by THOMAS RIGGINS
In Chapter Six (‘Simple and Compound Labour’) of Part Two of his classic work Anti-Dühring, Frederick Engels addresses a charge made by the German professor Eugen Dühring to the effect that in his work Das Kapital Marx has made a major blunder which amounts to a socially dangerous heresy regarding socialism. What could this heresy be?
Dühring says that Marx’s theory of value is only the common theory that all values are the result of labour and measured by labor-time. But Marx sheds no light on the difference between skilled and unskilled labor. In fact Marx is wrong when he tries to explain the difference by saying one person’s labor can be worth more than another’s because it has more average labor-time compounded within it. See below where Engels says Marx has no such conception regarding the “worth” of labor.
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