Reluctant as I am to defend

April 2026 › Forums › General discussion › Workers create all the “wealth” (SPGB, SWP) or “value” (CPGB)? › Reluctant as I am to defend

January 18, 2012 at 11:35 am #87556
ALB
Keymaster

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:

Quote:
When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, i.e. he can only change the form of the materials. Furthermore, even in this work of modification he is constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.

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):

Quote:
Labour is the Father and active principle of Wealth, as Lands are the Mother.

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.