From Adams such enthusiasm was amazing.
“What’s the solution?” asked Peter skeptically.
“I think it would be better if I didn’t depend on memory, chief, but gave it to you exactly in Marx’s own words.”
“All right.” Peter glanced at his wrist watch. “It’s already nearly six, and I’m due for dinner at my father’s apartment. Bring that master copy tomorrow.”
Chapter 23
SO far as I can gather, chief,” began Adams, “it seems that people under capitalism were allowed to exchange commodities with each other—you can imagine the chaos!—and the question that puzzled Marx was what determined the ratio in which these commodities were exchanged? So he goes about it this way—”
He opened his master copy of Das Kapital at a bookmark he had slipped in it. “Here’s the passage:
“Let us take two commodities, wheat and iron, for example. Whatever may be their relative rate of exchange it may always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of wheat is equal to a given quantity of iron: for example, i quarter wheat = i cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that there exists a common factor of the same magnitude in two different things, in a quarter of wheat and a cwt. of iron. The two things are therefore equal to a third which is in itself neither the one nor the other. Each of, the two, so far as it is an exchange value, must therefore be reducible to that third.
“And then Marx, in searching for this common factor, does it first of all by eliminating what it is not. And, just as you have been doing, chief, he says it ‘cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of the commodities.’ And, to make a long story short, he eliminates other things, such as ‘value-in-use—whatever that may have meant—and he concludes that there remains to commodities ‘only one common property, that of being products of labor.’ “
“Did he mean,” asked Peter, “that everything people wanted or used, and everything they exchanged with each other, had to be a product of labor?”
“Yes, I suppose he did.”
“But that just isn’t so, Adams! Suppose you and I are lost in the woods. We are starving; but finally one of us finds a tree with nuts on it and the other a bush with berries. Both the nuts and the berries have value to us, and we may share them or swap them in certain ratios. But both are products of nature, not of our labor. Or suppose oil is discovered on one hectare of land and not on another. Other things being equal, the first will be worth a great deal more than the second, but no labor has gone into it.”
“But the first piece of land would not be worth any more than the second until the oil was not only discovered, chief, but pumped up, refined, transported where it was wanted, and so on. And all that requires labor. Before it were put in a form to be used, labor would have to be embodied in it.”
“The labor, if well directed, would of course add to the oil’s value, Adams, as it was brought from one stage of value to another. But the value would be there before the labor was added! Oil land is worth more than land without oil even before anyone has touched it. When the well has been sunk it is of course worth still more. The oil is worth still more after it has been refined, and still more after it has been transported to where it can be used. The point I am making is that products of nature, even before they have been transformed by labor, have some value to us, and different values from one another. Therefore being products of labor is not the only common property in the physical things people want or use—which I suppose is what Marx meant by ‘commodities.’ “
“Well, chief, I suppose Marx simply took the contribution of nature for granted, and started from there.” i67
“But another thing that occurs to me,” said Peter, “is that simply being the product of labor doesn’t necessarily give a thing value. Suppose the labor has been misapplied in producing something entirely useless? Or in producing something actually harmful? Or suppose the labor is so incompetent that it actually spoils something? ... As I don’t need to tell you, this is happening every day. In this morning’s New Truth, for example, there’s a story of the ruining of a whole herd of cows by incompetent dairy hands who over milked them or didn’t know how to milk them. And a couple of days ago careless painters in calcimining the ceiling of the public library got a lot of the stuff on the books. And a week ago, a worker called into the Kremlin to repair a fine table drove a nail in the leg and split it down the middle.”
“I don’t recall, chief, that Marx anywhere says anything about incompetent or careless work, or work that results in more injury than improvement, but he does allow for misdirected or inefficient work—But you’d better let me explain.”
“Go on. “
“I began by quoting Marx to the effect that commodities have only one common property—that of being products of labor. Well, he goes on to explain that it is this that determines what he calls their Value,’ or the ratios in which they exchange. Let me read: ‘The value of one commodity,’ he wrote, ‘is related to the value of any other commodity as the working time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. As values, all commodities are only specific quantities of crystallized working time.’ For example, chief, if a unit of one commodity required five hours’ work, it would be worth, and it would exchange for, five like units of another commodity that required only one hour’s work to produce each unit.”
“And if a man dawdled over the first commodity so that he took ten hours to produce it, Adams, would a unit of it be worth ten units of the second commodity?”
“No, chief; that’s just what I’m coming to. Marx was very shrewd about this. He specified that it was only the socially necessary working time that counted. That’s what I meant when I said that he allowed for and discounted misdirected or inefficient work.”
“Did Marx ever define what he meant by ‘socially necessary’ labor time?”
“Yes. Let me read you his definition. The socially necessary working time is—’the working time required to produce a value-in-use under the normal conditions of production, and with the degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in a given society.’ “
“As I understand that, Adams, by the ‘socially necessary’ working time Marx means merely the average working time that prevails in any society.”
“Right.”
“So if bricklayers on the overall average lay 60 bricks an hour, he considers that the socially necessary number, even though the highest third among them lay 120 bricks an hour, and a brick-laying genius can lay 360 bricks an hour?”
“Right.”
“So by ‘socially necessary,’ Marx does not really mean what is demonstrably necessary, but merely the average?”
“I suppose your interpretation is correct, chief.”
“For if, with proper training and skill and spirit, men can be taught to lay 360 bricks in one hour, then it really isn’t necessary for anyone to take six hours to do it?”
Adams thought a minute. “No-o-o-o,” he drawled, “but maybe Marx just used an unfortunate term there. For by an hour’s labor he really meant nothing more than an hour’s unskilled labor, and an average hour of unskilled labor is, I suppose, even less than an average hour of all labor.”
“Suppose,” put in Peter, “that one man in one hour produces six times as much as the average man in one hour. Surely the product of his hour’s work isn’t worth as little as the average man’s product! Or suppose a highly skilled or endowed man produces something in an hour that the average man hasn’t the skill to produce at all?”
“You must give me a chance to answer that, chief. Marx doesn’t say that the product of skilled labor equals merely the product of the same amount of hours of unskilled labor. Let me read you what he does say. When he talks of working time, he tells us, he is talking of ‘simple average labor/ ‘Skilled labor/ he continues, ‘counts only as concentrated or rather multiplied unskilled labor, so that a small quantity of skilled labor
is equal to a larger quantity of unskilled labor.’”
“That doesn’t make any sense to me, Adams; because—”
“You’d better let me continue with his explanation, chief.” Adams read:
“That this reduction is constantly made, experience shows. A commodity may be the product of the most highly skilled labor, but its value makes it equal to the product of unskilled labor, and represents therefore only a definite quantity of unskilled labor. The different proportions in which different kinds of labor are reduced to unskilled labor as their unit of measure are fixed by a social process beyond the control of the producers, and therefore seem given to them by tradition.”
“Let’s go back to the point where I interrupted,” said Peter. “It seems to me that Marx is arguing in a complete circle. Under capitalism, I gather, people were permitted to exchange commodities with each other, and it was found that these commodities exchanged with each other in certain ratios. Now the problem that Marx set himself to solve was: What determined these ratios? And he answered: the amount of working time embodied in each of the commodities. But then he found, say, that one man, A, worked one day to produce a given unit of commodity X, and another man, B, worked one day to produce a given unit of commodity Y; but that as a matter of fact this one unit of X did not exchange against one unit of Y, but ‘experience showed’ that it took ten units of X to exchange for one unit of Y. So Marx then said that one day of B’s work ‘counts as’ ten days of A’s work.” “Yes,” replied Adams; “because B’s work is skilled and A’s work is unskilled.”
“But all that comes down to in plain Marxanto,” said Peter, “is that Marx isn’t measuring the value of the commodity by the working time, but by the relative skill embodied in it—or rather, by a complex measuring rod of working time multiplied by skill.”
“He reduces skill to working time, chief.”
“But how does he discover, Adams, by what multiplier or divisor to make the reduction? He does it by looking at the actual ratios in which the commodities produced by the labor actually do exchange, So his explanation is wrong; and he tries to justify it by arguing in a complete circle. He tells us that commodities exchange in proportion to the relative working times embodied in them. But then he is forced to admit that ten units of X commodity, for example, in which ten days’ work have been embodied, exchange in fact for only one unit of commodity Y in which only one day’s work has been embodied. And he glosses over the contradiction by blandly telling us that one day’s labor of Comrade B, who made commodity Y, ‘counts as’ ten days’ labor of Comrade A, who made commodity X—because, forsooth, ‘experience shows that it does! But what experience really shows is that the exchange ratio of commodities was not measured—certainly not exclusively measured—by the hours of working time, but by other factors, one of which is relative skills.”
“But isn’t it true, chief, that skilled labor does count as concentrated or multiplied unskilled labor?”
“But if it does, Adams, Marx should have explained why it does. This was the real problem that he had to solve. He simply said that it does—because ‘experience shows’ that it does. As a matter of fact, experience shows that commodities don’t exchange in relation simply to the working time embodied in them. Experience shows that Marx is wrong.”
“But Marx didn’t say,” persisted Adams, “that one hour of skilled labor actually was two or five or ten hours of unskilled labor, but merely that it counted as that in fixing exchange relations.”
“It’s wonderful what you could do with that phrase ‘counts as,’” replied Peter, “once you got fairly started. For example, you ask the manager of a collective, ‘How many chickens have you got on your farm?’ And he answers, ‘I figure we have a hundred and fifty.’ So you go around there and count them, and you find they have only fifty chickens. ‘But,’ says the manager, ‘we also have a cow.’ ‘What has that got to do with it?’ you ask. ‘Surely,’ says the manager, ‘you will admit that one cow counts as a hundred chickens!’ Or suppose you want to prove that commodities exchange in accordance with their relative weight in pounds. You find, as a matter of fact, that one pound of gold exchanges for 30,000 pounds of pig iron. But you were speaking, you say, emulating Marx, only of ‘common, average’ pounds, and the pounds in gold ‘count as’ concentrated or multiplied common average pounds of the kind found in pig iron. In fact, you continue triumphantly, each pound in gold ‘counts as’ 30,000 pounds in pig iron, because ‘experience shows’ that it does! A mysterious ‘social process beyond the control of the producers’ shows that it does!”
“I think I do have an explanation, chief, though Marx doesn’t explicitly give it.”
“What?”
“Well, we’ve got to take into account the length of time it takes a man to acquire a skill. For example, an unskilled bricklayer may lay only 60 bricks an hour, and a skilled bricklayer may lay 180 bricks an hour; but it may have taken him two hours to acquire his skill for every hour he works.”
“Ingenious of you, Adams, but not convincing. If you think a few minutes, you will find that your explanation raises more problems than it answers. You don’t seriously believe that a skilled bricklayer devotes two-thirds of his working life merely to acquiring his skill while producing nothing in the process! You don’t seriously believe that he lays no bricks at all during the time he is learning to lay bricks! You don’t seriously believe that he lays all his bricks in the last third of his life! Yet that is what your example supposes. You would have to prove that, on the average, skilled workers, merely to acquire their skill, have had to devote a percentage of their working life exactly proportionate to their present increased rate of production over unskilled workers. For example, you would have to prove that skilled workmen who produce twice as much in a day as unskilled workmen have devoted the whole first half of their working lives merely to acquiring their skill—that skilled workmen who produce five times as much in a day as unskilled workmen have devoted four-fifths of their working lives merely to acquiring their skill, and so on. As a matter of fact, there is no reason whatever to suppose that any such proportions hold. All experience, in fact, refutes it.”
Peter stopped to light a cigarette.
“And here we come to a crucial point,” he continued. “Neither Marx’s theory as it stands, or as amended by you, makes any allowance for the enormous differences, not only in training but in native gifts and endowments, between individuals. A good bricklayer, with no more training, may lay twice as many bricks a day as a bad one. And he will lay them so that they won’t have to be broken off and relaid by somebody else. But the work of an inspired architect, who designs the building that the bricklayers work on, is worth many times as much as the work even of the most skillful bricklayer. And this doesn’t depend on the greater length of time that the architect has taken to get his training. His value, if he is a first-rate architect, will be many times as much as this greater training period. And if he is incompetent, uninspired, without sense or taste, his work will have an actual negative value, regardless of the length of his training period.”
Adams thoughtfully took a few pinches of snuff. “I wish Marx were here to answer you,” he said at last. “I can’t.” “I have only begun,” said Peter, warming up. “I am an apt pupil, and I am now going to use against Comrade Adams the same arguments that Comrade Adams recently thought up against me. For, as so often happens, it seems that in the heat of argument we have reversed our positions. It was you who pointed out to me, when we were talking of collective farms and manufacturing, that it wasn’t labor alone that produced crops, but the combination and co-operation of land and nature and farm implements and nature. So the same man, for example, could produce twice or ten times as much with a mechanical tractor as with a simple hoe. And the same man with machinery could produce a hundred times as many pairs of shoes as he could if he had only a few hand tools.”
“I will have to admit that I was right, chief.”
“You c
onvinced me that you were. But if you were right, Marx must be wrong. It is not ‘simple average unskilled’ labor time that determines either the quantity of production or the value of that production to the community; it is the cooperation of a complex set of factors—of labor time, labor skill, land, nature, and the tools of production.”
Both sat for a time in silence. Peter tried to blow perfect smoke rings.
“Well,” he said finally, “supposing Marx had been right in holding that the quantity or value of production could be measured solely by the labor time necessary to produce. What could we have done with his theory, anyway?”
“You were looking, chief, you remember, for some common unit of measurement for different commodities, so that we could find out how great our total overall production was, compare it with previous totals, decide whether it was better to produce more of commodity A at the expense of producing less of B, and so on.”
“That’s right.”
“Well,” continued Adams, “it occurred to me that if labor hours were the right unit of measurement, we could stop issuing ration tickets to workers for particular commodities, and pay them instead in labor certificates. Let’s say, for example, that we paid them one certificate for every hour worked. If a worker put in the customary twelve-hour day, he would receive twelve labor certificates per day. Then a value would be put upon each commodity depending upon the number of working hours it took to produce it. Then each worker, at the end of the day or week—or, for that matter, whenever he pleased—could turn in his labor certificates for whatever commodities he most wanted.”
“Very ingenious,” said Peter. “But what would be the advantages?”
“The great advantage would be, chief, that we would get the freedom of consumption you recently spoke about. The individual consumer would not have to take goods in the proportions in which the government allotted them to him, but only in the proportions that he himself preferred. We would therefore be satisfying more needs or desires, and presumably we would be producing goods with a greater total value to the community.... That was what we wanted, wasn’t it?”