If you should ask your friend, the soap-box man, where he gets the figures which he reels off so glibly when he is talking to you about the way you are robbed, he may find it difficult to answer; but the difficulty he encounters when confronted with such a question is nothing in comparison to that which he will experience if you ask him to inform you how the Socialist bosses are going to figure out your labor value in a way to assure you against robbery. It is easy for him to say that under Socialism you will get all you produce, but don’t let him get away with the idea that he can make such statements without being called upon to prove them. It is a beautiful promise, this assurance of Socialism that every worker in the Co-operative Commonwealth will get every penny that is represented in his labor. It is a beautiful promise; but lots of people have made beautiful promises and haven’t kept them. Can it be possible that the bright little promiser who talks to you at the street corner is one of the “four-flushers,” too? Ask him the next time he invites questions. Tell him that you are a practical man, and that you want more definite details. Do you know what he will tell you? He will use a lot of words rounded out into more or less eloquent periods, but, when you attempt to analyze what he has said, you will find that all his wisdom could have been expressed in a single sentence. In plain English, he tells you that your request for details is nothing more or less than “a mark of ignorance.” He wants you to believe that Socialism’s plan will be all right for everybody, because, as the old negro said, “it jes’ works out so.” Well, perhaps it will! Let us see. To test the truth of this theory, we must tackle one of the most difficult problems that we shall be called upon to consider. But I think, if we are patient, we shall be able to get to the bottom of Marx’s complicated methods of reasoning, and so show that even the promise to ascertain the full value of the worker’s labor--to say nothing of the detail of giving it to him afterwards--is one of the most glaring absurdities in the whole Socialist scheme. Marx tells us that value is determined by labor. What does he mean? He means that the value of a commodity is fixed by the labor that is put into it. This is all right as far as this statement goes, but it does not help us very much in determining the value of a particular commodity. Before we can know what a commodity is worth, we must know (according to Marx) what it cost to produce the mental and physical energy that was used in making it. To do this, we must first know the total cost of all the commodities which the worker consumed during the period when he was performing this particular task.