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

Page 24 text:

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

Page 23 text:

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.

Page 25 text:

THE REDWOOD. wealth on the Socialistic plan would be a gross injustice, for it would give to the laborer that which is not his own and would rob from the man of ability the fruit of his own creative genius. There is in England today, however, a more thoughtful school of Socialists whose arguments are far more subtle than those proposed by the Marxian school. I refer to the Fabian society, whose intellectual headlights are such men as George Bernard Shaw, Mr. Sid- ney Webb and J. Ramsey McDonald, M. P. These men are wont to look upon Marx as the German Monists look up- on Darwin. They credit him only with the embryonic idea. His teaching was merely the nucleus of a greater, which was to evolve out of it. Economic de- terminism only reflected the material- istic doctrine of the age, they say, and it is not essential to the movement. They admit Ability as a factor in the creation of wealth and all that they de- sire is to see by a system of gradual increases in taxes the slow but sure turning over to the central government all the means of production. They ab- hor, likewise, the revolutionary meas- ures of confiscation proposed by the proponents of the popular branch of Socialism. They see a gross injustice to the laborer under the present system of production and they propose to erad- icate it by an identical system of Col- Cf. The Soc. Movement, J. R. McDonald, M. P., p. 142. lectivism in which all members of so- ciety shall share equally. But although their methods dififer the two factions are unanimous as to the ultimate goal. Likewise, although their arguments differ, they both as- sume the injustice of the present sys- tem whereby the laborer is robbed of his just deserts. Under this more recent school of So- cialism, however, the movement has been given a sudden impetus. The sub- tilty of their arguments and the unas- suming and conservative manner in which they propose to bring about their Utopia, has won many to their cause. It will not be amiss, therefore to ex- amine their line of argument and see whether or not their claims are justi- fied. The Fabians, being of a more thoughtful type than their Marxian comrades, have been forced to admit that labor is not the only source of wealth, but that Ability also is a po- tent productive agent. The trend of their reasoning therefore has been to establish a premise which will show why Ability as a factor in production is entitled to no more than labor. The arguments, of course, are many, but it will fulfill our purpose if we take a couple of the most important and ex- pose their fallacies, demonstrating that the Fabian claims of injustice are false and that the present system, though open to abuse, is at least closer to the principles of natural justice than the spectre which they propose.