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That a Worker's Labour Cannot be a Commodity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John O. Nelson
John O. Nelson
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Extract

There are, no doubt, a variety of reasons, good and bad, why anyone might want to treat a worker's labour, and most people, consciously or unconsciously do, as a commodity.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 70 , Issue 272 , April 1995 , pp. 157 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1995

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References

1 One could, like Ayn Rand, have an ethical reason for wanting to view the worker's labour as a commodity. If one thought of private capitalism as an ideal morality (Rand: Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, The New American Library, New York, 1966, ix: ‘Capitalism is not merely the “ practical”, but the only moral system in history’ (italics Rand's)) because one thought of all coercion as criminal, and capitalism's ethics is that of the trader and so an ethics of mutual consent, then one might want to assimilate the ethics of private capitalism i.e., the trader's ethics to all human relations (witness Rand in her depiction of the ideal community, ‘Gait's Gulch,’ in Atlas Shrugged, Dutton, New York, 1992, 714: Gait speaking: ‘So I'll warn you now that there is one word forbidden in this valley (Gait's Gulch)... the word ‘give’... ’ [the point being: the trader does not give, but trades commodities on the basis of mutual consent] and thus to treat the worker's labour as a commodity).Google Scholar

2 In fact, so far as I am aware, Marx nowhere adduces the arguments of this paper to show that capitalist wages are wage slavery. More similar to the arguments of this paper, involving as they do the substantivization of value, are his arguments to the effect that the capitalist, in making a profit, necessarily extracts from the value produced by the worker ‘surplus value,’ and that this is a form of robbery.

3 Murray, Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand and Company, Inc., 1962), vol. II, 503–504.Google Scholar

4 Though, as far as I know, Rothbard does not anywhere use the term ‘commodity’ in dealing with labour he describes labour in all the terms applicable to a commodity; e.g., op. cit., 324, ‘[the worker's labour] is brought to market’ and ‘has a price’.