Workers create all the “wealth” (SPGB, SWP) or “value” (CPGB)?

The “CPGB” of course  is no more the old CP than Militant is us (they too are name stealers) and you have to listen to 8 minutes of how they would love to infilitrate the SWP before you get to the criticism of the statement on “What the SWP stands for” that is published in every issue of Socialist Worker.This begins :

The “CPGB” speaker says that this conflicts with Marx’s opening criticism of the Gotha Programme adopted by the German Social Democrats in 1875 that:

Marx comments:

Actually, this is not a criticism of the SWP statement nor of the what we say in Clause 1 of our declaration of principles where we talk of “the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced”. Marx’s criticism was that the statement he criticised did not explicitly state that labour worked with and on materials that came from Nature to priduce wealth (personally, I think he’s nit-picking a bit here, even if he’s right). He wrote:

In other words, in any society  wealth is only produced by work and, under capitalism, it’s the work of the appropriately called working class that produces the wealth.Value is the form wealth takes under capitalism where there is production for the market with a view to profit (which is why it won’t exist in socialism) and is equally only created by the labour of the working class. As it’s a rather technical term in economics I don’t think it would be a good idea to change to change “wealth” to “value” in Clause 1.

So where does use value fit in if there is no wealth produced in a needs based economy?

Quite so.  But I was hoping Darren would reply to my question because it appears he’s assuming that a needs based society will not be producing wealth or value through default.  In regards to use-values being subjective and therefore not capable of being measured into a common unit I have to disagree.  What about  the calculation in kind solution being used has a form of measuring use-value?  Roughly speaking that is because I have no desire to get into a discussion on whether or not its necessary to calculate the entire resources of the planet in detail.  

Sorry Brian, I think you’re getting confused somewhere. I said:

‘Value’ in the Marxian sense is the amount of abstract socially necessary labour time represented in a commodity.Wealth, is any use-value. So to say that a needs based society would not produce wealth is a like saying a needs based society would produce square circles, it’s a logical contradiction. That’s not what I said.Watch my talk here

Reluctant as I am to defend the SWP I have to say that the “CPGB”‘s criticism of them on this is very petty. To say that “the workers create all wealth under capitalism” is not all that bad and misleading. Only work creates wealth (ie transforms parts of nature into something useful to humans) and this is as true under capitalism as under any other form of society. So the SWP statement is basically correct.The “CPGB” claim that this ignores nature and their speaker gives a garbled version of a quote that Marx used from the 17th century economic writer Sir William Petty about calling “labour the father and earth the mother of wealth”. Apparently this is what the “CPGB” would like the opening words of the SWP’s “What We Stand For” statement to be.What Marx wrote, in the opening pages of Capital, was:

The “CPGB” are playing on the difference between labour “creating” wealth and labour “being the source” of wealth. The SWP statement does not say (as the Gotha Programme did and which Marx criticised for it doing so) that labour is the source of wealth but only that it creates, or produces, it.What Petty actually wrote was (Marx must have been quoting from memory):

Which is even stronger than what Marx remembered him saying to back up the view that all wealth results from work (on nature-given materials). It also refutes the “CPGB”‘s speaker’s view that nature is more important than labour in the creation of wealth because a mother does more than a father in the creation of babies. They seem to have gone all Green by giving more importance to Mother Earth than to the Working Class.The new SWP formulation that “under capitalism workers’ labour creates all profit” is not wrong either.

Interesting. I see from following your link that as long ago as 2007 this NZ organisation’s What We Stand For started:

Maybe this is what the “CPGB” would like the SWP here to adopt? In any event, it is wrong. Profit arises from the exploitation of labour. No doubt capitalism mistreats nature but this is not the same sense of “exploitation”.”Exploitation” is not the same as mistreatment. Even if workers are not mistreated at work, eg by bullying foremen or dangerous working conditions, they are still exploited in the Marxian sense.To come back to JonDWhite’s original point about “wealth” and “value”, workers under capitalism produce wealth (from and with materials that originally came from nature) in the form of value, but only get paid the value of their labour power (their working skills) not the value of what they produce. The difference is surplus value, ie  they produce more value than the are paid for. That is the sense in which they are exploited. Nature contributes nothing to the creation of value (as opposed to wealth) and so not to profits (which derive from labour-produced surplus value alone).

 Link performed superbly JS     BTW, I take it you read the full article here:-http://unityaotearoa.blogspot.com/2012/01/towards-ecosocialism.html