What is at stake in the debate on value

New Lanark is one of the big tourist attractions in the south of Scotland. Designated a world heritage site by the UN it is an almost perfectly preserved model industrial village run by Robert Owen two hundred years ago. It has a large and elegant school building, an ’Institute for the Formation of Character’, workers houses and the original mills. An exhibition and theme ride puts accross some of the basic facts about Owen, the pioneer of Socialism, Trades Unionism and the Co-operative movement. The shop sells his Millenium address, dedicated 200 years ago to our generation. Posters around the site display his humanist philosophy, and explain how he established the first nursery school for worker’s children and set up the first system of sickness benefits. Owen, an idealistic employer, at first thought that he could persuade other capitalists to reform society and abolish poverty, but was ridiculed by his class. The New Lanark exhibition is rather coy about what Owen did next. It does not explain how he went on to become a socialist revolutionary organising the Grand National Consolidated Union, the objective of which was to hold a general strike then sieze the factories and mills for the workers. The union was suppressed by the government and Owen eventually went into exile to form the commune of New Harmony in America. He is remembered as the founder of co-ops and of industrial Trades Unionism. His plans for socialism have been largely ignored. He proposed to abolish money and replace it with labour vouchers. Every worker would be paid an hour’s worth of labour tokens for each hour they worked. Shops would sell goods at prices marked in labour so that if you worked an hour you could buy goods that had taken an hour to make. Contrast this to today’s society. With an hour’s wages, the average British worker can buy goods that took about 35mins to make. The rest goes as profits to the rich. In this very little has changed since Owen’s day. His idea would have abolished exploitation and poverty at a stroke. But at the same time it would have abolished profit and the incomes of the rich. Owen’s ideas were later taken up and systematised by Karl Marx, whose book Capital expalined just how labour was exploited. Marx’s ideas for socialism were similar to Owen’s. Marx put forward the labour theory of value, showed that labour