Time Will Run Back (23 page)

“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 convinced 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.”