LABOR
See also entries below.
“[L]abor is the appropriation of nature for the satisfaction of human needs...”
—Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Third Chapter, Capital in General,
MECW 30:40.
“Labor, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.”
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
[This, indeed, is the primary function of
labor within class society. —Ed.]
LABOR — COMMUNIST [Political Economy]
Labor performed for society (rather than directly for oneself or one’s family alone), and done
without wages or force of any kind. In a communist society this would be the sole form of social
labor. (And there will be no more socialist wage labor, let alone capitalist wage slavery!)
Why would people be willing to do such labor “for
free”? For a variety of reasons, such as:
• For the benefit of other people; i.e.,
altruism.
• Because the labor itself is interesting
and rewarding. This becomes ever truer as the most physically difficult or onerous or tedious labor
becomes more completely automated; as the remaining work tends on average to become more interesting;
and as the total amount of social labor actually necessary gradually diminishes.
• To participate with others in
cooperative efforts, which human beings have evolved to find quite socially rewarding.
Even in capitalist society there are many individuals
who devote themselves to such communist labor, as their time, energy and circumstances allow, though
in this society it is more likely to be called “volunteer” labor. Examples include medical
doctors who operate free clinics; volunteer fire departments in small towns; social and political
organizations who help out needy people as best they can; and so forth. In a genuine
socialist society, which is a transitional stage between
capitalism and communism, such communist labor must (if there is a true transition underway) become
more and more important, and gradually become a larger part of the average person’s social labor (in
place of the diminishing wage labor required of all).
“A factory operative [worker!] has less personal interest in his work than a
member of a Communist association, since he is not, like him, working for a partnership of
which he is himself a member.” —John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed.
by Ashley, Book II, Ch. I, 3, pp. 204-5. [Even some bourgeois writers like Mill see some
significant advantages to communist labor! —Ed.]
LABOR — Simple vs. Complex
In Volume I of Capital Marx defines the value
incorporated into a specific commodity in a capitalist system of production as a function
of the socially necessary labor time involved in producing that commodity. However, he is
well aware that despite this definition not all labor is equivalent, some is simple
labor, which is in effect average human labor or labor of a quality which is
roughly interchangeable between different tasks, while some other forms of labor are
specialized, involve considerable training, and so forth. This latter form of labor is
called complex labor, and Marx views a certain time period of this complex labor as
being equivalent to a longer period of simple labor (the precise longer equivalent
depending on the specific type of complex labor). It is actually the socially necessary
labor time of this equivalent simple labor which determines the amount of value in
the commodity produced.
“If we leave aside the determinate quality of productive activity,
and therefore the useful character of the labor, what remains is its quality of
being an expenditure of human labor-power. Tailoring and weaving, although they are
qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of
human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc., and in this sense both human labor. They
are merely two different forms of the expenditure of human labor-power. Of course,
human labor-power must itself have attained a certain level of development before it
can be expended in this or that form. But the value of a commodity represents human
labor pure and simple, the expenditure of human labor in general.... It is the
expenditure of simple labor-power, i.e. of the labor-power possessed in his bodily
organism by every ordinary man, on the average, without being developed in any
special way. Simple average labor, it is true, varies in character in
different countries and at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society
it is a given. More complex labor counts only as intensified, or rather
multiplied simple labor, so that a smaller quantity of complex labor is
considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labor. Experience shows that this
reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the outcome of the most
complicated labor, but through its value it is posited as equal to the
product of simple labor. The various proportions in which different kinds of labor
are reduced to simple labor as their unit of measurement are established by a social
process that goes on behind the backs of the producers; these proportions therefore
appear to the producers to have been handed down by tradition. In the interests of
simplification, we shall henceforth view every form of labor-power directly as
simple labor-power; by this we shall simply be saving ourselves the trouble of
making the reduction.” —Marx, Capital, Vol. I, section 2, (Penguin ed., pp.
134-5.)
[Thus, because of this
simplification in the presentation of Marx’s theory in Volume I of Capital,
it should be noted that in the real world we cannot in general correctly
determine the relative values of two different commodities by merely determining
the different socially necessary labor times involved in their production. That
would only be correct if the raw clock times were first translated into the
equivalent times for the simple labor involved. —Ed.]
LABOR and CAPITAL
[Intro material to be added... ]
[Marx speaking as if to all classical political economists:]
“Labor is the sole source of exchange-value and the only active creator of use-value.
This is what you [correctly] say. On the other hand, you say that capital is
everything, and the worker is nothing or a mere production cost of capital. You have
refuted yourselves. Capital is nothing but defrauding of the worker.
Labor is everything.” —Marx, TSV, 3:260.
“American business is about maximizing shareholder value. You
basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to
replace them.” —Allen Sinai, a bourgeois economist, in an interview in the New York
Times in 2010; quoted in Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols, People Get Ready
(2016), p. 303 note 67.
See also: ALIENATED LABOR
LABOR and LABOR POWER — Confusion Between
Marx drew the distinction between labor and labor power, and the basic distinction
here is not all that hard to understand: labor is what the worker does in the production
process, but what the capitalist purchases (with wages) is the commodity labor
power, or the ability and willingness to perform the required labor at the specified time and
place.
Still, small confusions about all this are very
common, even among knowledgeable Marxists themselves. There are indeed subtleties here, and it
is all too easy to refer to the one when you should strictly speaking be referring to the other.
For example, what is the answer to this question: “Is it labor or labor power which generates
surplus value?” We might need to think about that for a moment! Well, in this case it is actually
the labor which generates the surplus value in the system of capitalist production, and
not the labor power. But it is also true that variable capital (the value of labor power) is used
to calculate surplus value. So we might scratch our heads at times! The best answer to this
question is therefore probably along these lines: Surplus value is generated by the use of
the purchased commodity labor power in the production process, but the use of labor
power is what we call labor. Therefore it is actually the labor performed (and not labor power
directly) which leads to the generation of new value. However, Marx and Engels also said that the
commodity labor power is different from all other commodities in that it can be used to generate
new value, surplus value. The key here is to notice the phrase “it can be used”, and to remember
that labor power put to actual use is in fact what we call labor. Would it be a terrible outrage
to say to someone that it is labor power that generates surplus value? No, although it would not
be precisely correct. But in most contexts it could be reasonably construed as shorthand for the
more precise answer.
While it is of course desirable to use the terms
‘labor’ and ‘labor power’ correctly, we need not be too pedantic about this. To prove my case,
I’d like to give two examples from Marx and Engels themselves where it might be considered that
they (or else their translators) “made a mistake” in this regard.
First example, from Engels’s 1891 introduction
to his reissue of Marx’s 1849 lectures known as “Wage-Labor and Capital”:
“Labor-power is, in our present-day capitalist society, a commodity like
every other commodity, but yet a very peculiar commodity. It has, namely, the peculiarity
of being a value-creating force, the source of value, and, moreover, when properly treated,
the source of more value than it possesses itself.” [International Publishers
edition, 1933, p. 12.]
We don’t want to be too hard on Engels here, since, after all, the whole point of his
revised new edition of this excellent pamphlet was to make clear the distinction between labor
and labor power—which in general Engels (and Marx) do extremely well! Still, to be a little
pedantic for the moment, it is not really true that labor power is “the source of value”
as Engels says. This is obvious if we think of an example of non-capitalist commodity production,
where for example a single artisan or craftsman, working alone in his own shop, produced
commodities for sale. Since there was no purchased labor power commodity even involved in this
situation, the value produced in the commodities created for sale had to have come from
the craftsman’s labor, and not anyone’s labor power. And even under capitalist production,
the value (and exchange value) in the commodities produced comes from the worker’s labor, and not
(directly anyway) from the purchased labor power. But how about Engels’s claim here that the
commodity labor power is a value-creating force? Even if not directly so, we could at least
grant that this is true indirectly. In other words, it is the immediate use of this labor
power in the production process that creates value. But again, it would have been more precise for
Engels to have explicitly stated this: Instead of “it” (labor power) being a value-creating force,
it is the “use of it” which is the value-creating force. Of course it is quite pedantic to point
this out, but it is also true that being precise about the difference between labor and labor
power is pretty important, and sometimes requires very careful wording.
Second example, from another of Marx’s great
pamphlets, Wages, Price and Profit (1865) [republished on its 100th anniversary by the
Foreign Language Press, Peking], which is also known by its alternate name, Value, Price and
Profit. In a number of places, including this pamphlet [p. 72] Marx argues that while the
commodity labor power has a value, labor is not a commodity, and does not have a
value. He is certainly correct about this. “The value of the labouring power is formed by two
elements—the one merely physical, the other historical or social.” (The physical component,
refers to the minimum wages required to keep the worker alive and working and also to allow for
a new generation of workers to be raised to replace him or her when they die.) But then in the
next paragraph Marx continues on the same theme, continuing in reality to talk about the value
of labor power, but he fails to call it that: “Besides this mere physical element, the
value of labour is in every country determined by a traditional standard of life. It is
not mere physical life, but it is the satisfaction of certain wants springing from the social
conditions in which people are placed and reared up.” Was it a mere slip of the pen that Marx
refers to “labor” and not “labor power” here? Perhaps. Or perhaps he was just speaking loosely
and figured that everyone would know what he was talking about.
Again, in a fit of pedantry, we could complain
about Marx’s reference to “labor” here when he obviously meant “labor power”. But it is a fact
that even people who really know what they are talking about, sometimes speak loosely in this
manner. For that reason it pays to be very careful when we talk or write about labor and labor
power in contexts where the difference really matters. —S.H.
LABOR ARISTOCRACY
This is the very best-paid and privileged stratum of the proletariat, which has arisen mostly
within imperialist countries in the last century and a half. These are most often skilled
workers, whose special training gives them greater bargaining power with the capitalists with
regard to wages and benefits, especially where they are organized into strong craft unions.
In the richest imperialist countries, such as the U.S., some workers in the labor aristocracy
may even acquire some significant investments, such as rental property, stocks and bonds,
though the dominant part of their income is still from wages. (Only a very few people from
this stratum will actually break out of the working class entirely, even during boom
periods.)
However, it is still only possible for this
labor aristocracy to be as large as it is, and to receive as high wages and benefits as it
does along with acquiring some savings and investments in some cases, because of the
exploitation of large parts of the world by the imperialist ruling class. That international
exploitation leads to constant imperialist wars, and it is necessary for the ruling class to
pacify at least a major section of its workers at home with some small part of the wealth it
rips off from foreign countries (and from the “Third World” in particular).
The labor aristocracy, in turn, tends to
strongly support the bourgeoisie politically, and has in general an extremely low level of
proletarian class consciousness. In effect, this section of the working class has made an
accommodation with the capitalist-imperialists.
But in periods of serious economic crisis,
such as the U.S. and most of world capitalism are now in once again, the bourgeoisie is
finding it necessary to take back more and more of the higher wages and benefits it once could
easily afford to grant to a part of the working class. This is having the effect of reducing
the size of the labor aristocracy in the U.S. and most countries (though it is still growing
rapidly in one country—China). As the world capitalist crisis develops further, much of the
embourgeoised labor aristocracy will be once again driven down and reproletarianized.
“... the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois,
so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the
possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois
proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course,
justified to some extent.” —Engels, Letter to Marx, Oct. 7, 1858, MECW 40:343, online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_10_07.htm.
“This aristocracy of labor, which at that time earned tolerably good
wages, boxed itself up in narrow self-interest craft unions, and isolated itself from the
mass of the proletariat, while in politics it supported the liberal bourgeoisie.” —Lenin,
“Harry Quelch”, Sept. 12, 1913, LCW 19:370, online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/sep/12.htm. [Lenin is speaking of
Britain, specifically.]
“But it would be dogmatic and wrong to believe that the labor aristocracy
always sides with the bourgeoisie. Historical events have demonstrated that it is not only
economic conditions which determine the political behavior of workers. Workers are able
to suffer adverse conditions for a very long time, in fact they even get used to them.
Dissatisfaction is caused primarily by a worsening of conditions, especially by a
rapid worsening. The same also applies to the labor aristocracy. It holds the side of the
bourgeoisie so long as its economic privileges are stable, but, if its position sharply
deteriorates, it may become an active participant in the revolutionary struggle. This
happened in Hungary in 1918-19 before the establishment of the dictatorship of the
proletariat when a sharp inflation plunged down the living standard of the workers.
Skilled workers who were receiving the highest rates reacted far more vehemently to the
worsening of their position than did badly paid workers. They joined the Communist Party
and often played a leading role in the fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Similar
developments were observed in the workers’ revolutionary movement in Germany.” —Eugen
Varga, Politico-Economic Problems of Capitalism (1968), p. 127.
[While what Varga says here may be
true in exceptional circumstances, there is also the possibility in modern society that
an outraged labor aristocracy, which suddenly comes under economic attack because of a
severe capitalist crisis, may also turn in its ideological confusion to support a fascist
movement (along with a major section of the petty-bourgeoisie). Moreover, even the
possibility of a section of the labor aristocracy under attack joining the revolutionary
movement depends on there being a serious and active revolutionary movement in the
first place, which can only be built up from nothing by focusing primarily on the lower
strata of the working class. —S.H.]
LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATE — MEN VS. WOMEN
In this graph, accompanying an article by President Obama in the Economist [Oct.
8, 2016, p. 24], we see the changing U.S. labor force participation rate over a longer period
(1948-2016) and separated out by sex. Several facts should be noted: First, in the post-World
War II period more and more women got jobs. Until the early 1970s this had the effect of
increasing the average family income and promoted the growth of the so-called
“middle class”. After that point the further growth in the
percentage of women working became less and less of merely an option open to them and more and
more of a financial necessity in order to help stabilize family incomes as the real wages
(after inflation) of all American workers (men and women both) began to gradually decline.
Secondly, the labor force participation rate
for men has been in a gradual but more or less steady decline over this entire period, and
is even declining a little faster in recent years. Thirdly, the participation rate for women
nearly matched that of men by around the year 2000. And since then that rate has also begun a
gradual steady decline.
Because of the current qualitative leaps in
machine intelligence (see artificial intelligence)
and other forms of automation, there is every reason to believe that over the next couple
decades the labor force participation rate for all American workers, men and women both, will
face a much greater and more rapid decline.
“Women’s labor force participation rose to 57.4 percent in 2019 from about
43 percent in 1970.” —New York Times, May 8, 2022, National Edition, p. 3.
[Note that this figure for women in
2019 is substantially lower than that shown for women in the Economist chart, probably
because the age range for women being counted is wider in this case. Note also that because
of the Covid-19 Pandemic, which began in early 2020, and though we do not yet have the
precise figures here, the percentage of women in the work force has declined sharply, more
sharply than for men since women have lost a lot of child-care help and have had to stay home
to care for children. —Ed.]
LABOR POWER
“By labor-power or capacity for labor is to be understood the aggregate of those
mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises
whenever he produces a use-value of any description.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I,
ch. 6: (International, p. 167; Penguin, p. 270.) “A commodity which its possessor, the
wage-worker, sells to capital.” —Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital”, (MECW 9:202, as edited
in Engels’s 1891 edition.)
Labor power is therefore the worker’s
ability to work, which is what is sold to the capitalist for the wages received.
Labor power is not the same as labor itself, however! As everyone is aware,
once the capitalists sell the products that the workers produce, and even after paying
the workers their wages (which means the market value of their labor power), they
still have a large surplus left over from which they take their profits. The
fact that the actual labor of the workers generates this additional
surplus value beyond the workers’ wages (i.e., beyond
the value of their labor power) means that the real implicit value of their actual
labor must greatly exceed the value of what they sell to the capitalists, their
labor power. And therefore labor power and labor must be carefully distinguished
if we are to understand the source of the capitalists’ profits.
The distinction between labor power and
labor is often confusing for those new to Marxist political economy. In addition to
Chapter 6
of Volume I of Marx’s Capital, another good place to go to clear up this confusion
is to carefully read Engels’s 1891 edition of Marx’s pamphlet, “Wage Labor and Capital”
and especially Engels’s introduction where he goes into the difference between labor power
and labor quite thoroughly. This edition is available in an inexpensive paperback from
International Publishers, and available online at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm.
Engels’s introduction is also available separately in MECW 27:194-201.
“The change in value of money that is to be converted into capital
cannot take place in money itself, for in buying, it merely realizes the price of the
commodity, and on the other hand, as long as it remains money, it does not
change the magnitude of its value; and in selling, too, it merely converts the
commodity from its natural form into its money-form. The change must, therefore, take
place in the commodity of M—C—M; but not in its exchange-value,
since equivalents are exchanged; it can only arise from its use-value as such,
that is, from its consumption. For the purpose a commodity is required whose
use-value possesses the property of being the source of exchange-value—and this
does exist—labor-power.” —Engels, “Synopsis of Volume One of Capital
by Karl Marx” (1868), MECW 20:280.
LABOR THEORY OF VALUE (LTV)
The fundamental theory in political economy, put forth by Marx, that the economic
value of any commodity
in a capitalist system of production is determined by the average
socially necessary labor time that it
takes to produce that commodity. Thus if the average labor time necessary to produce a
certain type of overcoat is 25 times as great as the average labor time it takes to produce
a loaf of bread, the coat will have a value 25 times as great as that of the loaf. Marx,
however, understands full well that the actual prices of that
type of coat and that sort of loaf of bread might vary somewhat from this ratio for a
variety of reasons. But the analytical foundation, and most basic explanation for the
difference in the prices of the two commodities will still lie in the different quantities
of labor time necessary to make each.
Classical political economy also agreed
with this theory (in Ricardo, for example), at least in rough
outlines. But modern bourgeois economists reject it because they are loath to admit that
the working class, working on the products of nature, produces all value. They try instead
to explain value in terms of marginal supply and
demand, and so forth. But this leaves the usual fairly uniform differences in value
between the coat and the loaf of bread as quite mysterious. Alternately, they attempt to
explain the differences in value in terms of differing prices of production, but this begs
the question since they cannot supply any independent explanation for why prices of
production themselves differ!
All Marxists, or at least all those who
we care to consider as genuine Marxists in the sphere of political economy, agree with
the basic labor theory of value as briefly outline above. However, there are some secondary
aspects of the precise theory of value as put forward by Marx, about which even Marxists
can disagree. Marx, for example, said that only human labor, and only human labor
employed in the current production process, can create new
(surplus) value. Thus Marx does not seem to allow for the production of surplus value
by non-humans under any circumstances whatsoever. (See:
ANDROID THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ) Moreover,
Marx claimed that if a worker makes a machine and then uses that machine to produce
some commodity, only the labor time spent using the machine contributes to the
surplus value generated in the final commodity. An alternate view (which I for one hold)
is that the machine also allows the worker using it to continually reuse the labor
which went into making the machine, and therefore that both the new labor and the
re-used older labor will contribute to surplus value being generated in the final commodity.
For more on this, see the entry below. —S.H.
LABOR THEORY OF VALUE — Revised Form
This is a modified version of the labor theory of value (LTV) from that put forward by Marx.
It agrees with the fundamental proposition that the value
of a commodity produced in a capitalist system of production is solely due to the average
socially necessary labor time required
to produce that commodity. But it disagrees with Marx in that it views machinery as a way
of reusing the time spent in past labor (making the machine), and hence as also contributing
to surplus value along with the current labor time
expended. Here is the argument for making this modification:
“1) There is nothing mysterious nor magical about human labor
that can make it alone capable of generating surplus value in a system of
capitalist production. (Marx never adequately explained just why only human
beings supposedly have this capability, and thus left it all very mysterious.
He did say that human labor differs from animal efforts in that it is
conscious and purposeful, but
he did not explain why that makes any difference in this regard.) There must
be a good answer to the question, ‘Why is human labor able to produce surplus
value?’ It is incumbent on Marxist political economy to state precisely what the
answer to this question is.
“2) Furthermore, it is not
human creativity or intelligence that explains why human labor can generate surplus
value. (Some labor that generates surplus value requires very little
intelligence and shows virtually no creativity, such as certain types of extremely
repetitive assembly line work. And, on the other hand, some machinery already
demonstrates considerable intelligence and sometimes even some creativity—though
artificial creativity is much rarer so far, and is mostly confined to software, such
as certain expert systems.)
“3) Moreover, there is
no single specific human capability which, when exercised, alone is
able to generate surplus value. (On the contrary, there is an indefinitely large
number of actual things human workers can do which can generate surplus value, and
new ones are constantly being developed as production processes change.)
“4) Moreover, even now a
great many of these specific things which humans can do, and which generate surplus
value, can also be done by machines. (And in historical terms, machines are being
rapidly improved in the abilities to replace human beings in more and more types of
work.)
“5) All the sorts of
things that human beings can do which create surplus value come in degrees, from
very crude and primitive efforts to the highly skilled and sophisticated. This is
why we first see machines replacing the cruder forms of human labor, and then—as
the machines are improved—ever more sophisticated forms of human labor of the same
type.
“6) The thing that really
explains why human beings are able to generate surplus value is simply that human
beings can be ‘used over and over’ in the capitalist production process. (I.e., they
are not used up in the production of any commodity, as raw materials are.)
“7) But if the last principle
is true, then anything else that is used in the production process, without
being used up in each output commodity (i.e., tools and machinery), should also
contribute to surplus value.
“8) However, machines and
tools themselves were created by past human labor, and in fact all commodities that
presently exist are in the final analysis the result of the application of direct
or indirect human labor in various forms to the natural products of the world
around us.
“9) It is in general
impossible to quantitatively compare goods (or commodities) by comparing their
use values, since use values are so diverse, tend to
be unrelated to each other, and depend on the diverse and ever changing needs and
subjective desires of different individuals. (Whether a loaf of bread or a warm
coat is of greater use value to a person depends on the situation.)
“10) But there is an
underlying basis, and only one such feasible basis, for quantifying the differences
in exchange values for different commodities: the socially necessary labor
times incorporated into them. (So far this means just human labor, though
if androids are ever constructed, or if sentient aliens were to show up on earth
and also become workers, it would then include their labor.) Moreover, the labor
considered here must include not only the direct labor, but also the
properly apportioned indirect, or past labor contributed both in
the form of raw materials and tools & machinery. (The actual exchange values we
see, however, may be adjusted from this total socially necessary labor time for
various reasons, but the underlying labor time still forms the primary basis for
these exchange values.)
“11) Thus the labor theory
of value (LTV) remains essential in political economy. (Systems, like Sraffa’s,
that derive output prices directly from input quantities and prices (including
labor-power prices) may be technically possible, but are irrelevant here.
Political economy needs to explain a lot more than one price in terms of others.
For example it needs to explain how exploitation occurs and the deep reasons for
capitalist economic crises. (Furthermore, all prices themselves implicitly
relate to socially necessary labor times; the fact that a car costs $20,000 is
meaningless except within the framework where workers are paid definite amounts
for an hour of their labor time.) Sraffaian economics obscures such things. We
need to stay true to a profoundly political economics, a political economy
that clearly exposes the genuine human relationships at the bottom of
things.)
“12) But Marx’s specific
version of the LTV needs to be modified in one major way: It is not only
current labor which produces surplus value in a system of capitalist
production, but also the continuing use of past labor (embodied in tools
and machines). Modifying the LTV in this way allows us to resolve otherwise
insurmountable logical and conceptual problems in traditional Marxist political
economy. This revised LTV is far more coherent and defensible, but retains the
essential aspects of the traditional Marxist explanations for exploitation, the
source of capitalist profits, the underlying source of capitalist overproduction
crises as arising from the exploitation of labor in the capitalist production
process itself, and so forth.” —Scott Harrison, adapted from “Letter to Frank S.
about the labor theory of value” (Dec. 8, 2003), online at:
https://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/ScottH/Let_LTV.htm
LABOR THEORY OF VALUE — Ricardian and Pre-Marxist Form
“In speaking however of labour, as being the foundation of all value, and
the relative quantity of labour as determining the relative value of commodities, I must not
be supposed to be inattentive to the different qualities of labour, and the difficulty of
comparing an hour’s, or a day’s labour, in one employment, with the same duration of labour
in another. The estimation in which different qualities of labour are held, comes soon to be
adjusted in the market with sufficient precision for all practical purposes, and depends much
on the comparative skill of the labourer, and intensity of the labour performed. The scale,
when once formed, is liable to little variation. If a day’s labour of a working jeweller be
more valuable than a day’s labour of a common labourer, it has long ago been adjusted, and
placed in its proper position in the scale of value.” —David Ricardo, On the Principles of
Political Economy and Taxation, (London: 1817), Chapter 1: Value.
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (from after Dec. 6, 1845).
[Also quoted in other variations,
including: “And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it
requires to be exchanged for it.” and “The value of a thing is the amount of life you
must exchange for it.” We do not know the definitive version or the precise original
source. —Ed.]
“According to the Ricardian law of value, two capitals which employ the same
amount of living labor at the same rate of pay, assuming all other circumstances to be also
the same, produce in the same period of time products of the same value, and similarly the
same amount of surplus-value or profit. If they employ unequal amounts of living labor, then
they cannot produce the same surplus-value, or profit as the Ricardians say. However, the
contrary is the case. In point of fact, equal capitals produce, on average, equal profits in
the same time, irrespective of how much or how little living labor they employ. This
contradiction to the law of value was already known to Ricardo, but neither he nor his
followers were able to resolve it. Even Rodbertus could not ignore the contradiction, but
instead of resolving it, he makes it one of the starting points for his utopia (Zur
Erkenntnis ..., p. 131). Marx had already resolved this contradiction in his manuscript
‘Zur Kritik’ [Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, Chapter VIII, sections 3a and 6, and
Chapter 6]; in the plan of Capital, the solution is to be included in Volume 3 [parts
One and Two].” —Engels, Preface to Capital, Vol. II, (Pelican/Penguin, 1992), p. 101.
LABOR UNIONS: U. S. — Long-term Decline Of
For many decades the size and strength of U.S. labor unions has been in a long-term decline.
Union membership, as a percentage of the labor force, has declined tremendously. As of 2012
the percentage of American workers in unions fell to 11.3%, the lowest since 1916 when it
was 11.2%. In private industry the figures were even worse: the percentage of unionized
workers was only 6.6%.
The chart at the right
shows the decline of the percentage of U.S. workers who are members of labor unions over the
period from 1944 to 2014. [From: Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols,
People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless economy and a Citizenless Democracy
(2016), p. 62.]
American trade unionism since the 1930s, at
least, has been virtually entirely a reformist movement, attempting to improve the lot of
workers economically but within the capitalist system. In no way was it a
revolutionary movement working toward the overthrow of capitalism. It made some economic
advances for a while, but as it became more and more bourgeois it also became less and less
militant. Its members failed to comprehend that the gains in wages and benefits won through
unions, like all reformist gains under capitalism, are never secure and permanent. Eventually
the ruling class succeeds in striping away those gains and driving the workers down
again, especially when the developing economic crisis of its own capitalist system requires
it to do so. And, eventually, even the unions themselves are broken and destroyed.
LABOR UNIONS: U. S. — Partial Revival Of
As U.S. socio-economic problems get seriously worse, and despite the very long-term decline of
the American labor movment discussed in the above entry, there are beginning to be some limited
signs that the U.S. labor movement may be reviving to some extent. In part this is no doubt
because even college graduates are now no longer assured of finding any half-way decent jobs,
and many are finding themselves stuck in lower levels of the working class.
“Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55
percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher
among younger college graduates, according to data provided by Gallup.” —New York
Times, “College Graduates, in Working Class, Fuel Union Gains”, April 29, 2022.
LABOR’S SHARE OF PRODUCTION (In the U.S.)
Since labor, applied to the resources of nature, is responsible for the production of
all wealth, by rights “labor’s share” of what is produced should be 100%.
But not only does the very tiny capitalist class take a very large percentage of what
is produced in the U.S. every year, over time they have been taking an ever-greater
percentage of it. Considering all the goods and services produced in the country (i.e.,
Gross Domestic Product), in 1974 the millions of employees of
all kinds added together received just 59% of the total. By 2009, that had fallen to
just 55%. In other words, the working class, which makes up over 90% of the population,
barely receives half of what it produces. And actually the situation is much worse even
than that, since these figures are grossly exaggerated. For example, many capitalists,
including even the CEO’s of giant corporations, are themselves counted as “employees”!
It is likely that the real situation is that the working class, even in this extremely
wealthy country, receives considerably less than half of what it produces each year.
Moreover, these figures are for gross income. After the government extracts all its many
taxes (much of which goes for imperialist wars and other things which benefit the rich
rather than the poor), the fraction of the wealth produced by the workers that they
actually are allowed to keep is even further reduced! And low as this percentage
now is, over time it is getting ever smaller. [The statistics here come from the
“Economics Scene” column, by David R. Francis, The Christian Science Monitor,
Feb. 21, 2010, p. 23.]
The chart at the above right (from the St.
Louis branch of the Federal Reserve) shows an index value comparing the share of national
income received by labor from year to year (with 2005 being arbitrarily set to 100). As
is evident, labor’s share of income is sinking like a rock, and is now at historic lows.
LAFFER CURVE (Capitalist Economics)
A curve possibly first drawn by the bourgeois economist Arthur Laffer (though he did
not originate the idea), supposedly on a napkin in a Washington, D.C. bar in 1974,
which claims to be a theoretical explanation of why
supply-side economics makes sense, or even
a “proof” that it is correct. The argument behind the curve is that if there is no tax
on corporate profits, or only a very small percentage tax, then increasing the tax rate
a little will of course raise the total revenue that the government receives. However,
if the tax rate is very high, say 90%, then increasing it to say 99% will actually
lower the government’s revenue, because businesses will shut down operations and
there will be little corporate income to tax at all. Thus Laffer argued that there must
be some middle-ground tax rate where further increases in the rate will lead to smaller
tax revenue rather than to greater revenue.
In the idealized Laffer Curve (the
first diagram at the right) the shape of the curve is assumed to be a bell curve, or
something like it. There is no actual justification for thinking this; but if it were
this shape then raising the tax rate at all at any point to the right of the peak (such
as Point B) would have the joint effect of lowering actual production (GDP) and
also lowering government tax income.
However, while the effects of raising
taxes near the left end of the chart or the very-most right end are obvious, what
justification is there for saying what the effects are anywhere else? How do we know
that the actual shape of the Laffer Curve is not something like the example at the top
right? Actually, it is an empirical question just what the shape of the Laffer Curve is
between the two ends, and the shape might even vary in different countries and at
different times. But a recent empirical examination of the data in Europe suggests that
the curve actually looks like the third example, with a peak revenue for the government
at about the 70% tax rate. [From a study by M. Trabandt and H. Uhlig in
the Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 58, #4 (May 2011).]
Thus if there is any truth to
supply-side economics at all, and their argument that corporate tax rates should be
lowered, it is only where there are extremely high tax rates on corporate profits; and
such extremely high tax rates do not exist anywhere today.
See also:
REAGANOMICS,
SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS
LAGRANGE, Joseph-Louis [Born: Giuseppe Lagrangia] (1736-1813)
A great Italian-French mathematician and astronomer who was born and raised in Turin,
Italy, and spent most of his professional life in France and Berlin. His great book,
Mécanique analytique (1767), is his most famous contribution to science.
“Italy, where it all began, became a mathematical backwater
[because of Jesuit ideological suppression of the new mathematical ideas leading
to the calculus], a land in which there was no future for those seeking to pursue
a mathematical career. In the 1760s, when the young mathematical prodigy Giuseppe
Luigi Lagrangia of Turin sought to make a name for himself among the ‘great
geometers’ of the day, he was obliged to leave his homeland and travel first to
Berlin and then to Paris. He succeeded, but his Italian roots were soon forgotten.
To future generations he was and remains a Frenchman: Joseph-Louis Lagrange, one
of the greatest mathematicians in human history.” —Amir Alexander,
Infinitesimal (2014), p. 178.
LAISSEZ-FAIRE [Pronounced: lassay fair]
[From the French, meaning “to let people do as they please”.] The bourgeois doctrine
which opposes any governmental interference in the economy beyond that necessary to
maintain peace and sacred capitalist property rights. This was well-nigh universally
accepted by bourgeois economists in the 19th century, especially after
John Stuart Mill popularized it in his Principles
of Political Economy in 1848. However, during the imperialist era, and especially
during the Great Depression of the 1930s, much of
the bourgeoisie and many of its apologists came to appreciate that much government
intervention in the economy on behalf of the capitalists was highly desirable, and
even necessary for the continuation of capitalism. In particular
Keynesian economists argued that the capitalist economy had
to be carefully “managed”, and even the more traditional economists of the
“neo-classical synthesis” school all
recognized that the government at least needed to manage interest rates, the money supply,
and so forth. After the stabilization of capitalism for a long period after World War II,
laissez-faire (in a somewhat less pure form) came back into fashion again, often under
the new name (for much the same old ideas), neoliberalism.
It is really only with the financial crash of 2008 and the longer-term deepening crisis
leading toward the development of a new depression that some bourgeois economists
are once again starting to question their doctrine of near total faith in the virtues of
laissez-faire and the “free market”.
See also:
NEOLIBERALISM VERSUS LAISSEZ-FAIRE
“Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand, — one begins to be weary of all that.
Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause: — it is the
Gospel of Despair!” —Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Past and Present (1843),
Book III, Ch. 9.
“The man who accepts the laissez-faire doctrine would allow his garden to
run wild so that the roses might fight it out with the weeds and the fittest might survive.”
—John Ruskin (1819-1900), attributed.
LAKES
Freshwater lakes and streams in the U.S. and around the world are more and more being harmed by
the capitalist profit system and its horrendous side effects. One of many ways this is occurring
is through pollution, especially by agribusiness runoff of fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides,
and the like. Another way lakes and streams are being seriously harmed is through the diversion of
more and more fresh water to irrigation and urban usage, even where this is pretty non-sensical in
the first place (such as where it involves diversion of water for growing cotton in desert areas of
California and the Southwest, or the flagrant waste of water on golf courses and private swimming
pools for the rich). And of course, lakes are also being harmed as a side-effect of capitalist
induced climate change. (See quote below.)
“Earth’s deepening climate crisis is causing oxygen levels in freshwater
lakes around the world to decline rapidly in a trend that threatens freshwater biodiversity
and drinking water quality. As climate change warms the waters, they cannot hold as much
oxygen. The recent intense summer heat has reduced how much surface water mixes with and
delivers oxygen to the deep. Researches say the oxygen decline has been rapidly increasing.”
—Steve Newman, “Lake Suffocation”, in “Earthweek: a diary of the planet”, for the week
ending Friday, June 4, 2021; San Francisco Chronicle, June 6, 2021.
LANDLORD
1. The owner of property (housing, farmland,
etc.) which other people rent or are hired to work on.
2. [In China before collectivization in the
1950s:] A rural tyrant who owned substantial amounts of land (for the times) who himself did
not labor, but whose income instead depended primarily on hiring or otherwise exploiting
peasants through rent and usury.
3. Rural exploiters similar to these Chinese
landlords in other times and places.
See also:
CHINA—Class Analysis Before 1949,
EVICTIONS
“The profits were staggering. In 1966, a Chicago landlord told a
court that on a single property he had made $42,500 in rent but paid only $2,400 in
maintenance. When accused of making excessive profits, the landlord simply replied,
‘That’s why I bought the building.’” —Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and
Profit in the American City (2016), p. 252.
LANGUAGES — Expressiveness Of
Native speakers of a language often believe that their own language is more “expressive” than
any other. However, in reality, it is possible to express any thought whatsoever in any
language, though in one particular language it may require more words to do so than in another.
But the more concise language in the one case will inevitably be the more verbose in other cases.
Similarly, especially in translating highly specialized or technical material from one language
into another, it may be necessary (or at least very useful) to coin some new words—just
as it previously was in the first language.
“Linguistic nationalism” is something that all
the people of the world need to oppose, though, ideally, there should also be an international
language that everyone in the world could understand and speak.
“Maurice Druon of the French Academy once proposed that French should be
made the principal legal language of the European Union. He argued that its logic and
precision rendered it the judicial language par excellence. Others chortled. How
very French of him!
“The French are hardly alone in
believing that their language is especially poetic, emotional, logical, precise, accessible
or rich. But it turns out that the things people prize in their own languages can often be
the same things foreign learners hate. Take the formal-informal distinction in words for
‘you’. German and French have du and tu for friends and family, and Sie
and vous for unknown adults and formal speech. Natives of those languages miss that
distinction when speaking English. Those whose languages (like English) don’t make it in
the first place often resent having this choice forced on them in French or German.
“A dictum among linguists is that
languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must. Given the time and
willingness to explain or coin basic terms, any language could be used to talk about
anything. But they vary wildly in what they insist speakers say, with the tu-vous
distinction just the tip of an iceberg. Washo, a native language of Nevada, has four past
and three future tenses, depending on how distant an event is in time. Tariana, from
Brazil, has ‘evidentiality’: speakers choose one of five verb-endings to show how they
know what they aver to be true. Jarawara, also from Brazil, distinguishes ‘we (including
you)’ and ‘we (without you)’....
“In short, languages are governed
by trade-offs. One that avoids making certain information mandatory may be easier to
speak, but leaves the listener to fill in the gaps.”
—The “Johnson” column on language,
in The Economist, Sept. 21, 2019, p. 89.
LAO ZI [also Romanized as Lao Tzu and Lao-Tse]
(6th century BCE)
Chinese philosopher and sage, the original source of Taoism.
Lao Zi (which literally means “the old master”) inspired the semi-religious Taoist book
Tao-te-Ching (“The Way of Power”) which was compiled some 300 years after his
death, and which teaches self-sufficiency, simplicity and detachment. From the Marxist
standpoint, Lao Zi is of interest mostly because of the primitive, but intriguing,
dialectics that he put forward, and also his faith in the people. For example, consider
this fine statement attributed to him, which sounds very much like the Maoist
mass line:
“Go to the people.
Live with them.
Learn from them...
Start with what they know;
Build with what they have.
But with the best leaders,
When the work is done,
The task accomplished,
The people will say,
We have done this ourselves!”
LASSALLE, Ferdinand (1825-1864)
German journalist, lawyer, petty-bourgeois socialist and labor leader.
See also:
“IRON LAW OF WAGES”
“Lassalle was a German petty-bourgeois socialist who played an
active part in organizing (in 1863) the General Association of German Workers, a
political organization that existed up to 1875. The programmatic demands of the
Association were formulated by Lassalle in a number of articles and speeches.
Lassalle regarded the state as a supra-class organization and, in conformity with
that philosophically idealist view, believed that the Prussian state could be
utilized to solve the social problem through the setting up of producers’
co-operatives with its aid. Marx said that Lassalle advocated a ‘Royal-Prussian
state socialism’. Lassalle directed the workers towards peaceful, parliamentary
forms of struggle, believing that the introduction of universal suffrage would
make Prussia a ‘free people’s state’. To obtain universal suffrage he promised
Bismarck the support of his Association against the liberal opposition and also
in the implementation of Bismarck’s plan to reunite Germany ‘from above’ under
the hegemony of Prussia. Lassalle repudiated the revolutionary class struggle,
denied the importance of trade unions and of strike action, ignored the
international tasks of the working class, and infected the German workers with
nationalist ideas. His contemptuous attitude towards the peasantry, which he
regarded as a reactionary force, did much damage to the German working-class
movement. Marx and Engels fought his harmful utopian dogmatism and his reformist
views. Their criticism helped free the German workers from the influence of
Lassallean opportunism.” —Note 140 to LCW vol. 5, pp. 558-559.
“What was the historic service Lassalle rendered to the German
working-class movement? It was that he diverted that movement from the
path of progressionist [reformist] trade-unionism and co-operativism towards
which it had been spontaneously moving...” —Lenin, What Is To Be Done?
(Feb. 2002), LCW 5:385.
LATHI [Pronounced: lah-tee, or lah-thee (to
rhyme with catty or Cathy)]
[From Hindi and related languages:] A stick or cane, typically 3 or 4 feet long, used
in a type of martial arts in India (often with longer sticks), but more commonly today
known because of its use by police forces to force submission by the masses. Lathis
are typically made of wood or very strong cane and often have a sturdy metal cap on the
end. Blows from them can cause serious injury and sometimes even death. Britain, when
it controlled India as a colony, first introduced lathis as a police weapon. They also
developed what is known as the lathi charge (or sometimes as one word,
lathicharge), where rows of police charge the protesting masses in military
fashion and viciously beat them.
“In modern times, lathi is the primary weapon of the Indian riot
police along with helmets, shields, tear gas and other methods. Policemen are
trained in highly co-ordinated drill movements which can leave many of the rioters
crippled. This drill has been quite controversial among human rights activists so
in many places the police do not follow the drill but hit in such a way to disperse
the crowds. Security guards and police officers often carry a lathi along with or
in place of firearms. They prefer lathi for their ease of use and comparative
safety and only resort to firearms in situations when lathi cannot be used
efficiently.” —Wikipedia article on lathis.
LAW AND ORDER — “No Exceptions”
“Police in Alabama arrested, handcuffed, and jailed an 82-year-old
grandmother over an unpaid trash-collection bill of $77.80. Martha Menefield says
officers told her not to cry as they put her in handcuffs. ‘I’m just happy my grandkids
weren’t here to see that,’ she said. Police chief Mike Reynolds said that while officers
can use ‘discretionary judgment on certain matters,’ enforcement of arrest warrants ‘is
not one of them.’” —“Only in America”, The Week, December 16, 2022, p. 6.
[But compare this “crime” with that of the biggest bankers and financial cheats who stole
billions of dollars and caused the extremely serious Great
Recession of 2007-9, and the following years, in which millions of people were
victimized and even lost their homes; but who were never arrested or punished. (See the
next quote.) —Ed.]
“Bankers were not held responsible for their role in causing the crisis
[the financial crisis of 2008-9 and the much longer Great Recession associated with it].
In March 2009, Obama summoned the nation’s top banking executives to the White House and
warned them to mind their manners. ‘My administration,’ he told them, ‘is the only thing
between you and the pitchforks.’ In the old westerns, the virtuous sheriff protects his
prisoners from the mob so they can stand trial. This time there were few trials. As of 2018
about 355 bankers, mortgage lenders, real estate agents, and borrowers had been convicted
of crimes related to the crisis. But they were almost all small fry. No executives of the
largest financial firms went to jail.” —Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists Hour:
False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (2019), pp. 321-2.
LAZARUS, Sylvain (1943- )
A radical bourgeois French sociologist, anthropologist and political theorist, and longtime
political and philosophical associate of the “post-Maoist”
Continental philosopher
Alain Badiou. In his youth he was strongly influenced by
the May 1968 uprisings in France and by the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution in China. In late 1969 he (along with Badiou and others) founded the Union
des communists de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFML) which was a nominally
“Maoist” organization. (I.e., the intellectuals in this small sectarian group were
enthusiastic about Mao and the GPCR, insofar as they actually knew much about them.)
In 1981, using the nom de plume Paul
Sandevince, Lazarus published a piece entitled “Notes de travail sur le post-léninisme”
[“Working Notes on Post-Leninism”] in which he openly talked about his deep dissatisfaction
with many essential principles of Marxism-Leninism, and called for a new type of “post-Leninist”
political party. In 1985, after the collapse of the UCFML, Lazarus, Badiou and some of the
others formed a new group they called L’Organisation Politique, which did not consider
itself to be a revolutionary political party nor to be working toward the creation of one.
Its only mass practice was around a few reformist issues (especially promoting the rights of
immigrants in France). The OP itself fizzled out, and apparently completely disappeared by
2007 at the latest.
By the year 2001 Lazarus and Badiou were openly
rejecting the need for any proletarian class perspective whatsoever in politics, as well as
the need for any revolutionary party of any sort. (See the BADIOU entry
for quotes about this.) No doubt Lazarus and his friends once had some youthful revolutionary
spirit, but that has long since disappeared. Indeed, it seems quite unlikely that they were
ever really genuine Maoist revolutionaries in the first place.
Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index
MASSLINE.ORG Home Page
[According to the U.S. government:] The percentage of the total non-insitutionalized working-age
population of a country or region that is in the officially defined labor force (see above);
that is, the percentage which is either working or else is unemployed but actively looking for
work (as admitted by the government).