Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy. V – Theory of Value - Part 25 of 28

Engels sets out the fallacy of equating labour-power with labour, and so the value of labour-power with the value created by that labour.

“After all, it is clear that what a labourer produces and what he costs are just as much different things as what a machine produces and what it costs. The value created by a labourer in a twelve-hour working-day has absolutely nothing in common with the value of the means of subsistence which he consumes in this working-day and the accompanying period of rest. In these means of subsistence there may be embodied three, four or seven hours of labour-time according to the stage of development reached by the productivity of labour. If we assume that seven hours of labour were necessary for their production, then the theory of value of vulgar economics accepted by Herr Dühring says that the product of twelve hours of labour has the value of the product of seven hours of labour, that twelve hours of labour are equal to seven hours of labour, or that 12=7.” (p 247-8)

To make it even more obvious, Engels reduces it to a physical product – wheat. An agricultural labourer might produce sixty bushels of wheat a year. It doesn't matter whether this labourer is a serf who must provide free labour on the landlord's land, a peasant farmer, or a wage worker. In each case, this sixty bushels of output is in no way a function of, or determined by the amount of wheat the labourer requires – either as wheat to consume, or to exchange for other necessaries – to ensure their own reproduction. That amount may be only 45 bushels in a year. In the various social relations above, the serf simply provides 15 bushels in production, on the landlord's fields, whilst the peasant farmer hands over 15 bushels in rent, whilst the wage labourer, handed over the entire 60 bushels to the capitalist farmer, is handed back 45 as wages.

But, if the vulgar theory, accepted by Duhring is to be believed that labour equals labour-power, and so wages determine the value created, we would similarly have to conclude that 60 = 45!

“The whole development of human society beyond the stage of brute savagery begins from the day when the labour of the family created more products than were necessary for its subsistence from the day when a portion of labour could be devoted to the production no longer of the mere means of subsistence, but of means of production. A surplus of the product of labour over and above the costs of subsistence of the labour, and the formation and expansion, of a social production and reserve fund, out of this surplus, these were and these are the basis of all social, political and intellectual progress.” (p 248)

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