Homogenous Social Labour

Some products such as, for example, an automobile, require the application of quite different kinds of labour. How are we to measure its value in labour time? How are we going to arrive at its value by the amount of labour it contains, since there are a variety of kinds incorporated and this, too, for different lengths of time. After all, this is the modern way to produce. Marx lumps all labour together as general human labour, or to use his term, homogenous social labour. It is by quantities of this homogenous social labour that values are measured today.

But, you will say, how is that arrived at? You know that the labour of the carpenter is quite different from that of the tailor and the latter is different again from the toolmaker or tanner, or the bricklayer, the typesetter, or the coal miner. But they are all human labour and can be lumped together and averaged. So many hours of highly skied labour can be reduced to a larger number of hours of lesser skilled labour. In other words, we abstract labour from its concrete reality, and we strike an average. We lump together the labour of the carpenter, tailor, toolmaker, tanner, etc., into homogenous social labour in the abstract.

To illustrate this change, we will take the example of how a plum pudding is made. First, flour is needed, then milk, butter, sugar, salt, baking soda, perhaps some eggs and other ingredients. And we must not forget the plums, which give the pudding its name. After these are mixed and the pudding is baked and ready to serve it no longer consists ofheterogeneous elements, such as eggs, sugar, flour, plums, etc., but it is a pudding. It can be measured by the pound, divided into ounces, etc. It is a homogenous thing now. It is thus with lumping all human labour together from the less skilled to the most highly skilled, abstracting it mentally for measuring purposes. Therefore, we can arrive at the value of all products as being just certain quantities of homogenous social labour in the abstract. And this works out in practice and it was working in this manner before anyone discovered the fact and explained it so that it could be understood.

“But,” you will say, “I do not go to the clothing store and say, give me that twenty-hours-of-social-labour suit of clothes.” Well, you do not exactly do it that way but you say what amounts to the same thing. You say, “Give me that twenty-dollar suit of clothes.”

We are assuming here, for illustration, that there is one hour of social labour incorporated in the quantity of gold behind each dollar, and, therefore twenty of such dollars would (on average) be equal to twenty hours of social labour embodied in the suit of clothes. And that is how it works. Commodities (on the average) exchange at their value. Yet, strange to say, there is plenty of profits made by exchanging commodities at their value. We will explain this “miracle” later.

Money

In these days, with so many money bugs buzzing around, there is need for explaining the real nature and function of money. The Technocrats with their “energy” dollar, the “direct credit” bugs with their “greenback dollars,” the Roosevelt “brain trusters” with their “symetallic dollar” or what some have called rubber dollars. Al Smith picturesquely referred to these proposals as “baloney dollars,” and he feared they might be sliced too thin.

Large numbers of small property owners who have had their experience of the bankers saying “no” to what they regarded as legitimate demands, are now clamouring for government loans and inflation of the currency, so that they can pay their debts with thin “baloney dollars,” to be loaned to them at a small interest or, preferably, no interest at all. Many of these, having little understanding of the science of political economy, have come to the conclusion that money is the “invention of the devil,” or at least of devilish bankers. They have come to the conclusion that money was invented for the purpose of robbing them, and that the bankers by some sleight-of-hand trick rob them of the values they produce. This is due to their lack of understanding of what money actually is, and how the competitive system is reducing them to poverty.