“Once one attributes a ‘market value’ to labor, there are no longer any limits to the distortion of concepts. If labor had a ‘value’ and were itself an object of exchange, wouldn’t it then be the designated standard of values? This was what Smith believed and, following him, Malthus. The influence of the labor-as-standard idea reappeared in the twentieth century: it became official doctrine under Nazism, and it resurfaces in a different form in Keynes.
PAUL FABRA – Capital for profit
1. The products of labor, in exchange for which workers receive wages, are part of all the commodities sold by the enterprises.
This is one of the reasons why these products, which are services, are the primary commodity. Another reason is that this same commodity enters the production of public administrations and non-commercial associations. And to these two reasons is added a third: all organizations, including families, which employ personnel, buy primary commodities.48
2. Every holder of income from product of labor derives it from the sale of the primary commodity49
Including when this holder is not aware of being a merchant, economically speaking. Radical and unjustly inspired criticisms of economic life would not remain so frequent if those who peddle them would admit that the remuneration for their work also makes them merchants.
3. Many of these merchants are unwilling, but it is in avoidance of the worst.
Giving exclusivity to the practice of subsidies (gifts, transfers), would lead to prohibit economic exchange and, consequently, to the prohibition of the wage system, in all its thus severely undermining the exercise of fundamental freedoms.
4. Since the primary commodity is the service of labor in exchange for its remuneration, the primary market is the labor market.
If this market is, for whatever reason, economically immature, then it may be practically futile to work to clean up other markets before having, even in theory, made progress in recognizing what makes the labor market more objective and impartial, and therefore less paved with injustices. Whether it is accepted or not, the Labor Code is in fact the first book of the Commercial Code.
5. A political economy is only realistic if in its initial expectations it admits the primacy of the labor market.
The primacy of the labor market is fundamental because it is where the primary commodity—product of human labor itself—is exchanged, forming the very basis of all economic activity. When a political economy, through its dominant theories and policies, obscures or represses this reality, it severs us from the true nature of value creation. This distortion weakens our collective capacity to form sound economic judgments, leaving us vulnerable to policies and practices that generate systemic harm.
6. It is not because the primary commodity is the service of labor that there is not another category of elementary commodity.
The other category of elementary commodity that the service of labor is, as this chapter returns to later, the service of the placement of savings in exchange for its remuneration. The basic markets are those of labor and savings placements. The absence of full employment is likely to be due more to the state of the savings market than to the labor market, given that corruption by habit and inadequate legal provisions of only one of these two markets is unlikely.