Cheaper food — less wages

From the firm of Harry Ferguson, Ltd., of Coventry, producers of the Ferguson Tractor, comes a booklet containing an alleged solution to the rising cost of living. By reducing the cost of food and thereby preventing demands for higher wages, the farmer, so he is assured, can prevent the “vicious, mounting spiral of inflation.” But let Harry Ferguson, Ltd., speak for themselves:

A paragraph headed : “Industry’s Prime Cost” proceeds:

“The prime cost of all industry is the cost of maintaining human beings. Human beings cannot he maintained unless they are paid enough to ensure that they get sufficient food to keep them fit to do their jobs; and they must also have, at the very least, a reasonable margin left over to enjoy other things.
“If, therefore, food prices can be stabilised, wages can be stabilised too.”

The writer delicately refrains from carrying his argument to the next logical step—that if food prices can be reduced, wages can be reduced too.

This booklet has not, as you may guess, been produced for the purpose of introducing the employees of Harry Ferguson, Ltd., to Marx’s theory of Value. It has as its object the sale of tractors and carries the popular two fold appeal to the potential customer—the assurance that “costs” will be cut, backed by the patriotic appeal to assist the “National effort.”

Nevertheless, although the composer of this stirring appeal may never have read a line of Marx, no Marxist could quarrel with his analysis of the prime cost of industry. (The additional margin to “enjoy other things” is a novel, if somewhat vague touch and should merit close attention if some economist can be persuaded to come forward with the formula by means of which this margin is calculated!)

How often have the workers refused to accent this analysis from the Socialist platform? Will they accept it now, from the pen of their masters’ hirelings?

Let the worker consider carefully the implications. The farmer is urged to buy agricultural implements to enable the worker to enjoy a more substantial or varied diet. but, in reality, to facilitate a general reduction in wages. Nor is this stupid and vicious economy confined to the land. Everywhere that so-called “labour-saving” machinery is installed, whether in mills, mines or factories, whether in warehouses, offices or hotels, the object is never to save labour hut always to save wages.

This is inevitable under capitalism. The capitalist class is forever striving to reduce wages, whether by direct action in the workshops where labour-saving machinery enables production to be maintained or increased with fewer workers, or indirectly where the cheaper production of the necessities of life enables a reduction to be made in the basic wage.

The solution? A social system wherein the use of machinery on the farm as in every other sphere of production, has as its two-fold object the genuine saving of labour (with its accompanying increase of leisure and energy to enjoy that leisure) and the production of articles solely, simply and sensibly for—need. In a word—Socialism.

H. J. G.