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

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THE REDWOOD. remaining portion surplus value. The entire $90,000.00 was a result of time and labor, he said, therefore the $30,- 000 which the capitalist took was pro- duced and earned by the laborers them- selves. The capitalist had worked not more than four hours a day, yet by an unfair system of distribution he confis- cated one-third of the entire earnings. Marx proposed to put an end to this un- just system by placing the means or tools of production in the hands of the government and to distribute this sur- plus value among the workers who cre- ated it. Labor-time was to be the stan- dard and in the case of a professional worker or skilled laborer, he would re- ceive according to the time spent in education or apprenticeship. The principle that all wealth is a re- sult of the labor of the average ma- jority still forms the basis of popular Socialism. Therefore to this funda- mental tenet let us turn our attention. The theory of the injustice of the ap- propriation of surplus value and the So- cialistic conclusion of the exploitation of the working classes, rests directly upon -the Marxian theory of value. To assail the foundation then will be to de- stroy the superstructure simultaneous- ly. Marx, it will be recalled, main- tained that exchange value was entire- ly independent of use value except inas- much as no article could be sold unless it had some value and use. But for all other purposes the two were distinct. Thus the exchange value, i. e., the price the good brings is determined solely by the labor crystallized in that article. But let us suppose that a merchant brings from the forest of South Amer- ica several shiploads of different kinds of wood to some European port. In the forests of South America the wood has no exchange value, for any one there may have all he wants by the mere taking. At the European port, the wood immediately has a high ex- change value. Now, according to Marx, the standard of this value will be the amount of labor, time, -expense and cost of transportation which has brought the wood to the present port. But this cannot be, for then all the wood, con- veyed would sell at the same price, which is far from being the case. Cedar and mahogany, abstracting from the labor expended upon it will always bring a greater exchange value or price than pine or birch. Thus Social- ists must admit that USE plays just as important a part in the fixing of ex- change value as labor and time. In fact a general estimate of the use- fulness of an article will administer more toward the fixing of exchange val- ue than the labor embodied in it. A good bottle of wine will always bring a higher price than a bottle of poor wine despite the fact that more time and labor might have been spent in produc- ing the latter. Why does fruit from the same orchard and the same trees sell at a variety of prices? Or coal from the same mine? Because utility is the determining factor, entirely in- Adapted from Soc, V. Cathrein.

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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

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THE REDWOOD. dependent of the labor and time con- sumed in producing them. Marx therefore is unjustified in drawing the conclusion that all wealth is produced by labor alone for labor and time are not the only factors which bring about the exchange value of a given economic good. Utility plays even a more important part. But to admit that utility is a factor as well as labor involves the Socialists in an inextricable contradiction. For to admit utility as a factor is to admit those factors that administer to utility. In the preceding illustration it was B. who foresaw the utility, who devised the means of satisfying it, who risked his capital in the commercial venture. It was he who gave work to thousands of men whose labor would have been valueless without his direc- tive oversight. His was a labor quite disproportionate with that of the man who checked freight. B ' s work called for a grade of superior intelligence which cannot be reduced to a question of time spent in acquiring. And this suggests another and even greater difficulty to the Socialist, name- ly the part played by ability in the cre- ation of wealth. There are various or- ders of labor, mental and manual, some more useful to society than others and therefore more valuable. Labor would be useless had it not some superior di- rective power. It would be as a mighty machine powerless to move without some outside motive force. Consider for example the greatest engineering achievement of modern times, the Pa- nama Canal. This work is doubtless crystallized labor, as Marx terms it, but it is not in its distinctive features, crystallized labor as such. It is crys- tallized science, chemistry, mathematics and in short it is crystallized knowledge and intellect of such high calibre as not to be found existing in one mind out of ten thousand and labor is only effective in the production of such an undertak- ing inasmuch as it submits itself to the guidance of the intellectual leaders who conceived it. To reduce this higher type of labor, as Socialists propose, to a question of average time spent in acquiring it is foolhardy. How long may I ask would it have taken the ordinary man to in- vent the electric light, the telephone or the spinning jenny? How long an ap- prenticeship would the average man need before he could give to the world the serums of modern medicine, the steam engine of Watt or the treasures of literature and so in every walk of life? Nature has so constituted man that she has established an equality of her own and it is puerile to attempt to reduce all value to labor and all labor to time. All wealth IS NOT produced by la- bor alone and value IS NOT a result of of labor and time. Hence the entire theory of surplus value and the unjust accumulation of capital must necessar- ily collapse as these are but deductions from the theory of value. On the other hand an equal ■distribution of