Secretarial practice

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1828236004

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-249926

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Secretarial practice

Edition:: fourth edition

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd

Year of publication:: 1930

Scope:: viii, 987 Seiten

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter VIII. Transfer and transmission of shares

Collection:: Economics Books

26 THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. In respect of value, says Marx, commodities intended for exchange are merely crystallized labour. The unit of labour is an average day’s work, which varies in different countries and at different times, but which may be considered a fixed quantity in a given community. More complicated labour, or work which demands the higher faculties, must be considered as simple labour raised to a higher power. A useful article, then, possesses value only because it represents labour. The things most necessary to existence, air and water, have in general no value, because they can be obtained without labour. How, then, is the quantity of values represented by an article to be measured ? By the quantity of “ the substance creative of value,” that is to say of labour, that it contains. The quan tity of labour is itself measured by the duration of the labour, by days and hours. Here Marx makes a correction in the theory of Smith and Ricardo, and forestalls an objection. It might, in fact, be said that, if it is the duration of the labour that creates the value of the products, a coat which took a tailor twice as long to make as was necessary, would therefore be twice as valuable. Not so, replies Marx ; the measure of the value of things is the duration of the labour on the average re quisite, performed with the average amount of skill and dili gence, and in the normal industrial conditions at any given time. If with the aid of a sewing machine a shirt can be made in one day, that will be the measure of the value of a shirt, and not the two or three days that were formerly necessary. Even thus amended, the theory which makes labour the source of value is entirely erroneous, as will be shown later on. We may here remark that, like all abstractions, these averages are want ing in scientific exactness. In truth, each kind of labour has its own value, its own particular character. Is the day’s labour of a mason of precisely the same value as that of a carpenter, a painter, a carver, a plumber, or a common labourer ? Clearly not. How, too, can they be compared unless by the wages that each of these workmen receives ? It must be admitted, der Kapitalismus ; Rud. Meyer, Der Emancipationskampf des vierten Standes ; and in French, the short but solid study of M. Maurice Block, Les Théoriciens du Socialisme en Allemagne.

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