world have come to the realization that Socialism represents far more than the disgrunt- led voicings of society ' s cast-oflfs, that the Appeal to Reason is a poor rep- resentative of a movement of such in- ternational portent and that arrayed in its ranks are some of the keenest in- tellects of the day. Although Socialists themselves dis- agree in many details and though the term itself is indiscriminately used to signify a variety of more or less re- stricted political and social revolutions, still there is something in essence to which it may be truthfully said all So- cialists will agree. What essential political and social changes do the Socialists of America, England, Germany and of every coun- try agitated by them seek? What few principles are there upon which they are all unanimous? With these two norms, as it were, to refer to we may be sure to arrive at those principles which constitute the sum total of the modern movement and our own dis- cussion, then, will apply to all alike and with equal force. Thus restricted we may predicate of Socialism the three following tenets: 1. The state is to take over the whole of capital or producers ' wealth which includes all the means of pro- duction. 2. The production and distribution of goods shall be organized by the whole people collectively. The gov- ernment will therefore be purely demo- cratic and the officials removable at will. 3. The people collectively is sole proprietor. The individual owns only what he uses for his own consumption and cannot use it to produce it for others. From these three statements it fol-

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THE EEDWOOD. value of any commodity is the result of the human labor and time spent up- on it. Thus reasons the father of Scien- tific Socialism : Let us take two kinds of merchan- dise; e. g., wheat and iron. Whatever be their ratio of exchange it can always be expressed by the equation one bushel of wheat equals X pounds of iron. This means that an equal amount of something common to both is con- tained in two different things. Both are equal to some third quantity which in itself is neither the one nor the oth- er. But each of the two, in as far as it is value and exchange, must be re- solveable into this third element If we abstract the use value of merchandise it retains but one quality, the quality of being the product of la- bor. Nothing remains but the same ghost-like actuality, a mere crystaliza- tion of human labor without distinc- tion A value in use or an ob- ject has value only because human la- bor in the abstract is embodied or ma- terialized in it. But how are we to measure the amount of its value? By the amount of ' value-creating sub- stance, ' i. e., LABOR CONTAINED IN IT. t Marx admits that there can be no exchange value unless the commodity has a use value, as, e. g., a paper shoe. Since it has no use it can have no ex- change value despite the amount of labor that has been expended upon it. tCapital, K. Marx. Vol. 1, p. 3, 4, S. But for all other purposes he held VALUE IN EXCHANGE IS EN- TIRELY INDEPENDENT OF VAL- UE IN USE. As stated above, his con- clusion was that the exchange value, measured by price, of any economic good was determined by the time and labor embodied in it, the standard being the average time taken by the average laborer or as Marx termed it, the so- cially necessary labor time. These few principles of the Marx- ian system are the foundation of his theory of surplus value. Through the discovery of surplus value Marx claim- ed to have exposed the outrageous ex- ploitation of the laboring classes and the manner in which the bourgeiosie were robbing the working man of his own just deserts and hence he deduced the injustice of the present system of production. The principle of surplus value is best demonstrated by a simple example. B. is a manufacturer (or capitalist as you choose to call him). He makes, let us say, hats, socially useful objects and whose exchange value, according to Marx, is the result of the time and la- bor spent upon them. B. sells his year- ly output for $90,000.00. Let us say for the sake of illustration that one- third of this amount or $30,000.00 was required for raw materials, machinery and incidental expenses. Another one- third or $30,000.00 additional was paid to labor for service rendered. Now this leave a balance of $30,000.00 clear prof- it for the capitalist. Marx called this