This question <94|160> overall <107|109> Hans: <107|109>.

Question 74: Does skilled labor produce more value per hour than unskilled labor? Explain!

[108] Hans: Getting higher wages is not the same as creating more value   Scott's [94] goes to Marx's text in order to answer Question 74. This is good; the previous answers haven't done it enough. Scott writes:

According to Marx the answer is not.

This is not true. Marx thinks skilled labor does produce more value per hour than unskilled labor.

Further down Scott misunderstands Marx again:

We are asked to reduce all labor to simple labor so that we don't continually have to make the reduction between skilled and unskilled labor.

This is only a stylistic device. Marx will act from now on as if all labor was unskilled, although what is really the case (according to the way how Marx sees it) is that there are different skills, which are then reduced to unskilled labor.

Next Scott writes how he understand my sentence in the Annotations that “the market does the counting”:

I believe this to be the answer in that the market counts by valuing through higher salaries, (which is the capitalist greatest desire and its' mark of success.

This is another misunderstanding, and a basic one which I haven't criticized enough in my earlier submissions. We are not yet talking here about wages. We are talking about the values which the commodities containing skilled or unskilled labor fetch on the market.

In another thread of his argument, Scott criticizes that the previous submissions used a subjective concept of value. I agree here, this is again something which I should have marked as wrong with a big red pen in the earlier submissions. When Marx talks about “value” he means some objective social reality, not some subjective valuation.

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