File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-08-17.000, message 45


Subject: LTV And practical politics 
Date: Thu, 04 Aug 94 10:32:48 +0100
From: wpc-AT-cs.strath.ac.uk



Philip asks what practical political significance the LTV has.
It should be remembered that in the period of the rise of 
the socialist movement in the late 19th and early 20th century,
propaganda based on the labour theory of value was an essential
element.

Here in Glasgow, John Maclean, a socialist school teacher used to hold
public lectures on the subject attended by hundreds of workers.
By providing a clear explanation of exploitation in the way that
no other theory can, this basic educational work laid the foundations
for a strong and class concious proletarian movement. 

The same story could be repeated for a number of key industrial cities.
The labour theory of value is and has since before Marx been the
foundation of working class economics.

If it is abandoned, and the idea put forward that value is created
either by the genius of financial speculators or by some inate 
productive power of capital, then there is no effective rebuttal
possible to the claims of business that capital is entitled to a
fair return on its investments. Once a socialist government accepts
that premise, the interests of employed class must perforce be
sacrificed to those of the employing class.

The labour theory of value as understood by workers, always had the
strong moral implication that as Burns put it `were aw Jock Tamsons bairns',
we are all equal. The implications of this are not only that 
labour is the only legitimate source of income, but that there is
no reason why one person should be paid more than another unless
they are demonstrably working harder or more productively.

It was a basic part of the original socialist message that people
would be paid in terms of vouchers for work done. Not only was this
clear in Marxs critique of the Gotha program, it was if one may use
the phrase, the common currency of classical socialism.

The abandonment of this position, which Allin Cotterell has argued 
originated in the first decade of this century with Kautsky and
was continued in the USSR, greatly weakened the simplicity and
comprehensibility of the socialist message.

Beyond this, it left the new socialist economies with no rational
calculus of economic costs. (Von Mises original argument had conceeded
that labour values might do this.) But in the absence of a calculation
based upon labour values, prices became increasingly irrational and
detached from the law of value. Stalin bemoaned this in 1952, but 
came up with no effective proposals to remedy it. All subsequent
critiques of the organisation of the socialist economy were based
on a conceptual foundation laid by our opponents, and if implemented could
only lead in the disasterous direction that they have.

At a more mundane level, I was driven to do my recent work on the
empirical validity of the LTV by events that occured during the 
last UK election. I aided the local CP candidate in his distribution
of literature. I contained the usual leftist platitudes, taken over
probably without realising it from Trotsky that capitalism could no
longer afford welfare reforms. I thougth that this was manifestly false,
and did some work on calculating the effective rate of surplus value
in the economy to show this. The point is that over the years since
the conservatives came to power, the number of minuites in the hour
worked by employees for their own benefit had fallen from 40 mins per
hour to about 25 mins. The upper classes were never better able to
pay for reforms than at present!



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