material by the laborer. His twelve hours’ labor has created, according to this, a new value of 6 dollars. Therefore, the value of his twelve hours’ labor would be equivalent to 6 dollars. So we have at last discovered what the “value of labor” is.
“Hold on there!” cries our machinist. “Six dollars? But I have received only 3 dollars! My capitalist swears high and dry that the value of my twelve hours’ labor is no more than 3 dollars, and if I were to demand six, he’d laugh at me. What kind of a story is that?”
If before this we got with our value of labor into a vicious circle, we now surely have driven straight into an insoluble contradiction. We searched for the value of labor, and we found more than we can use. For the laborer the value of the twelve hours’ labor is 3 dollars; for the capitalist it is 6 dollars, of which he pays the workingman 3 dollars as wages, and pockets the remaining 3 dollars himself. According to this, labor has not one, but two values, and, moreover, two very different values!
As soon as we reduce the values, now expressed in money, to labor-time, the contradiction becomes even more absurd. By the twelve hours’ labor a new value of 6 dollars is created. Therefore in six hours the new value created equals 3 dollars—the amount which the laborer receives for twelve hours’ labor. For twelve hours’ labor the workingman receives, as an equivalent, the product of six hours’ labor. We are thus forced to one of two conclusions: either labor has two values, one of which is twice as large as the other, or twelve equals six! In both cases we get pure absurdities. Turn and twist as we may, we will not get out of this contradiction as long as we speak of the buying and selling of “labor” and of the “value of labor.” And just so it happened to the political economists. The last offshoot of classical
