The Value of Labour To his master the slave is a capital, and his value, like that of an animal, a machine, or any piece of fixed capital, is determined by summing up and discounting all the services which may be expected from him, or, as we may say, by capitalising his net return.
The capital value of free labour, the value of the free labourer, is no object for valuation, any more than his person is an object of economical disposal, or a "good." On the other hand, the individual acts of labour are always objects of economical disposal, and so objects of value, even in the freest community, -- even in a community where the labourer himself governs and makes, the laws. No economy could be conducted without men recognising not only which labour, in general, is the best and which the worst, but which, in the circumstances, is the more and which the less important, which must be used sparingly and which may be used with most freedom.
The method by which labour is valued is exceedingly simple.
The ordinary principles of imputation decide what share of the return may be ascribed to each individual service, and the value of this share obtains directly as the value of the service which produces it. Thus every kind and quality of labour shows a different result according to the available supply, the demand, the support revived from complementary goods, and the technical possibilities. At the top of the tree stand the "monopoly"services, when the general economic conditions of the time aid them with technical support and general demand at the bottom stand the over-congested branches of labour, particularly unskilled manual labour. Wherever labour power is available in great quantity it is valued as a "cost-good," and suffers from all the disadvantages of this valuation. The marginal employment is always the decisive one, -- that employment of the labour in question which brings the smallest result economically permissible.
The socialists would have us believe that the value of every kind of labour should be estimated simply according to time; that is to say, the duration of the service should alone decide its value relative to other labour, -- which assumes, of course, that slovenly labour is reduced to earnest labour, unskilled to skilled labour. This is the extent to which the quality of the labour would be taken into consideration, but no further. Those differences of quality which reside in the task set before the labourer are left quite out of consideration. Common manual labour, higher artisan labour, superior mental labour, are all to be regarded as equal. Does it require any special proof that this is contrary to the natural laws of valuation, and that no economy could last which treated its division of labour in this way?
The socialists continually overlook the fact -- although, indeed, they only follow in the footsteps of most of the economists -- that value, in our present condition of society, has two services to perform. The one is to act as title to personal income. In the great round game of income-winning, every one is to receive in the end as much as the value of his stake amounts to; and in the game the stakes may be wealth as well as personal labour. The man who has much wealth to stake receives, as a rule, much income, even without personal labour, and the man who has little wealth to stake, as a rule receives little, even with the most strenuous expenditure of labour.
