Wikipedia has an entry on the lump-of-labour fallacy. Back in October, I added two paragraphs to it to call attention to my critique of the alleged fallacy but my addition was recently deleted by an editor with some sort of an ax to grind. Follow the indicated links to view and/or contribute to the entry and the edit discussion.
Posted by sandwichman at May 5, 2005 09:20 AMI agree that pearlg's editing was heavy-handed. Since the whole point of Wikipedia (as I understand it) is to be a people's medium that circumvents academic gatekeeping, his/her emphasis on peer review and credentialing seems sort of contrary to the spirit of the thing.
On the "lump of labor" topic itself, I really need to study it more thoroughly. But the standard dismissal we get from "free market" boilerplate (like Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson) just don't cut it.
It's not a self-evident fallacy that machines or techniques that reduce the amount of labor necessary to do a job will reduce the amount of available work. Arguments to that effect are typical of vulgar libertarianism: they are equivocal as to how far the present system can be takeen as a proxy for a "free market." To say that something "can't happen" under the present state capitalist system, because that's "the way the market works," is nonsense.
In a real free market system, the bargaining power of labor would be such that jobs competed for workers, instead of the other way around. And cooperative ownership and self-employment would be much more widespread than at present. Under those circumstances, decisions to change production methods would be decisions by labor itself to increase its own productivity, with labor internalizing all the benefits and losses from the decision. Under those circumstances, it would indeed be a fallacy that workers would suffer from increases in productivity.
But in the present government-cartelized system, with legally enforced privileges for land and capital that force labor to sell itself under terms of unequal exchange, it's hardly likely that labor will internalize all the benefits of changing the work process. The presence of the state in state capitalism causes changes that might otherwise be mutually beneficial, instead, to be a zero-sum game.
So it's quite likely, under such circumstances of privilege, that the benefits of increased labor productivity would accrue to the owners of capital, while the harm would accrue to workers.
We don't live in a free market economy, or anything remotely approaching it. In a government-cartelized, corporate-dominated economy like the present one, the rules of "how the free market works" go right out the window. For example, it makes no sense to use Say's Law to "prove" that overproduction is impossible. As Joseph Stromberg pointed out, under state capitalism J.A. Hobson is closer to the truth than J.B. Say.
Posted by: Kevin Carson at May 10, 2005 09:31 AM