Re: Lump of labor fallacy fallacy

[tom walker <lumpoflabour@xxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown wrote:

> So the the lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy ?

Not exactly. The claim that proponents of shorter
working time *necessarily* commit the lump-of-labor
fallacy is a fallacy. In fact, that claim is itself an
instance of the lump-of-labor fallacy, which if you
care to go into the antecedents is another name for
the old wages-fund doctrine of vulgar classical
political economy.

An old guy named Karl Marx put the wages-fund doctrine
out of its misery so it had to be resurrected in
disguise as a presumably anti-doctrine doctrine. John
Wilson in an 1871 article titled "Economic Fallacies
and Labor Utopias" attacked unionism on the grounds
that it employed a version of the wages-fund theory.
It is true that unions in the mid-19th century did
discover that they could turn the arguments of the
wages-fund doctrine to their advantage even though the
original purpose of the doctrine had been to show that
it was futile and even self-defeating for workers to
collectively demand higher wages. Which goes to show,
it's not enough to play on a crooked table, you've
also got to be able to change the rules at will
depending on how the game is going.

The Sandwichman

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