Similarly, Engels notes that in his statement, Duhring has stepped outside the reality of commodity production and exchange, and taken a leap into his economic commune of the future. Again, Engels sets out the difference between the value of labour-power/wages as against the value created by labour.
“... Marx put a short footnote to the passage in Capital cited above: “The reader must note that we are not speaking here of the wages or value that the labourer gets for a given labour-time, but of the value of the commodity in which that labour-time is materialised.” Marx, who seems here to have had a presentiment about his Dühring, therefore safeguards himself against an application of his above statement to the wages which are paid in existing society for compound labour. If Herr Dühring, not content with doing this all the same, presents these statements as the principles on which Marx would like to see the distribution of the necessities regulated in a socialistically organised society, he is guilty of a shameless imposture, the like of which is only to be found in the gutter press.” (p 255-6)
As I have set out, elsewhere, it is not the value of the skilled labour-power that makes it complex labour, or that determines the relation of complex labour to simple labour. But, as Engels describes, here, superficially, this may appear to be the case. It is correlation confused with causation. In fact, it stands the relation on its head. It is the relation of complex labour to simple labour that provides the explanation for the high wages of those that supply the complex labour, not vice versa.
Engels takes the example of the labour of the porter and the architect used by Duhring. According to Duhring,
“All labour-time the porter’s and the architect’s is perfectly equivalent. So labour-time, and therefore labour itself, has a value.” (p 256)
The nonsense of that conclusion, still to be found in the writing of some, today, who claim to be Marxists, has already been described. As Engels continues,
“But labour is the creator of all values. It alone gives the products found in nature value in the economic sense. Value itself is nothing other than the expression of the socially necessary human labour materialised in an object. Labour can therefore have no value. One might as well speak of the value of value, or try to determine the weight, not of a heavy body, but of heaviness itself, as speak of the value of labour, and try to determine it.” (p 256)
So, if, as Marx sets out, labour has no value, how could he argue, as Duhring claims, that the value of one type of labour is greater than another?
“Now let the reader fathom Herr Dühring's brazenness in imputing to Marx the assertion that the labour-time of one person is in itself more valuable than that of another, that labour-time, and therefore labour, has a value—to Marx, who first demonstrated that labour can have no value, and why it cannot!” (p 256)
What Marx set out was not that one type of labour is more valuable than another, which implies that labour itself has value, but that one type of labour creates more value in an hour than another. Whether the labourer who supplies that (complex) labour is paid more for it or not, is an entirely different matter, and depends on, primarily, the value of that labour-power, and secondarily, on questions of supply and demand for that labour-power.
“The realisation that labour has no value and can have none is of great importance for socialism which wants to emancipate human labour-power from its status as a commodity. With this realisation all attempts — inherited by Herr Dühring from primitive working class socialism — to regulate the future distribution of necessities as a kind of higher wage fall to the ground. From it there follows the further realisation that in so far as it is governed by purely economic considerations, distribution will be regulated by the interests of production, and that production is most encouraged by a mode of distribution which allows all members of society to develop, maintain and exercise their capacities as all-sidedly as possible.” (p 256-7)
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