Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/80

16 necessary days, and the value of each pair of braces will drop to a third of its previous value. The price will fall as well, probably below this third. The value of the trousers will however be now as before determined by the socially necessary 10,000 days, not by the 8,000 actually spent on them; the value of each single pair of trousers will amount to five-quarters of the previous value. As a consequence, the production of braces will be unprofitable, the amount of labour employed in it will be decreased, and it will flow back to the production of trousers, now grown so uncommonly profitable.

In this way the law of value regulates production under the system of free competition. It is not the best method conceivable of regulating production, but the only one possible under the system of private property in the means of production. In its place there would, under a social ownership of the means of production, come the social regulation of production. The need for regulating production through the exchange of equal values would cease. With that would also cease the necessity for money to be a measure of value and an object of value. The place of metal-money can be taken by any token-money. The prices of products themselves can now be fixed independently of their value. Still the amount of labour-time incorporated in them will always retain its essential importance as their measure, and it is just possible that the prices prevalent at the time as the result of the past commercial history will even be made the starting point.

If, however, money and prices of products are still to prevail, labour will also be paid in money, and, therefore, wages will remain.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to speak of a continuation of the present-day wage-system, as many Fabians do, who say that the business of Socialism is not to abolish the wage-system, but far more to universalise it. That is only superficially correct. As a matter of fact, the wage under a proletarian régime is something quite different to what it is in a capitalist society. To-day it is the price of the commodity called Labour-Power, It is in the last resort determined by the cost of subsistence of the worker, while its oscillations depend on the changes in supply and demand. In a society controlled by the proletariat that will cease, the worker will no longer be compelled to sell his labour power, it will cease to be a commodity, which is in its price determined by the cost of reproduction, its price will be independent of the relation between demand and supply. What in the last resort will now determine the rate of wages will be the quantity of products available for distribution among the working class. The greater this quantity, the higher can and also will rise the general rate of wages, though, at the same time, the respective wages in the different branches of industry will still to a certain extent be determined in their relative amounts by supply and demand. As the workers of course will not