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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