The Wage[s]-Lump Doctrine — still dogma after all these years “The wage-fund doctrine was the quintessential product of what Marx termed vulgar political economy; a dogma concealing real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifying them, on the other. It was a transparent effort to disarm the working-class movement, and an attempt (largely successful) to rally public opinion behind bourgeois resistance to the demands of working people for a better life. It was the principal ideological weapon in the arsenal of capital in its disputes with labor over the level of wages.” — Kenneth Lapides, Marx’s Wage Theory in Historical Perspective The lump-of-labor fallacy CLAIM is the wage-fund doctrine in disguise. The fallacy claim’s conclusions about the
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The Wage[s]-Lump Doctrine — still dogma after all these years
“The wage-fund doctrine was the quintessential product of what Marx termed vulgar political economy; a dogma concealing real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifying them, on the other. It was a transparent effort to disarm the working-class movement, and an attempt (largely successful) to rally public opinion behind bourgeois resistance to the demands of working people for a better life. It was the principal ideological weapon in the arsenal of capital in its disputes with labor over the level of wages.” — Kenneth Lapides, Marx’s Wage Theory in Historical Perspective
The lump-of-labor fallacy CLAIM is the wage-fund doctrine in disguise. The fallacy claim’s conclusions about the ultimate futility of workers’ demands are indistinguishable from the doctrine’s conclusions.. Only the premise from which those conclusions are deduced has been altered. Instead of asserting a certain quantity of work to be done, the fallacy claim attributes that fixed assumption to a designated scapegoat: workers, unions, populists. The claimants’ own assumptions are left undefined, as an amorphous “in reality.”
That undefined “reality” is a given amount of capital for employing workers that can only be increased or decreased as a result, respectively, of a decrease or increase in the cost of labor. That is to say, a wage-fund lump!
The wage-fund doctrine was debunked in 1826 by Sir Edward West. It was “recanted” in 1869 by John Stuart Mill. The lump-of-labor fallacy CLAIM was shown to rely on the discredited fixed wage-fund assumption by Charles Beardsley in 1893. So why do economists (& CEOs) still cling to this dogma?
Because it conceals real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifies them, on the other.
Because it disarms working-class movements and rallies public opinion behind bourgeois resistance to the demands of working people for a better life.
Because it is the principal ideological weapon in the arsenal of capital in its disputes with labor over the the hours of work.