Your pay envelope

by John Richard Meader

Any farmer will tell you that it is impossible to make the varying costs of agricultural products harmonize with the theories of Marx. In raising wheat, or potatoes, a great deal depends upon the quality of the land. If the land is very good, wheat may be grown at a cost of 50 cents a bushel, and with much less labor than the farmer would expend in raising wheat oh poorer land, though the latter crop might cost from 75 cents to a dollar a bushel to raise, if not more.

It is not the cost of an article that determines its value. Its value is based primarily upon its capacity to satisfy human wants. A useless article has no exchange-value, no matter how much it has cost. An article that has gone out of fashion possesses comparatively little value, in spite of the fact that it represents the expenditure of capital as well as actual labor which was “necessary labor” at the time it was performed. The Socialists have to admit this fact—Marx also admitted it (“Capital,” p. 189)—yet they do not seem to see the inconsistency of saying that the value of an article is affected by its loss of utility, while, at the same time, asserting that “a useful article has value only because human labor ... has been embodied in it.” If they told the truth they would say, “an article upon which labor has been expended has value only because it is useful.” But this would be to admit that their whole scheme is built upon a foundation of sand.

A commodity has value, not only because it has cost time and skill to produce it, and therefore is difficult of attainment, but also for the reason that it holds the one common property of all valuable articles—utility. It is true that articles of value are seldom produced without labor. It is not true that it is labor that makes them valuable. In confessing this, Socialism acknowledges that the law of Marx is contradicted by experience. Are we Simple Simons not to see this very obvious contradiction?

Take the commodity timber—because the woods which we use in building houses and those which are used in making furniture possess radically different values.

If you were to go to a primitive country, John, you would find plenty of trees that you could cut down, without asking anybody’s permission and without paying anybody for the privilege. Suppose that you were to take a gang of men into such a forest and were to cut down a lot of trees. If you took no pains in selecting these trees, but cut various kinds of wood, you would get different prices for the timber, and these prices would not in any way depend upon the cost of production (cutting down the trees) or the expense of transportation. As you know, there is a market price for every kind of wood, yet one wood costs practically no more than another to produce, and one may be transported as cheaply as another. What does this price depend upon? Upon utility, does it not? It is the use-value of the wood that ultimately fixes its price.

Then, too, you may take the products of the arts—the books we read and the paintings we admire. Does the amount of labor-time expended in the making fix the value of these commodities? An author may devote years to writing a novel, and yet see it fall still-born from the press, whereas another novelist, in a few months, may produce a story that nets him $25,000. Does labor-time count as a factor in determining the value of our books, our pictures, our musical compositions, or our scientific discoveries?

There is still another factor to be considered, John, and that is the productive power of thought. Marx, as you would see were you to analyze the first pages of his book, “Capital,” starts off with the idea that all labor is common, manual labor. Later on, he encounters the difficulty that labor when undirected is usually unproductive. A thousand men, working without direction, will produce nothing proportionate to the amount of physical strength they expend. Put a man with brains and knowledge over them, and he will show them how to make their labor fully productive.

Even Marx recognized the fact that he must make some provision for “skilled” and “mental” labor, so he grudgingly bridged over the gap by stating that “skilled labor counts only as unskilled labor, a given quantity of skilled labor being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labor” (“Capital,” p. 11).

Socialists to-day try to deny that Marx intended to imply that the term “labor” means “average manual labor.” They will tell you, if you question them closely, that the term “labor” includes industrial effort of every kind—mental as well as physical labor. This is a worse absurdity than to say that manual labor is the source of all value. If we are to admit that “labor” includes every kind of effort, the assertion that all wealth should go to the laborers who produced it simply means that all wealth ought to go to the human race. And so it does. The only question remaining is: How can it be distributed more fairly?

This would take the very cornerstone away from the Socialist’s structure and bring it tumbling about his ears. If we do this, there is practically no room for argument left, for the number of persons who in no way contribute to the industrial progress of the world—the inheritors of wealth who are literally and positively idle—is so small that there is no reason why we should give them much serious consideration.