In the period between the two world wars of the twentieth century, Henry Ford, the man who discovered the tremendous “leverage” possibilities of high-wage, low-price, long-line-of-production capitalism, was looked down upon by the intellectuals. He was an enemy of craftsmanship. He didn’t believe in history. He was naive enough to think you could stop a great war with a gesture and an appeal to the McGuffy Reader type of morality. He made absurd remarks about the bankers, or about Wall Street, or about the “international Jew.” He had crackpot ideas about the therapeutic value of folk dancing and the dietetic magic of soy beans; he was a monomaniac on the subject of the twin evils of tobacco and alcohol.
Of course, Marx’s foolishness was not his own; it stemmed from certain assumptions made by the classical economists whom he read with no eye for tautology or for the logical howlers that had become sacrosanct by virtue of incessant repetition. The classical economists believed there was a “wages fund” which limited the amount of money available for workers during a given year. They believed that wages and profits were in inexorable conflict, that capitalists must do literally anything to keep the rate of profit from falling, that value was to be explained in terms of the laborhours that went into the making of an object, and that there was such a thing as a “natural” price. Out of this mishmash it was perhaps inevitable that Marx should construct his theory of surplus value. For if it was the amount of labor time that accounted for value, then it was obvious that profits were a “theft” of part of the worker’s laborhours. And the drive to keep the rate of profit from falling must be at the sole expense of labor.
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