The daily Nome industrial worker., 1917-08-10
IONSU NIPPON AND PRODUCTION

A good many people hold that all society IS victimzed at the point of consumption. And if one zere to divide economists into two classes today one could differentiate 5Aem in no better way than the school that believes in victimization at the point of consumption and those who hold that the real victim ization is performed at the point Of production.
 The latter is the theory that Marx advanced and which he has upheld in controversy against all opponents with complete success. But it is not popular with the powerful classes and with educators who live, move and have their being by the favor of the powerful classes.
 Quite a number of little reform CTS are urging reforms which will eliminate the robbery of consumers and especially is this true of that by no means insignificant coteric of men who have recently advanced a re hash of the old time Tree silver argu- ments when asking for a more ex- tensive currency in the form of treasury notes to farmers, secured by collateral in the shape of first mort gages on their farms. They have erected the noble structure of their fheir not wholly altruitrc agitation .apon the promised contention that thp consumer is he who is robbed.
 They point out that there is not FEuuey enough to go around. That u 5aen the farmers get money to
 move their crops. they get no such thing. that they get credit. And be- cause they have to pay the money Just interest on this credit the prices of commodities have to in cluue this cost Of production and dis tribution.
 Their arguments are sound enough when dwelling upon inc inadequacy of the present currency and the in- Ss,itable result Of tho concentration of the power and wea'th in thC hands of the few. Buc their de mands being based upon a false as sumption, they are misled into a Iolicy of reform which would not reform at all.
 The production of wealth possesses one r-arhoo fea- t,ralth possesses one marked fea- lnre. "an immense accumulation of commodities" as Marx forcibly points ont in the very first words of his great analysis of the capitalist sy- tem InheI ent in such commodit es IS all wealth.
 These commodities represent cer- aain values. Those values were created by labor. A portion of that value was returned to labor, in the Sorm of wages the rest is realized in rent, in interest and in profit.
 Labor has produced all that wealth. But labor has only been re- SElsi1 pd to the extent of the payroll. Take the total wages paid in the almned States and take the value of alY the commodities created, sub :stract one from the other and you have the total which is haggled about in the form of rent, in the form of interest and in the form of taxes and in the form of profit. But that interest that profit, those taxes, and that rent comes from unpaid labor: val ues is the total commodity world which Marx called surplus value, being created by labor over and above what labor was paid for pro hucing them. in the form of wages.
 Now there is a desperate hue and cry raised by one set of meE againts the other set of men because they =e4t excessive interest. D, cahsc they lrn,eX excessive profits, because tl.gy demand too much rent aud be- oissnse too much taxes have to be paId-
 That comes from the immense values and what wa see be- fore our eyes are number of men quarrelling over the amount to which they are entitled in the total mass of wealth created by aabor.