4. Distribution

Wellred

Core Argument

Dühring’s “socialitarian” system promises to abolish capitalism while retaining its mode of production, merely replacing its distribution. The economic commune, which owns all means of production, is to exchange equal labour for equal labour using metallic money, paying equal wages and fixing uniform prices according to average production costs. Yet this scheme founders on the problem of accumulation. If a commune of 100 workers produces 360,000 marks annually and pays out the same sum, no reserve fund remains. To accumulate, it must either impose a price surcharge—which cancels out between communes—or pay members less than the value of their product, thereby creating Marxian surplus-value and revealing itself as an “ennobled” truck system. The metallic money, intended to function only as a labour certificate within the commune, cannot be prevented from acting as real money. Individuals hoard, lend, and exact usury; hoarders become bankers and controllers of production, mastering the communes themselves. On the world market, gold remains world money, giving further motive to accumulate private wealth. Dühring’s system thus recreates high finance. The source of these errors is his foggy understanding of value and money, and his attempt to discover the value of labour.

Commodities are private products made for social consumption through exchange. Their social character consists in having use-value for others and being products of general human labour. Society recognises as value-creating only labour of normal average skill—socially necessary labour-time. Value is expressed not directly in labour-hours but relatively, through exchange with another commodity. This compels society to single out one commodity—money—as the direct incarnation of social labour. Commodity production is not the only form. In ancient Indian communities and southern Slav family communities, direct social production and distribution preclude commodity exchange and value. Under direct social production, society knows labour-time directly and can calculate it absolutely, so it will not assign values to products. The concept of value contains the germ of money and all developed forms of commodity production, including the antagonism between capital and wage-labour, the industrial reserve army, and crises. To abolish capitalism by establishing “true value” is absurd. The “value of labour” is a contradiction; labour cannot have value any more than weight can have weight. Demanding that workers receive the full proceeds of labour abolishes accumulation and disperses means of production. This elevates the basic law of existing society—the law of value—into the basic law of an imaginary society, attempting to abolish the consequences of commodity production by enforcing its fundamental law.