6. Simple and Compound Labour¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Engels defends Marx’s theory of value against a ferocious attack by Herr Dühring, who accuses Marx of a schoolboy blunder and a dangerous socialist heresy concerning skilled labour. Dühring’s core objection is that Marx leaves the value of skilled labour “in complete obscurity.” Dühring insists that all labour-time is “absolutely equal in value” without any need for averaging; the only difference in a skilled product is the concealed labour-time of others (e.g., in tools or training). He charges Marx with being haunted by the “ghost of skilled labour-time” and trapped by the “traditional mode of thought of the educated classes,” for whom it is monstrous to equate the labour-time of a porter and an architect.
Engels retorts by stating the simple fact Marx actually presents: in capitalist society, a commodity’s value is determined by the human labour embodied in it. Skilled or compound labour counts only as multiplied simple labour, a reduction established by a social process “behind the backs of the producers.” This is not a hazy conception but a description of a daily observable phenomenon. Dühring’s confusion, Engels argues, stems from mistaking Marx’s analysis of commodity value (specific to a society of private producers) for a theory of “natural cost” or “absolute value.” Marx’s passage says nothing about wages or socialist distribution; a footnote explicitly warns against this misapplication.
Engels then turns Dühring’s own doctrine against him. If all labour-time is absolutely equal in value, then labour itself has a value. This, Engels demonstrates, is a logical absurdity: labour is the creator of all value, so to speak of the “value of labour” is like speaking of the “weight of heaviness.” Marx, by contrast, first proved that labour can have no value. Dühring’s position reduces to a braggart phrase meaning “equal wages for equal labour-time,” a principle Engels dismisses as inferior even to the demands of old French communist workers and Weitling.
The chapter concludes with a polemical resolution of the “higher wages for compound labour” question. In a society of private producers, individuals bear training costs, so the higher price accrues to them. In a socialist society, society bears these costs, and the greater values produced by compound labour belong to society. The worker has no claim to extra pay. Engels thus defends Marx’s dialectical materialist method against Dühring’s crude equalitarianism, exposing the latter’s “social alchemy” as a reactionary utopianism that would perpetuate professional distinctions rather than abolish them.