The “CPGB” of course  is no

December 2025 › Forums › General discussion › Workers create all the “wealth” (SPGB, SWP) or “value” (CPGB)? › The “CPGB” of course  is no

January 13, 2012 at 10:09 am #87548
ALB
Keymaster

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 :

Quote:
The workers create all wealth under capitalism.

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:

Quote:
Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture.

Marx comments:

Quote:
Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only a manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.

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:

Quote:
The above phrase … is correct in so far as it is implied that labour is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments … And in so far as man from the beginning behaves towards nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labour, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labour becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth.

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.