I think Jack Conrad and the

[ALB]

I think Jack Conrad and the Weekly Worker are being excessively pedantic. When the SWP say that "the workers create all the wealth under capitalism" all that they are meaning to say is that the labour that today creates wealth by working on materials that orifinally came from nature is that of the working class. They no more mean to say that workers create the materials that originally came from nature than we do when we refer in Clause 1 of our Declaration of principles to "the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced".But let's be pedantic. Conrad is claiming that Marx's statement in the Critique of the Gotha Programme denying that labour is "the source of all wealth" refutes the SWP statement. But does it? Does saying that labour "creates" or "produces" all wealth mean that it is "the source" of all wealth too? I wouldn't have thought so. Labour is not the source of all wealth. It is just that without labour wealth can't be produced, i.e nature can't be transformed.And when Conrad raises the point that peasants and artisans also produce wealth (by their labour) this is the sort of objection that we expect pedants to raise against what we say in our Declaration of Principles:

Quote:

when visiting Greece, I enjoy drinking the rough village wines sold along the roadside by small farmers; I buy newspapers from my local British-Muslim newsagent; and I get my shoes repaired by the British-Bengali cobbler over the road. Such little businesses produce use-values and therefore, by definition, wealth too. With such examples in mind, it is surely mistaken to baldly state that “workers create all the wealth under capitalism”.

But even he seems to think he's gone too far here since he adds:

Quote:

In theoretical terms, forgetting or passing over petty bourgeois commodity production is a mote, a mere speck of dust, in the eye of the SWP’s ‘Where we stand’ column.

What does he want them to say: that "workers create the great bulk of wealth under capitalism" or us to say "by whose labour most wealth is produced"?And, to end on a really pedantic note, what wealth does his "local British-Muslim newsagent" produce?