Do you know what he will tell you? He will use a lot of words rounded out into more or less eloquent periods, but, when you attempt to analyze what he has said, you will find that all his wisdom could have been expressed in a single sentence. In plain English, he tells you that your request for details is nothing more or less than “a mark of ignorance.” He wants you to believe that Socialism’s plan will be all right for everybody, because, as the old negro said, “it jes’ works out so.”
Well, perhaps it will! Let us see.
To test the truth of this theory, we must tackle one of the most difficult problems that we shall be called upon to consider. But I think, if we are patient, we shall be able to get to the bottom of Marx’s complicated methods of reasoning, and so show that even the promise to ascertain the full value of the worker’s labor—to say nothing of the detail of giving it to him afterwards—is one of the most glaring absurdities in the whole Socialist scheme.
Marx tells us that value is determined by labor.
What does he mean?
He means that the value of a commodity is fixed by the labor that is put into it. This is all right as far as this statement goes, but it does not help us very much in determining the value of a particular commodity. Before we can know what a commodity is worth, we must know (according to Marx) what it cost to produce the mental and physical energy that was used in making it. To do this, we must first know the total cost of all the commodities which the worker consumed during the period when he was performing this particular task.
You know the old problem of the hen and the egg—which was first? The Socialist’s labor-value puzzle is much more perplexing, because, in addition to a lot of other things, you are called upon to find out which was first, the worker or the commodity which he consumed—the clothes he wore, the food he ate, the bed in which he slept while acquiring the strength for the work that produced this commodity.
If you were called upon to answer this question, to fix the value of even a single article, you would find the task anything but an easy one. Can you imagine what will happen when the government functionaries sit down to figure out this problem for every kind of article that is sold—anywhere in the world?
But, don’t imagine that their task ends here. When they have once succeeded in getting this puzzle solved, they will next be called upon to find out how many persons have contributed their labor toward the production of each and all of the commodities that have entered into the transaction.
Benedict Elder, in exposing this particular absurdity of Socialism in The Common Cause (September, 1912), illustrated his argument by showing the difficulties that the Socialist statisticians will face when they are called upon to find the value of the labor necessary in producing an ordinary pin. As it is difficult to obtain a more striking example, we may well follow Mr. Elder’s calculations.