CHAPTER IV
HOW THE “ROBBING” IS DONE
My dear Mr. Smith,
After asserting that labor produces all value, and “showing” that the laborer receives but a very small portion of the value which he produces, Marx tells us that this unpaid-for labor—the labor-strength and time of which the worker is robbed—is used by the Capitalist Class (Marx’s term for the employer) in the further robbery of the worker. This unpaid-for labor Marx calls “surplus value,” and he includes under this term everything that the worker does not get in his own pay-envelope—dividends, interest, rents and profits of all kinds.
Of course, nobody will deny that “surplus value”—or, more correctly, profit—may exist in industry. If the employer could not reap more from the industry than the mere equivalent of wages paid, it would not be to his interest to keep on paying wages. But the “surplus value” to which I refer, and the thing that Marx means when he talks about “surplus value,” are entirely different.
To admit that Marx is right in his definition of surplus value, we must first come to the conclusion that the worker is entitled to all the value that is produced, and, as we have already seen, this is not so. If it is not so, what has become of Marx’s surplus-value theory? There may be industrial injustices; there are many instances in which employers fail to pay those who work for them a just wage. I am willing to admit that there are numerous cases of this kind. If I thought it would add to the strength of my argument to particularize, I could name many unjust employers. But it would do no good. Between the abuses committed by individual capitalists and the “awful crimes of capitalism” which Socialism depicts, there is a difference as great as the distance from pole to pole.
According to Marx’s theory, if a laborer can produce something equal to the amount of his wage in six hours of work, the value of the product which he turns out during the other six hours in his work-day is stolen from him. “The extra six hours,” says Marx, “I shall call surplus labor, which realizes itself in a surplus product having a surplus value” (“Capital,” p. 178).
Have I made this clear, John? Do you see what Marx is driving at—that, when you are helping your employer to pay his rent, the interest on the money he has borrowed that he might keep you at work, the dividends to his stockholders, or the profit to himself, you are helping him to rob you—actually contributing to the robbery of yourself?
The soap-box orator will talk to you by the hour about surplus value. He will tell you that it makes no difference how much money there is in your pay-envelope. So long as it does not contain every cent of your employer’s profit, you are being “robbed.” “No wage can ever be fair compensation for a day’s work!” he shouts. “Before there can be justice on earth, the making of goods for profit must come to an end, for this is the ‘tap-root’ from which all the evils of Society develop. No dividends! No Interest! No Rents! No Profits! In a word, no Surplus Value!”
Marx, like the soap-boxer on the corner, includes all profits in the category of robbery and exploitation. He admits that labor can do nothing without capital, but he contends that capital itself is the product of past labor and, therefore, ought rightfully to belong to the laborers of the present day. “Capital,” he says, “is dead labor, that, vampire-like, lives by sucking living labor” (“Capital,” p. 134).
In this we have the assumption that all labor is performed by “laborers” of the propertyless class, and that all capital is owned by “capitalists.”