* From: tom walker 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, ^^^^ CB: How is the claim 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 ^^^^ CB:If wages go up, price don't have to go up , if profits go down, Citizen Weston ? _Value, Price and Profit_ ? ^^^^ 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 ^^^^^^^ CB: When once upon a time, "we" few activists argued against overtime at some GM plants so as to employ more workers, did we use the wage-fund doctrine to our theoretical advantage ? UAW wasn't arguing for cutting overtime, by the way.
