Something on Labour Theory of Value

 

To the working class, a  lesson should be clear. Unless they organise to take and control these great social forces, they will soon be the hopeless serfs of gigantic monopolies embracing whole continents. What are the workers doing about it as their masters organise into larger and still larger corporations, nationally and internationally. We are faced with the greatest aggregations of capital the world has ever seen.  They must resolve that socialism is an issue to be decided now, in the immediate present.

Many allege that Marx is out of date. The real fact is that the capitalists and CEOs are aware of the truth of the labour law of value with their continual and unceasing efforts are made to reduce the time taken to produce commodities. It is not the price-fixing that we see at work specially in the monopolistic corporations. It is the cost-cutting schemes and planning to so increase output per man that less labour is embodied in each article, thus enabling them to outsell their rivals and increase their profits.

A business that cannot invest enough capital to install the most up-to-date technology cannot compete with the efficiency and labour-saving methods of others. If it was simply a matter of will to charge higher prices there would be nothing new or modern about the super-capitalists. All sellers have the will to get the highest price the market will bear, but to-day, as well as a century ago, the seller’s will depends upon suitable conditions for its gratification. The huge firms find the way to wipe out their rivals is to produce cheaply. The way to produce cheaply is to reduce the amount of labour involved in producing each product. Hence capitalists invests in  modern large plants with the latest machinery and enforce working conditions that  speeds up their workers.

A business’s power to charge higher prices is limited by—

1. the purchasing power of its customers ;

2. the similar goods to be obtained from rival firms ;

3. the use of substitutes when price is too high;

4. the decline in amount sold of these commodities if price is higher than market will bear.

 Attacks on “monopoly prices” lead the workers to look at things from the point of view of consumers of commodities.

Actually the workers are the smallest consumers of the total national production. Their purchasing power is limited to the amount of their wages. The capitalists are able to buy the largest quantity because their “share” of the total output is largest in the shape of rent, interest and profit.

The workers must view matters as producers, being the only class engaged in production. It is where they produce that they are exploited. The demand then must not be “lower prices,” but the “abolition of exploitation.”