Recently, a meme from one of Twitter’s many socialist denizens received a lot of attention. The message it seems to convey is that workers are undervalued because they are paid far less than they produce:
The implication is clear and reflects a popular topic of discussion in socialist circles. The worker in this meme produces 3,000 of these plastic rings per hour of work, but is only paid enough per hour to buy 3. This would imply that he is only paid for one thousandth of the value of this that he produces! Surely this is exploitation, right?
Well no. There are two important points missing from this meme that change things up a bit. The first is that the worker here cannot produce 3,000 plastic rings per hour. If he could do that, he would simply sit in his garage and make them himself, selling them directly and greatly improving his income. He can only make $3,000 an hour because he works with machines built by others and paid for by others. His work alone is not enough to produce 3,000 per hour. This requires combining one’s work with the massive capital investment that the company has made to make its work more productive, in the context of a company that also provides the working environment, raw materials and tools needed to manage orders and sales. , as well as countless other aspects necessary to allow it to do what it does. For this worker to claim that he specifically produces 3,000 euros per hour through his own labor, he must massively downplay and dismiss the work and investment made by so many other people. His work is important, of course, but it’s just one small step in an incomprehensibly complex process involving the cooperation of countless workers who also participate in the production of these plastic rings.
As is often the case, the flaw in this type of thinking was highlighted by Adam Smithin his well-known (but apparently not well-known enough) description of what ultimately goes into the production of a simple wool coat:
The woolen coat, for example, which covers the day laborer, however crude and harsh it may appear, is the product of the joint labor of a great multitude of workers. The shepherd, the wool sorter, the wool comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, and many others, must all unite their several arts to accomplish even this . family production. How many merchants and transporters, moreover, must have been employed in transporting materials from some of these workers to others who often live in a very distant region of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many shipbuilders, sailors, sailboats, rope makers, must have been employed to bring together the different drugs used by the dyer, and which often come from the most remote corners. of the world! What variety of work is also necessary to produce the tools of the humblest of these workers! Leaving aside such complicated machines as the sailor’s ship, the fuller’s mill, or even the weaver’s loom, let us just consider what variety of labor is necessary to form this very simple machine, the shear. with which the shepherd cuts the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of wood, the burner of charcoal intended for use in the foundry, the brickmaker, the mason, the workers who take care of the furnace, the builder of mills, the forger, the blacksmith must all join their different arts to produce them… if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what variety of labor is employed in each of them, we will be aware that without the aid and cooperation of many thousands of people, the meanest person in a civilized country could not support himself.
In the modern world, the network of activities and labor leading to the production of these plastic rings is, if anything, incomprehensibly larger than what Adam Smith describes in the production of a wool coat in the 18th century. All of this work, effort, investment and cooperation is erased from existence by the type of “reasoning” employed in this meme. Although socialists claim to be allies of labor, by making claims like this they ironically devalue and dismiss the importance of the cooperative efforts of large numbers of workers.
