Undiminished Proceeds of Labour

Where the Demand Came From

That what the worker makes belongs to the worker was common property of nineteenth-century socialism. Lassalle hardened it into programmatic language, and in 1886 Anton Menger traced the whole claim in The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour. The stiff Korean coinage 노동전수익권 dates from the translation of that lineage.

The demand is intuitive enough. If the capitalist's share is exploitation, then in a society that has abolished exploitation the worker should surely receive the product of his labour entire.

Marx's List of Deductions

Part I of the Critique answers the intuition with arithmetic. The co-operative proceeds of labour are the total social product, and from it must first be deducted:

1. cover for replacement of the means of production used up
2. an additional portion for the expansion of production
3. reserve or insurance funds against accidents and natural calamities

What remains is means of consumption. But before that is divided among individuals, further deductions are made:

1. general costs of administration not belonging to production, which shrink as the new society develops
2. what is meant for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools and health services, which grow as it develops
3. funds for those unable to work

By the end of the list the word 'undiminished' has already collapsed. In Marx's phrase the proceeds 'have already unnoticeably become converted into the "diminished" proceeds', with the qualification that what the producer loses as a private individual comes back to him directly or indirectly as a member of society. One step further and the phrase 'proceeds of labour' loses its meaning altogether, since in a society resting on common ownership the producers do not exchange their products and individual labour exists directly as a component of total labour.

The Real Objection Is Not Arithmetic

The deductions are preliminary. The conclusion of the passage lies elsewhere:

'It was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.'

Any distribution of means of consumption is a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. Where the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers as capital and land while the masses own only labour power, present-day distribution follows automatically; where the material conditions are the co-operative property of the workers, a different distribution follows just as automatically. What Marx called 'vulgar socialism' is the habit of reversing this order and treating distribution as independent of the mode of production.

What the Demand Left Behind

The undiminished proceeds vanished from the programmes but survived as a habit of thought. Every proposal that leaves ownership untouched and solves the problem by redividing the shares stands in this line. The Critique's answer is not that such proposals are wrong, but that socialism cannot be defined by them: unless you ask whose the conditions of production are before you ask how much is shared out, a distributive formula slides easily into a benefit administered by the state.