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Title: Letter to Mother Earth Author: Laurance Labadie Date: 1933 Language: en Topics: labor vouchers, money, mutualism Source: Retrieved on 1/17/22 from https://c4ss.org/content/55689 Notes: Sent as a letter to John G. Scott and Jo Ann Wheeler’s version of Mother Earth and printed in an issue in 1933.
Believing that the attempt to make labor-time a standard for a monetary
unit a fallacy and bound to fail in practice, I submit a few questions
and observations. Whose labor is to be used as a standard, the efficient
or the inefficient man’s? Take any product you may, say shoes. John
produces five pairs a day, James produces ten. Is it possible that John
in a free market will be able to obtain for his shoes a price twice as
great as James? Absurd! In a competitive market, John would be forced
out of business if he charged a price twice as great as James. If he
charged the same price, which he must do to remain in business, what
becomes of the labor-time unit? Disappeared!
What is a standard of value? It is one product in terms of which the
exchange rate of other products are measured. It is true that labor, in
the shape of the utility of the objective hindrance overcome, the value
of which is determined in a competitive market, enters as an element
determining the exchange value of product and in a freely competitive
market tends to become the whole factor. But products must be useful in
order to be exchangeable, and usefulness is determined by desire. The
value of labor is determined by its result, not the result by amount of
labor in time.
The truth is that the desire for a product can measure the utility and
hence the value of the labor expended in making it, but the amount of
labor cannot conversely measure the value of a product. For, what may be
said of productive labor and wasted labor? How are they to be
differentiated? Surely it must be seen that under a freely competitive
system inefficiency and waste are automatically eliminated. This is to
the benefit of society at large. This is why a freely competitive system
is, truly and broadly speaking, the most automatically cooperative
condition possible. And this is why, fortunately, that freedom solves
the economic problem. Efficiency crowds out inefficiency, putting the
right man in the right place and remunerating each according to the
service he renders society.
The trouble with economic conditions is that they are not freely
competitive and the State is the institution which maintains this system
of robbery. What with all the privileges guaranteed to and handicaps
placed upon the different producers it so happens that some are able to
derive more than their just share of the wealth produced. The necessary
conditions for a freely competitive society which anarchists desire, the
equality of opportunity, is very far from being realized today. This is
why they so valiantly struggle to instruct people in the economic
benefits of liberty.
While we claim that liberty solves every solvable social problem either
it be in education, sex, literature, art, crime, religious beliefs or
whatnot, we emphacize most strongly on the economic field, for this, it
is believed, is the key to all others. It is unfortunate that so many
so-called radicals (men who go to the root of things) do not understand
economic processes, especially as they would exist under freedom. In my
estimation, what makes this so is, not only the intentional perversions
made by the text book economists, but also the stupid blunders made by
Karl Marx in his, I believe, honest attempt to fight for the cause of
the working class.
As far as the money problem is concerned, all that anarchists desire is
that anyone or any combination may go into the business of furnishing
money or insuring credit. To the superficial thinker, especially the
authoritarian minded such as Socialists or Communists, this would seem
the veritable return to chaos. But we will see how fraudulent or
insecure money fares when free competition in banking exists, and what
will become of the phenomenon of interest. What will most probably
happen has been ably shown by Proudhon, Wm. B. Greene, and others.
But it is quite doubtful that an attempt to directly adopt a labor-time
unit of value will meet with any success.
Laurance Labadie