This doctrine is elaborately worked out in the massive volumes of Capital. Marx admits, of course, that all kinds of labour are not of equal value. The skilled workman produces more value than the unskilled, and he also receives higher wages. How are these differences measured? By the differing costs of producing and maintaining the supply of skilled and unskilled workers.
The training of the skilled worker is a cost of producing him, and the maintenance of the supply of skilled labour involves additional costs. The "labour" whose amount is the measure and determinant of the value of commodities is not the actual labour time of the workers, irrespective of their skill and quality, but an "abstract, undifferentiated human labour" of which skilled labour is to be regarded as a multiple. One hour's labour of a skilled man may count as two or more hours of this "simple but the difference is not arbitrary. It is measured by the relative costs of producing the different types of labour.
Equally, not all labour, but only useful labour, is productive of value. Useless labour produces no value at all; and even useful labour produces value only in so far as it is of average, or ordinary. efficiency. A slow worker, who takes two hours to do what an ordinary, or average, worker would do in an hour, produces in two hours only one hour's value. This is Marx's conception of "socially necessary labour." The Social Right.—While asserting that the worker is ex ploited by the extraction of surplus value, Marx throws over board completely the notion that each worker ought to receive the full value of his own product. Modern production, he points out, is essentially a social and co-operative process, in which it is impossible to say what, or how much, any single individual has produced. The "right to the whole produce" thus becomes, not a right of any worker to his own product, but a social right of all the workers to the whole product of their combined and co operative labour. The entire economic system is essentially one: it is no more possible to draw a line between factory and factory, or industry and industry, than between individual workers.
If then, Marx claims the entire product for the whole body of producers, and treats all surplus value as filched from them by extortion, what allowance does he make for the labour of organ ising and managing production, and of distributing the products? He is ready to allow that the brain-worker engaged in produc tion is a producer of value equally with the manual worker. But he denies that the processes of distribution, the merchanting and trading processes of industry, are productive of value. This is not
to say that they are unnecessary. They are necessary expenses of production, and cause deductions from the amount of surplus value left for division as rent, interest and profits to the ex ploiters. The workers engaged in distribution have clearly to be paid as well as the directly productive workers. The capitalist also may be doing useful work ; but in addition to his own share in the social product he is filching the workers' surplus value.
This surplus value is divided into rent, interest and profits. In discussing the principles on which this division takes place Marx makes few original contributions to economic theory, fol lowing in the main the orthodoxy of his own day. But in dis cussing the allocation of profits (Capital, Vol. III.) he incidentally modifies in a vital fashion the impression created by his treatment of the question of value in Volume I. Profits in different em ployments, he points out, are equalized by the competition of capitalists one with another. If the profits in one employment are high, fresh competitors enter the field, and lower prices until profits fall to the average level.