Engels quotes Duhring's claim that,
“Marx's theory of value is “nothing but the ordinary ... theory that labour is the cause of all values and labour-time is their measure. But the question of how the differential value of the so-called skilled labour is to be conceived is left in complete confusion.” (p 251)
According to Duhring, this also represents a socialist heresy dangerous to society. Engels dissects Duhring's claim and argument. He notes that the relevant passage from Marx, which calls forth the wrath of Duhring is very brief.
“Marx is examining what it is that determines the value of commodities and gives the answer: the human labour embodied in them. This, he continues, “is the expenditure of simple labour-power which, on an average exists, apart from any special development, in the physical organism of every ordinary individual... More complex labour counts only as simple labour raised to a higher power, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of more complex labour is equal to a greater quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made.” (p 252)
So, as noted earlier, the determinant of the new value created is not the value of labour-power/wages. In fact, nor is it the amount of labour “embodied” in them, contrary to that unfortunate description used, here, by Engels. As Engels himself sets out, in his Prefaces and Introductions to Marx's Poverty of Philosophy, and Wage-Labour and Capital, the physically “embodied” labour does not distinguish between simple and complex labour as discussed here, but also, does not distinguish between labour that is socially necessary, and that which is not.
For example, if a spinner produces yarn using a spinning wheel rather than a spinning machine, which produces ten times as much, in the same time, 90% of their labour-time is not socially necessary, and does not create new value. Similarly, even if all spinners use the most efficient means to produce 1,000 tonnes of yarn, but there is only demand for 800 tonnes of this yarn, 20% of the labour expended, and so “embodied” in the yarn was not socially necessary, and did not create new value.
“whether it is expended under normal average social conditions or not. Whether the producers take ten days, or only one, to make products which could be made in one day; whether they employ the best or the worst tools; whether they expend their labour time in the production of socially necessary articles and in the socially required quantity, or whether they make quite undesired articles or desired articles in quantities above or below demand – about all this there is not a word: labour is labour, the product of equal labour must be exchanged against the product of equal labour.”
Moreover, as Marx, also, details, in Capital, it is not the labour previously embodied in the production of commodities that determines their value, but the labour currently required for their reproduction.
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