SUBJECT CONTINUED--EXPLOITATION OF SKILL.
"The worth of a thing, is just what it bring." The professional man who
charges the highest fees is most respected, and he who undercharges
stands disgraced. We have a friend who has been, and we believe will
continue to be, one of the most useful men in Virginia. He inherited an
independent patrimony. He acquired a fine education, and betook himself
laboriously to an honorable profession. His success was great, and his
charges very high. In a few years he amassed a fortune, and ceased work.
We expounded our theory to him. Told him we used to consider him a good
man, and quite an example for the rising generation; but that now he
stood condemned under our theory. Whilst making his fortune, he daily
exchanged about one day of his light labor for thirty days of the
farmer, the gardener, the miner, the ditcher, the sewing woman, and
other common working people's labor. His capital was but the
accumulation of the results of their labor; for common labor creates all
capital. Their labor was more necessary and useful than his, and also
more honorable and respectable. The more honorable, because they were
contented with their situation and their profits, and not seeking to
exploitate, by exchanging one day of their labor for many of other
people's. To be exploitated, ought to be more creditable than to
exploitate. They were "slaves without masters;" the little fish, who
were food for all the larger. They stood disgraced, because they would
not practice cannibalism; rise in the world by more lucrative, less
useful and less laborious pursuits, and live by exploitation rather than
labor. He, by practising cannibalism more successfully than others, had
acquired fame and fortune. 'Twas the old tune--"Saul has slain his
thousands, and David his tens of thousands." The more scalps we can
shew, the more honored we are.
We told him he had made his fortune by the exploitation of skill, and
was now living by the still worse exploitation of capital. Whilst
working, he made thirty dollars a day--that is, exploitated or
appropriated the labor of thirty common working men, and gave in
exchange his own labor, intrinsically less worthy, than any one of
theirs. But now he was doing worse. He was using his capital as a power
to compel others to work for him--for whom he did not work at all. The
white laborers who made his income, or interests and dividends, were
wholly neglected by him, because he did not know even who they were. He
treated his negro slaves much better. It was true, he appropriated or
exploitated much of the results of their labor, but he governed them and
provided for them, with almost parental affection. Some of them we knew,
who feigned to be unfit for labor, he was boarding expensively. Our
friend at first ridiculed our theory. But by degrees began to see its
truth, and being sensitively conscientious, was disposed to fret
whenever the subject was introduced.
One day he met us, with a face beaming with smiles, and said, "I can
explain and justify that new theory of yours. This oppression and
exaction of skill and capital which we see continually practiced, and
which is too natural to man ever to cease, is necessary in order to
disperse and diffuse population over the globe. Half the good lands of
the world are unappropriated and invite settlement and cultivation. Most
men who choose can become proprietors by change of residence. They are
too much crowded in many countries, and exploitation that disperses them
is a blessing. It will be time enough to discuss your theory of the
despotism of skill and capital, when all the world is densely settled,
and the men without property can no longer escape from the exactions of
those who hold property."
Our friend's theory is certainly ingenious and novel, and goes far to
prove that exploitation is not an unmitigated evil. Under exceptional
circumstances, its good effects on human happiness and well-being, may
greatly over-balance its evil influences. Such, probably, is the case at
the North. There, free competition, and the consequent oppressions of
skill and capital are fiercer and more active than in any other country.
But in forty-eight hours, laborers may escape to the West, and become
proprietors. It is a blessing to them to be thus expelled, and a
blessing to those who expel them. The emigration to the West rids the
East of a surplus population, and enriches it by the interchanges of
trade and commerce which the emigration immediately begets. As an
exceptional form of society, we begin to think that at the North highly
useful. It will continue to be good and useful until the North-west is
peopled. Then, and not till then, it will be time for Mr. Greely to
build phalansteries, and for Gerrit Smith to divide all the lands. We
find that we shall have to defend the North as well as the South against
the assaults of the abolitionist--still, we cannot abate a jot or tittle
of our theory: "Slavery is the natural and normal condition of society."
The situation of the North is abnormal and anomalous. So in desert or
mountainous regions, where only small patches of land can be cultivated,
the father, wife and children are sufficient for the purpose, and
slavery would be superfluous.
In order to make sure that our reader shall comprehend our theory, we
will give a long extract from the "Science of Society," by Stephen
Pearle Andrews of New York. He is, we think, far the ablest writer on
moral science that America has produced. Though an abolitionist, he has
not a very bad opinion of slavery. We verily believe, there is not one
intelligent abolitionist at the North who does not believe that slavery
to capital in free society is worse than Southern negro slavery; but
like Mr. Andrews, they are all perfectionists, with a Utopia in full
view:
I. Suppose I am a wheelwright in a small village, and the only one of my
trade. You are travelling with certain valuables in your carriage, which
breaks down opposite my shop. It will take an hour of my time to mend
the carriage. You can get no other means of conveyance, and the loss to
you, if you fail to arrive at the neighboring town in season for the
sailing of a certain vessel, will be $500, which fact you mention to me,
in good faith, in order to quicken my exertions. I give one hour of my
work and mend the carriage. What am I in equity entitled to charge--what
should be the _limit of price_ upon my labor?
Let us apply the different measures, and see how they will operate. If
Value is the limit of price, then the price of the hour's labor should
be $500. That is the equivalent of the value of the labor to you. If
cost is the limit of price, then you should pay me a commodity, or
commodities, or a representative in currency, which will procure me
commodities having in them one hour's labor equally as hard as the
mending of the carriage, without the slightest reference to the degree
of benefit which that labor has bestowed on you; or, putting the
illustration in money, thus: assuming the twenty-five cents to be an
equivalent for an hour's labor of an artizan in that particular trade,
then, according to the _Cost Principle_, I should be justified in asking
only twenty-five cents, but according to the _Value Principle_, I should
be justified in asking $500.
The _Value Principle_, in some form of expression, is, as I have said,
the only _recognized_ principle of trade throughout the world. "A thing
is worth what it will bring in the market." Still, if I were to charge
you $500, or a fourth part of that sum, and, taking advantage of your
necessities, force you to pay it, everybody would denounce me, the poor
wheelwright, as an extortioner and a scoundrel. Why? Simply because this
is an _unusual_ application of the principle. Wheelwrights seldom have a
chance to make such a "speculation," and therefore it is not according
to the "established usages of trade." Hence its manifest injustice
shocks, in such a case, the common sense of right. Meanwhile you, a
wealthy merchant, are daily rolling up an immense fortune by doing
business upon the same principle which you condemn in the wheelwright,
and nobody finds fault. At every scarcity in the market, you immediately
raise the price of every article you hold. It is your _business_ to take
advantage of the necessities of those with whom you deal, by selling to
them according to the _Value_ to them, and not according to the _Cost_
to you. You go further. You, by every means in your power, create those
necessities, by buying up particular articles and holding them out of
the market until the demand becomes pressing, by circulating false
reports of short crops, and by other similar tricks known to the trade.
This is the same in principle, as if the wheelwright had first dug the
rut in which your carriage upset, and then charged you the $500.
Yet hitherto no one has thought of seriously questioning the principle,
namely, that "_Value is the limit of price_," or, in other words, that
"_it is right to take for a thing what it is worth_." It is upon this
principle or maxim, that all _honorable_ trade professes now to be
conducted, until instances arise in which its oppressive operation is so
glaring and repugnant to the moral sense of mankind, that those who
carry it out are denounced as rogues and cheats. In this manner a sort
of conventional limit is placed upon the application of a principle
which is equally _the principle_ of every swindling transaction, and of
what is called legitimate commerce. The discovery has not hitherto been
made, that the principle itself is essentially vicious, and that in its
infinite and all-pervading variety of applications, this vicious
principle is _the source_ of the injustice, inequality of condition, and
frightful pauperism and wretchedness which characterize the existing
state of our so-called civilization. Still less has the discovery been
made, that there is another simple principle of traffic which, once
understood and applied in practice, will effectually rectify all those
monstrous evils, and introduce into human society the reign of absolute
equity in all property relations, while it will lay the foundations of
universal harmony in the social and moral relations as well.
II. Suppose it costs me ten minutes' labor to concoct a pill which will
save your life when nothing else will; and suppose, at the same time, to
render the case simple, that the knowledge of the ingredients came to me
by accident, without labor or _cost_. It is clear that your life is
worth to you more than your fortune. Am I, then, entitled to demand of
you for the nostrum the whole of your property, more or less? Clearly
so, if _it is right to take for a thing what it is worth_, which is
theoretically the highest ethics of trade.
Forced, on the one hand, by the impossibility, existing in the nature of
things, of ascertaining and measuring positive values, or of
determining, in other words, what a thing _is really worth_, and
rendered partially conscious by the obvious hardship and injustice of
every unusual or extreme application of the principle that it is either
no rule or a bad one, and not guided by the knowledge of any true
principle out of the labyrinth of conflicting rights into which the
false principle conducts, the world has practically abandoned the
attempt to combine Equity with Commerce, and lowered its standard of
morality to the inverse statement of the formula, namely, that, "_A
thing is worth what it will bring_;" or, in other words, that it is
fitting and proper to take for a thing when sold whatever can be got for
it. This, then, is what is denominated the Market Value of an article,
as distinguished from its actual value. Without being more equitable as
a measure of price, it certainly has a great practical advantage over
the more decent theoretical statement, in the fact that it _is_ possible
to ascertain by experiment how much you can force people, through their
necessities, to give. The principle, in this form, measures the price by
the degree of _want_ on the part of the purchaser, that is, by what he
supposes will prove to be the value or benefit to him of the commodity
purchased, in comparison with that of the one with which he parts in the
transaction. Hence it becomes immediately and continually the interest
of the seller to place the purchaser in a condition of as much want as
possible; "to corner" him, as the phrase is in Wall street, and force
him to buy at the dearest rate. If he is unable to increase his actual
necessity, he resorts to every means of creating an imaginary want by
false praises bestowed upon the qualities and uses of his goods. Hence
the usages of forestalling the market, of confusing the public knowledge
of Supply and Demand, of advertising and puffing worthless commodities,
and the like, which constitute the existing commercial system--a system
which, in our age, is ripening into putrefaction, and coming to offend
the nostrils of good taste no less than the innate sense of right,
which, dreadfully vitiating as it is, it has failed wholly to
extinguish.
The Value Principle in this form, as in the other, is therefore _felt_,
without being distinctly understood, to be essentially diabolical, and
hence it undergoes again a kind of sentimental modification wherever the
_sentiment_ for honesty is most potent. This last and highest expression
of the doctrine of honesty, as now known in the world, may be stated in
the form of the hortatory precept, "Don't be _too_ bad," or, "Don't
gouge _too_ deep." No Political Economist, Financier, Moralist, or
Religionist, has any more definite standard of right in commercial
transactions than that. It is not too much to affirm that neither
Political Economist, Financier, Moralist, nor Religionist knows at this
day, nor ever has known, what it is to be honest. The religious teacher,
who exhorts his hearers from Sabbath to Sabbath to be _fair_ in their
dealings with each other and with the outside world, does not know, and
could not for his life tell, how much he is, in fair dealing or equity,
bound to pay his washerwoman or his housekeeper for any service whatever
which they may render. The _sentiment_ of honesty exists, but the
_science_ of honesty is wanting. The sentiment is first in order. The
science must be an outgrowth, a consequential development of the
sentiment. The precepts of Christian Morality deal properly with that
which is the soul of the other, leaving to intellectual investigation
the discovery of its scientific complement.
It follows from what has been said, that the Value Principle is the
commercial embodiment of the essential element of conquest and war--war
transferred from the battle-field to the counter--none the less opposed,
however, to the spirit of Christian Morality, or the sentiment of human
brotherhood. In bodily conflict, the physically strong conquer and
subject the physically weak. In the conflict of trade, the
intellectually astute and powerful conquer and subject those who are
intellectually feeble, or whose intellectual development is not of the
precise kind to fit them for the conflict of wits in the matter of
trade. With the progress of civilization and development we have ceased
to think that superior physical strength gives the _right_ of conquest
and subjugation. We have graduated, in idea, out of the period of
physical dominion. We remain, however, as yet in the period of
intellectual conquest or plunder. It has not been questioned hitherto,
as a general proposition, that the man who has superior intellectual
endowments to others, has a right resulting therefrom to profit thereby
at the cost of others. In the extreme applications of the admission only
is the conclusion ever denied. In the whole field of what are
denominated the legitimate operations of trade, there is no other law
recognized than the relative "smartness" or shrewdness of the parties,
modified at most by the sentimental precept stated above.
The intrinsic wrongfulness of the principal axioms and practice of
existing commerce will appear to every reflecting mind from the
preceding analysis. It will be proper, however, before dismissing the
consideration of the Value Principle, to trace out a little more in
detail some of its specific results.
The principle itself being essentially iniquitous, all the fruits of the
principle are necessarily pernicious.
Among the consequences which flow from it are the following:
I. _It renders falsehood and hypocrisy a necessary concomitant of
trade._ Where the object is to buy cheap and sell dear, the parties find
their interest in mutual deception. It is taught, in theory, that
"honesty is the best policy," in the long run; but in practice the
merchant discovers speedily that he must starve if he acts upon the
precept--in the short run. Honesty--even as much honesty as can be
arrived at--is _not_ the best policy under the present unscientific
system of commerce; if by the best policy is meant that which tends to
success in business. Professional merchants are sharp to distinguish
their true policy for that end, and they do not find it in a full
exposition of the truth. Intelligent merchants know the fact well, and
conscientious merchants deplore it; but they see no remedy. The theory
of trade taught to innocent youths in the retired family, or the Sunday
school, would ruin any clerk, if adhered to behind the counter, in a
fortnight. Hence it is uniformly abandoned, and a new system of morality
acquired the moment a practical application is to be made of the
instruction. A frank disclosure, by the merchant, of all the secret
advantages in his possession, would destroy his reputation for sagacity
as effectually as it would that of the gambler among his associates.
Both commerce and gambling, as professions, are systems of strategy. It
is the business of both parties to a trade to over-reach each other--a
fact which finds its unblushing announcement in the maxim of the Common
Law, _Caveat emptor_, (let the purchaser take care.)
II. _It makes the rich richer and the poor poorer._--Trade being, under
this system, the intellectual correspondence to the occupation of the
cut-throat or conqueror under the reign of physical force--the stronger
consequently accumulating more than his share at the cost of the
destruction of the weaker--the consequence of the principle is that the
occupation of trade, for those who possess intellectual superiority,
with other favorable conditions, enables them to accumulate more than
their share of wealth, while it reduces those whose intellectual
development--of the precise kind requisite for this species of
contest--and whose material conditions are less favorable--to
wretchedness and poverty.
III. _It creates trade for trade's sake, and augments the number of
non-producers, whose support is chargeable upon Labor._ As trade under
the operation of this principle, offers the temptation of illicit gains
and rapid wealth at the expense of others, it creates trade where there
is no necessity for trade--not as a beneficent interchange of
commodities between producers and consumers, but as a means of
speculation. Hence thousands are withdrawn from actual production and
thrust unnecessarily into the business of exchanging, mutually devouring
each other by competition, and drawing their subsistence and their
wealth from the producing classes, without rendering any equivalent
service. Hence the interminable range of intermediates between the
producer and consumer, the total defeat of organization and economy in
the distribution of products, and the intolerable burden of the
unproductive classes upon labor, together with a host of the frightful
results of pauperism and crime.
IV. _It degrades the dignity of Labor._ Inasmuch as trade, under the
operation of this principle, is more profitable, or at any rate is
liable to be, promises to be, and in a portion of cases is more
profitable than productive labor, it follows that the road to wealth and
social distinction lies in that direction. Hence "Commerce is King,"
Hence, again, productive labor is depreciated and contemned. It holds
the same relation to commerce in this age--under the reign of
intellectual superioritythat commerce itself held a few generations
since--under the reign of physical force--to military achievement,
personal or hereditary. Thus the degradation of labor, and all the
innumerable evils which follow in its train, in our existing
civilization, find their efficient cause in this same false principle of
exchanging products. The next stage of progress will be the inauguration
of Equity--equality in the results of every species of industry
according to burdens, and the consequent accession of labor to the
highest rank of human estimation. Commerce will then sink to a mere
brokerage, paid, like any other species of labor, according to its
repugnance, as the army is now sinking to a mere police force. It will
be reduced to the simplest and most direct methods of exchange, and made
to be the merest servant of production, which will come, in its turn, to
be regarded as conferring the only true patents of nobility.
V. _It prevents the possibility of a scientific Adjustment of Supply to
Demand._ It has been already shown that speculation is the cause why
there has never been, and cannot now be any scientific Adaptation of
Supply to Demand. It has also been partially shown, at various points,
that speculation, or trading in chances and fluctuations in the market
has its root in the Value Principle, and that the Cost Principle
extinguishes speculation. It will be proper, however, in this connection
to define exactly the limits of speculation, and to point out more
specifically how the Value Principle creates it, and how the Cost
Principle extinguishes it.
By speculation is meant, in the ordinary language of trade, risky and
unusual enterprises entered upon for the sake of more than ordinary
profits, and in that sense there is attached to it, among merchants, a
slight shade of imputation of dishonesty or disreputable conduct. As we
are seeking now, however, to employ language in an exact and scientific
way, we must find a more precise definition of the term. The line
between ordinary and more than ordinary profits is too vague for a
scientific treatise. At one extremity of the long succession of
chance-dealing and advantage-taking transactions stands gambling, which
is denounced by the common verdict of mankind as merely a more specious
form of robbery. It holds the same relation to robbery itself that
duelling holds to murder. Where is the other end of this succession? At
what point does a man begin to take an undue advantage of his fellow man
in a commercial transaction? It clearly appears, from all that has been
shown, that he does so from the moment that he receives from him more
than an exact equivalent of cost. But it is the constant endeavor of
every trader, upon any other than the Cost Principle, to do that. The
business of the merchant is profit-making. _Profit_ signifies,
etymologically, _something made over and above_, that is, something
beyond an _equivalent_, or, in its simplest expression, _something for
nothing_.
It is clear, then, that there is no difference between profit-making in
its mildest form, speculation in its opprobrious sense as the middle
term, and gambling as the ultimate, except in degree. There is simply
the bad gradation of rank which there is between the slaveholder, the
driver on the slave plantation, and the slave dealer, or between the man
of pleasure, the harlot, and the pimp.
The philanthropy of the age is moving heaven and earth to the overthrow
of the institution of slavery. But slavery has no scientific definition.
It is thought to consist in the feature of chattelism; but an ingenious
lawyer would run his pen through every statute upon slavery in
existence, and expunge that fiction of the law, and yet leave slavery,
for all practical purposes, precisely what it is now. It needs only to
appropriate the services of the man by operation of law, instead of the
man himself. The only distinction, then, left between his condition and
that of the laborer who is robbed by the operation of a false commercial
principle, would be in the fact of the oppression being more tangible
and undisguisedly degrading to his manhood.
If, in any transaction, I get from you some portion of your earnings
without an equivalent, I begin to make you my slave--to confiscate you
to my uses; if I get a larger portion of your services without an
equivalent, I make you still further my slave; and, finally, if I obtain
the whole of your services without an equivalent--except the means of
keeping you in working condition for my own sake, I make you completely
my slave. Slavery is merely one development of a general system of human
oppression, for which we have no comprehensive term in English, but
which the French Socialists denominate _exploitation_--the abstraction,
directly or indirectly, from the working classes of the fruits of their
labor. In the case of the slave, the instrument of that abstraction is
force and legal enactments. In the case of the laborer, generally, it is
speculation in the large sense, or _profit-making_. The slaveholder will
be found, therefore, upon a scientific analysis, to hold the same
relation to the trader which the freebooter holds to the blackleg. It is
a question of taste which to admire most, the dare-devil boldness of the
one, or the oily and intriguing propensities and performances of the
other.