THE FEDERALISM OF CARL MARLO.
Marlo and Rodbertus are sometimes spoken of as the precursors of German
socialism. This, however, is a mistake. The socialism which now exists
appeared in Germany among the Young Hegelians forty years ago, before
the writings of either of these economists were published, and their
writings have had very little influence on the present movement.
Rodbertus, it is true, communicated a decided impulse to Lassalle, both
by his published letter to Von Kirchmann in 1853, and by personal
correspondence subsequently. He was a landed proprietor of strongly
liberal opinions, who was appointed Minister of Agriculture in Prussia
in 1848, but after a brief period of office retired to his estates, and
devoted himself to economic and historical study. He took a very decided
view of the defects of the existing industrial system, and held in
particular that, in accordance with Ricardo's law of necessary wages,
the labourer's income could never rise permanently above the level of
supplying him with a bare subsistence, and consequently that, while his
labour was always increasing in productivity, through mechanical
inventions and other means, the share which he obtained of the product
was always decreasing. What was required was simply to get this tendency
counteracted, and to devise arrangements by which the labourer's share
in the product might increase proportionally with the product itself,
for otherwise the whole working population would be left behind by the
general advancement of society. The remedy, he conceives, must lie in
the line of a fresh contraction of the sphere of private property. That
sphere had been again and again contracted in the interests of personal
development, and it must be so once more. And the contraction that was
now necessary was to leave nothing whatever in the nature of private
property except income. This proposal is substantially identical with
the scheme of the socialists; it is just the nationalization of all
permanent stock; but then he holds that it could not be satisfactorily
carried out in less than five hundred years. Rodbertus's writings have
never been widely known, but they attracted some attention among the
German working class, and he was invited, along with Lassalle and Lothar
Bucher, to address the Working Men's Congress in Leipzig in 1863. He
promised to come and speak on the law of necessary wages, but the
Congress was never held in consequence of the action of Lassalle in
precipitating his own movement, and from that movement Rodbertus held
entirely aloof. He agreed with Lassalle's complaints against the present
order of things, but he disapproved of his plan of reform. He did not
think the scheme of founding productive associations on State credit
either feasible or desirable, and he would still retain the system of
wages, though with certain improvements introduced by law. He thought,
moreover, that Lassalle erred gravely in making the socialists a
political party, and that they should have remained a purely economic
one. Besides, he looked on it as mere folly to expect, with Lassalle,
the accomplishment in thirty years of changes which, as we have seen, he
believed five centuries little enough time to evolve.
Rodbertus may thus be said to have had some relations with the present
movement, but Marlo stands completely apart from it: and his large and
important work, "Untersuchungen ueber die Organization der Arbeit, oder
System der Weltoekonomie," published at Kassel in 1850-5--though
original, learned, and lucid--remained so absolutely unknown that none
of the lexicons mention his name, and even an economist like
Schaeffle--who was the first to draw public attention to it, and has
evidently been considerably influenced by it himself--had never read it
till he was writing his own work on socialism (1870). But though Marlo
cannot be said to have contributed in any respect to the present
socialistic movement, his work deserves attentive consideration as a
plea for fundamental social reform, advanced by a detached and
independent thinker, who has given years of patient study to the
phenomena of modern economic life, and holds them to indicate the
presence of a deep-seated and widespread social disease. Carl Marlo is
the _nom de plume_ of a German professor of chemistry named Winkelblech,
and he gives us in the preface to his second volume a touching account
of how he came to apply himself to social questions. In 1843 he made a
tour of investigation through Northern Europe in connection with a
technological work he was engaged in writing, and visited among other
places the blue factory of Modum, in Norway, where he remained some
days, charmed with the scenery, which he thought equal to that of the
finest valleys of the Alps. One morning he went up to a neighbouring
height, whence he could see the whole valley, and was calmly enjoying
the view when a German artisan came to ask him to undertake some
commission to friends in the fatherland. They engaged in conversation.
The artisan went over his experiences, and repeated all the privations
he and his fellows had to endure. His tale of sorrow, so alien
apparently to the ravishing beauty around, made a profound impression on
Winkelblech, and altered the purpose and work of his life. "What is the
reason," he asked himself, "that the paradise before my eyes conceals so
much misery? Is nature the source of all this suffering, or is it man
that is to blame for it? I had before, like so many men of science,
looked, while in workshops, only on the forges and the machinery, not on
the men--on the products of human industry, and not on the producers,
and I was quite a stranger to this great empire of misery that lies at
the foundation of our boasted civilization. The touching words of the
artisan made me feel the nullity of my scientific work and life in its
whole extent, and from that moment I resolved to make the sufferings of
our race, with their causes and remedies, the subject of my studies." He
pursued these studies with the greatest industry for several years, and
found the extent of men's sufferings to be greatly beyond his
expectation. Poverty prevailed everywhere--among labourers and among
employers, too--with peoples of the highest industrial development, and
with peoples of the lowest--in luxurious cities, and in the huts of
villagers--in the rich plains of Lombardy, no less than the sterile
wilds of Scandinavia. He arrived at the conclusion that the causes of
all this lay not in nature, but in the fact that human institutions
rested on false economic foundations, and he held the only possible
remedy to consist in improving these institutions. He became convinced
that technical perfection of production, however great, would never be
able to extinguish poverty or lead to the diffusion of general comfort,
and that civilization was now come to a stage in its development at
which further progress depended entirely on the advancement of political
economy. Political economy was, therefore, for our time the most
important of all sciences, and Winkelblech now determined to give
himself thoroughly to its study. Hitherto he had not done so. "During
the progress of my investigations," he says, "the doctrines of
economists, as well as the theories of socialists, remained almost
unknown to me except in name, for I intentionally abstained from seeking
any knowledge of either, in order that I might keep myself as free as
possible from extraneous influences. It was only after I arrived at the
results described that I set myself to a study of economic literature,
and came to perceive that the substance of my thoughts, though many of
them were not new, and stood in need of correction, departed completely
from the accepted principles of the science." He reached the conclusion
that there prevailed everywhere the symptoms of a universal social
disease, and that political economy was the only physician that could
cure it; but that the prevailing system of economy was quite incompetent
for that task, and that a new system was urgently and indispensably
required. To set forth such a system is the aim of his book. He derides
Proudhon's idea of social reforms coming of themselves without design,
and argues strongly that no reform worthy the name can ever be expected
except as the fruit of economic researches. He agrees with the
Socialists in so far as they seek to devise a new economic system, but
he thinks they make a defective diagnosis of the disease, and propose an
utterly inadequate remedy. He counts them entirely mistaken in
attributing all existing evils to the unequal distribution of wealth, a
deficiency of production being, in his opinion, a much more important
source of misery than any error of distribution. In fact, his
fundamental objection to the existing distribution is that it is not the
distribution which conduces to the highest production, or to the most
fruitful use of the natural resources at the command of society. He
differs from the German socialists in always looking at the question
from the standpoint of society in general, rather than from that of the
proletariat alone, and he maintains that a new organization of labour is
even more necessary for the interest of the capitalists than for that of
the labourers, because he believes the present system will infallibly
lead, unless amended, to the overthrow of the capitalist class, and the
introduction of communism. His point of view is moreover purely economic
and scientific, entirely free from all partizan admixture, and while he
declares himself to be a zealous member of the republican party, he says
that he purposely abstains from intervention in politics because he
regards the political question as one of very minor rank, and holds
that, with sound social arrangements, people could live more happily
under the Russian autocracy than, with unsound ones, they could do under
the French republic. The organization of labour is, in his opinion,
something quite independent of the form of the State, and its final aim
ought to be to produce the amount of wealth necessary to diffuse
universal comfort among the whole population without robbing the middle
classes. These characteristics sufficiently separate him from the
socialist democrats of the present day.
His book was published gradually in parts, sometimes after long
intervals, between 1848 and 1856, and it was finally interrupted by his
death in 1865. A second edition appeared in 1885, containing some
additions from his manuscripts, but the work remains incomplete. It was
to have consisted of three parts; 1st, a historical part, containing an
exposition and estimate of the various economic systems; 2nd, an
elementary or doctrinal part, containing an exposition of the principles
of economic science; and, 3rd, a practical part, explaining his plan for
the organization of labour. The first two parts are all we possess; the
third, and most important, never appeared, which must be regretted by
all who recognise the evidences of original power and singular candour
that the other parts present.
Marlo's account of the social problem is that it arises from the fact
that our present industrial organization is not in correspondence with
the idea of right which is recognised by the public opinion of the time.
That idea of right is the Christian one, which takes its stand on the
dignity of manhood, and declares that all men, simply because they are
men, have equal rights to the greatest possible happiness. Up till the
French Revolution, the idea of right that prevailed was the heathen one,
which might be called the divine right of the stronger. The weak might
be made a slave without wrong. He might be treated as a thing and not as
a person or an equal, who had the same right with his master or his
feudal superior to the greatest possible enjoyment. Nature belonged to
the conqueror, and his dominion was transmitted by privilege. Inequality
of right was therefore the characteristic of this period; Marlo calls it
monopolism. But at the French Revolution the Christian idea of right
rose to its due ascendancy over opinion, and the sentiments of love and
justice began to assume a control over public arrangements. Do as you
would be done by, became a rule for politics as well as for private
life, and the weak were supported against the strong. Equality of right
was the mark of the new period; Marlo calls it panpolism. This idea
could not be realized before the present day, because it had never
before taken possession of the public mind, but it has done this now so
thoroughly that it cannot be expected to rest till it has realized
itself in every direction in all the practical applications of which it
is susceptible. The final arbiter of institutions is always the
conception of right prevailing at the time; contemporary industrial
arrangements are out of harmony with the contemporary conception of
right; and stability cannot be looked for until this disturbance is
completely adjusted.
Now the first attempts that society made to effect this adjustment were
not unnaturally attended with imperfection. In the warmth of their
recoil from the evils of monopolism, men ran into extreme and distorted
embodiments of the opposite principle, and they ran contrary ways. These
contrary ways are Liberalism and Communism. Liberalism fixed its
attention mainly on the artificial restrictions, the privileges, the
services, the legal bonds by which monopoly and inequality were kept
up, and it thought a perfect state of society would be brought about if
only every chain were snapped and every fetter stripped away. It
conceived the road to the greatest possible happiness for every man was
the greatest possible freedom; it idolized the principle of abstract
liberty, and it fancied if evil did not disappear, it was always because
something still remained that needed emancipation. Communism, on the
other hand, kept its eyes on the inequalities of monopolistic society;
imagined the true road to the greatest possible happiness was the
greatest possible equality; that all ills would vanish as soon as things
were levelled enough; in short, it idolized the principle of abstract
equality. Modern Liberalism and modern Communism are therefore of equal
birth; they have the same historical origin in the triumph of the
principle of equality of right in 1789; they are only different modes of
attempting to reduce that principle to practice; and Liberalism happens
to be the more widely disseminated of the two, not because it represents
that principle better, but merely because being more purely negative
than the other, it was easier of introduction, and so got the start of
Communism in the struggle of existence. According to Marlo, they are
both equally bad representatives of the principle, and their chief good
lies in their mutual criticism, by means of which they prepare the way
for the true system, the system of Federalism, which will be presently
explained. The history of revolution, he says, begins in the victory of
Liberalism and Communism together over Monopolism; it proceeds by the
conflict of the victors with one another, and it ends in the final
triumph of Federalism over both.
Marlo next criticises the two systems of Liberalism and Communism with
considerable acuteness. Both the one and the other are utopias; they are
absorbed in realizing an abstract principle, and they, as a matter of
fact, produce exactly the opposite of what they aim at. Communism seeks
to reach the greatest possible happiness by introducing first the
greatest possible equality. But what is equality? Is it equality when
each man gets a coat of the same size, or is it not rather when each man
gets a coat that fits him? Some communists would accept the former
alternative. They would measure off the same length to the dwarf and
the giant, to the ploughman and the judge, to the family of three and
the family of thirteen. But this would be clearly not equality, but only
inequality of a more vicious and vexatious kind. Most communists,
however, prefer the second alternative, and assign to every man
according to his needs, to every man the coat that fits him. But then we
must first have the cloth, and that is only got by labour, and every
labourer ought if possible to produce his own coat. The motive to
labour, however, is weakened on the communistic system; and if those who
work less are to be treated exactly like those who work more, then that
would be no abolition of monopoly, but merely the invention of a new
monopoly, the monopoly of indolence and incapacity. The skilful and
industrious would be exploited by the stupid and lazy. Besides,
production would for the same reason, insufficient inducement to labour,
be diminished, progress would be stopped, and therefore the average of
human happiness would decline. Communism thus conducts to the opposite
of everything it seeks. It seeks equality, it ends in inequality; it
seeks the abolition of monopoly, it creates a new monopoly; it seeks to
increase happiness, it actually diminishes it. It is a pure utopia, and
why? Because it misunderstands its own principle. Equality does not mean
giving equal things to every man; it means merely affording the greatest
possible playroom for the development of every personality, and that is
exactly the principle of freedom. The greatest possible equality and the
greatest possible freedom can only be realized together; they must
spring out of the same conditions, and a system of right which shall
adjust these conditions is just what is now wanted.
Liberalism is a failure from like causes. It seeks to realize happiness
by freedom; it realizes neither. For it mistakes the nature of freedom,
as the Communists mistake the nature of equality. It takes freedom to be
the power of doing what one likes, instead of being the power of doing
what is right. Its whole bent is to exempt as much as possible of life
from authoritative restraint, and to give as much scope as exigencies
will allow to the play of individuality. It is based on no positive
conception of right whatever, and looks on the State as an alien whose
interference is something exceptional, only justified on occasional
grounds of public necessity or general utility. It fails to see that
there are really no affairs in a community which are out of relation to
the general wellbeing, and destitute of political significance. Nothing
demonstrates the error of this better than the effects of the Liberal
_regime_ itself. For half a century the industrial concerns of the
people have been treated as matters of purely private interest, and this
policy has resulted in a political as well as economical revolution.
Industrial freedom, which has produced capitalism in the economic field,
has resulted in political life in the ascendancy of a new class, a
plutocracy, "the worst masters," said De Tocqueville, "the world has yet
seen, though their reign will be short." The change which was effected
by the legislation of the Revolution was not a development of a fourth
estate, as is sometimes said; it was really nothing more than the
creation of a money aristocracy, and the putting of them in the place of
the old hereditary nobility. The system of industrial right that happens
to prevail, therefore, so far from being, as Liberals fancy, outside the
sphere of political interest, is in truth the very element on which the
distribution of political power, in the last analysis, depends. Nothing
is more political than the social question. Liberals think slight of
that question, but it is, says Marlo, the real question of the day, and
it is neither more nor less than the question of the existence or
abolition of Liberalism, the question of the maintenance or subversion
of the principle of industrial freedom, the question of the ascendancy
or overthrow of a money aristocracy. The fight of our age is a fight
against a plutocracy bred of Liberalism. It is not, as some represent
it, a struggle of labourers against employers; it is a joint struggle of
labourers and lower _bourgeoisie_ against the higher _bourgeoisie_, a
struggle of those who work and produce against those who luxuriate idly
on the fruits of others' labour. As compared with this question,
constitutional questions are of very minor importance, for no matter
whether the State be monarchy or republic, if the system of industrial
right that prevails in it be the system of industrial freedom, the real
power of the country will be in the hands of the capitalist class. He
who fails to see this, says Marlo, fails to understand the spirit of
his time. It is always the national idea of right that governs both in
social and political relations, and as long as the national idea of
right is that of Liberalism, we shall continue to have capitalism and a
plutocracy. It is the mind that builds the body up, and it is only when
a new system of right has taken as complete possession of the national
consciousness as Liberalism did in 1789, that the present social
conflict will cease and a better order of things come in.
From want of such a system of right--from want even of seeing the
necessity for it, Liberalism has defeated its own purpose. It sought to
abolish monopoly; it has only substituted for the old monopoly of birth
the more grievous monopoly of wealth. It sought to establish freedom; it
has only established plutocratic tyranny. It has erred because it took
for freedom an abstraction of its own and tried to realize that, just as
Communism erred by taking for equality an abstraction of its own and
trying to realize that. The most perfect state of freedom is not reached
when every man has the power of doing what he likes, any more than the
most perfect state of equality is reached when every man has equal
things with every other; but the greatest possible freedom is attained
in a condition of society where every man has the greatest possible
play-room for the development of his personality, and the greatest
possible equality is attained in exactly the same state of things. Real
freedom and real equality are in fact identical. Every right contains
from the first a social element as well as an individual element, and it
cannot be realized in the actual world without observing a due
adjustment between these two elements. Such an adjustment can only be
discovered by a critical examination of the economic constitution of
society, and must then be expressed in a distinct system of industrial
right, which imposes on individual action its just limits. True liberty
is liberty within these limits; and the true right of property is a
right of property under the same conditions. The fundamental fault of
Liberalism, the cause of its failure, is simply that it goes to work
without a sound theory of right, or rather perhaps without any clear
theory at all, and merely aims at letting every one do as he likes,
with the understanding that the State can always be called in to
correct accidents and excesses.
This defect is what Federalism claims to supply. It claims to be the
only theory that abandons abstractions and keeps closely to the nature
of things, and therefore to be the only theory that is able to realize
even approximately the Christian principle of equality of right. The
name furnishes no very precise clue to the conclusion it designates, and
it has no reference to the federative form of State, for which Marlo
expressly disavows having any partiality. He has chosen the word merely
to indicate the fact that society is an organic confederation of many
different kinds of associations--families, churches, academies,
mercantile companies, and so on; that association is not only a natural
form, but the natural form in which man's activity tends to be carried
on; and that in any sound system of industrial right this must be
recognised by an extension of the collective form of property and the
co-operative form of production. Communism, says Marlo, is mechanical,
Liberalism is atomistic, but Federalism is organic. When he
distinguishes his theory from communism, it must be remembered that it
is from the communism which he has criticised, and which he would prefer
to denominate Equalism; it is from the communism of Baboeuf, which would
out of hand give every man according to his needs, and would
consequently, through impairing the motives to industry, leave those
needs themselves in the long run less satisfactorily provided for than
they are now. But his system is nearly identical with the communism of
the Young Hegelians of his own time--that is, with the German socialism
of the present day--although he arrived at it in entire independence of
their agitations, and builds it on deductions peculiar to himself. Like
them, he asks for the compulsory transformation of land and the
instruments of production from private property into collective
property; like them, he asks for this on grounds of social justice, as
the necessary mechanism for giving effect to positive rights that are
set aside under the present system; and he says himself, "If you ask the
question, how is the democratic social republic related to Federalism,
the most suitable answer is, as the riddle to its solution."
He starts from the position that all men have equally the right to
property. Not merely in the sense, which is commonly acknowledged, that
they have the right to property if they have the opportunity of
acquiring it; but in the further significance, that they have a right to
the opportunity. They are in fact born proprietors--_de jure_ at least,
and they are so for two reasons. First, God has made them persons, and
not things, and they have, therefore, all equally a natural right to
their amplest personal development. If society interferes with this
liberty of personal development--if it suffers any of its members to
become the slaves of others, for example--it robs them of original
rights which belong to them by the mere fact of their manhood. But,
secondly, property, resources of some sort, being indispensable means of
personal development, God, who has imposed the end, has supplied the
means. He has given nature, the earth and the lower creation, into the
dominion of man, not of this or that man, or class of men, but of
mankind, and consequently every man has, equally with every other, a
right to participate in the dominion of nature, a right to use its
bounty to the extent required for his personal development. No
appropriation of nature can be just which excludes this possibility and
robs any man of this natural right. It is, therefore, wrong to allow to
any single person, or to any limited number of persons, an absolute
dominion over natural resources in which everybody else has, by nature,
a right to some extent to share. He who should have complete and
exclusive lordship over all nature, would be lord and master of all his
fellow-men, and in a period after natural agents are all appropriated
the system of complete and absolute property leaves the new-comers at
the mercy of those who are already in possession. They can only work if
the latter give them the productive instruments; they can only reap from
their work so much of its fruits as the latter are pleased to leave with
them; and they must perish altogether unless the latter employ them.
They are slaves, they are beggars; and yet they came into the world with
the rights of a proprietor, of which they can never be divested. Nature
laid covers for them as well as for the rest, and a system of property
is essentially unjust which ousts them from their seat at her table.
The common theory of property starts from the premiss, that all men have
the right to property, and draws the conclusion, that, therefore, some
men have the right to monopolize it. As usually understood, the
proprietary right is as much a right of robbery as a right of property,
and Proudhon would have been quite correct in describing property as
theft, if no better system of property could be devised than the
present.
But such a system can be devised; one under which the right of
new-comers may be respected without disturbing those of possessors. This
can only be done by putting entirely aside the complete and absolute
form of property which is in so much favour with Liberalism, and by
making the right of property in any actual possession a strictly limited
and circumscribed right from the first--the right not to an arbitrary
control over a thing, but to a just control over it. So long as property
is always thought of as an arbitrary and absolute dominion over a thing,
the proprietary right cannot possibly be explained in a way that does
not make it a right given to some to rob others. Why not, therefore,
define property from the beginning as subject to limitations, and
contrive a new form or system of it, in which these limitations shall
for ever receive due recognition, and no man be thereafter denied the
opportunity of acquiring as much of the bounty of nature as is necessary
for him to carry out his personal development?
That is Marlo's task, and it would have been an easy one, if all goods,
if everything that satisfies a human want, had been supplied directly by
nature, as air is supplied, without the need of industry to procure it
or the power of industry to multiply it. Then the problem would be
solved very simply as the earlier communists desired to solve it. Every
member of society would be entitled to partake of nature's supplies, as
he now does of air, in the measure of his need, and when those supplies
ran exhausted, just as when the air became vitiated, society would be
entitled, nay obliged, to suppress further propagation. But the question
is far from being so simple. Nature only yields her bounties to us after
labour; they are only converted into means of life by labour; and they
are capable of being vastly multiplied by labour. This element of
labour changes the situation of things considerably, and must be allowed
a leading _role_ in determining a just right and system of property. The
only case where a proprietary right can be recognised which is
unmodified by this consideration, is the case of those who are unable to
labour. They fall back on their original right to a share in the bounty
of nature in the measure that their personal development requires; in
other words, according to their needs. Their share does not lie waste,
though they are unable to work it themselves, and their share belongs to
them immediately because they are persons, and not because they may
afterwards become labourers. Marlo recognises, therefore, antecedently
to labour the right to existence, and this right he proposes to realize
for the weak and disabled by means of a compulsory system of national
insurance.
The other natural proprietary rights are consequent in one way or
another upon labour. First, there is the right to labour. If every man
has a right to a share in the dominion of nature, then every man who is
able to labour has a right to obtain the natural resources that are
necessary to give him employment according to capacity and trade. No
private appropriation of these resources can divest him of his title to
get access to them, and if he cannot find work himself, the State is
bound to provide it for him in public workshops. Second, every man has a
right to the most profitable possible application of labour to natural
resources. He has an interest in seeing the common stock put to the best
account, and he is wronged in this interest when waste is permitted,
when inferior methods are resorted to, or when the distribution of work
and materials is ill arranged. Now the best arrangement is when each man
is equipped according to the measure and quality of his powers. Nature
will be then best worked, and man's personal development will then be
best furthered. If such an arrangement cannot be effected on the system
of property now in vogue, while it may be under another, it is every
man's right to have the former system supplanted by the latter. The most
economical form of property is the most just. Third, the next right is a
right to an almost unlimited control over the fruits of one's own
labour. Not over the means of labour; these can only be justly or
economically held by a circumscribed control; but over the fruits of
labour. These ought to be retained as exclusive property, for the simple
reason that the natural resources will be so turned to the best account.
On any other system of payment the motive to labour is impaired, and the
amount of its produce diminished. Distribution by need defeats its own
end; the very needs of the community would be less amply satisfied after
it than before it. Distribution according to work is the sound economic
principle, and therefore the just one. Marlo here leaves room for the
play of the hereditary principle and of competition to some extent, and
he allows the free choice of occupation on similar grounds. Men will
work best in lines their own tastes and powers lead them to. Everything
is determined by economic utility, and economic utility is supposed to
be at its height when the natural resources of a country are distributed
among its inhabitants according to the requirements of their labouring
powers.
This condition of things can only be realized, first, if population is
regulated; second, if unproductive labour is suppressed; and third, if
the means of labour are made common property. The necessity for
regulating population comes, of course, from the limitation of the
natural resources at society's command. In any community there is a
certain normal limit of population--the limit at which all the natural
resources are distributed among all the inhabitants according to their
powers--and the community will learn when this limit is reached from the
number of workmen who are unable to obtain private employment, and are
obliged to seek work from the State. Then it can regulate population by
various expedients. It may require the possession of a certain amount of
fortune as a preliminary condition to marriage, and raise this amount
according to necessity. It may encourage emigration. It may forbid
marriages under a fixed age, and to prevent illegitimacy, it might give
natural children the same rights as legitimate ones. But Marlo trusts
most to the strong preventive check that would be supplied by the power
imparted to working men under the Federal _regime_ of improving their
position.
The same necessity that makes it legitimate, and, indeed, imperative to
regulate population, makes it legitimate and imperative also to suppress
what Marlo calls unproductive acquisition, _i.e._, the acquisition by
persons who are able to work of any other property than they earn as the
fruit of their work; and to suppress likewise all waste of the means of
life and enjoyment, such, for example, as is involved in the maintenance
of unnecessary horses, dogs, or other animals that only eat up the
products of the soil. The obligation to labour and the curtailment of
luxury would come into exercise before the restrictions on population,
and be more and more rigorously enforced as the normal limit of
population was approximated.
But the most important and the most necessary innovation is the
conversion of land and the instruments of production into the form of
collective property. The form in which property should be held ought to
be strictly determined by considerations of economic utility. From such
considerations the Liberals themselves have introduced important changes
into the system of property; they have abolished fiefs, hereditary
tenancies, entail, servitudes, church and village lands, all the
peculiarities of monopolistic society, because, as they said, they
wished to substitute a good form of property for a bad; and they at
least have no right, Marlo thinks, to turn round now on Communists or
Federalists for proposing to supersede this good form of property by a
better. They have themselves transformed property by law, and they have
transformed it on grounds of economic advantage; they have owned that
the economic superiority of a particular form of property imposes a
public obligation for its compulsory introduction. They asserted the
competency of the State against the monopolists, and they cannot now
deny it against the socialists. If the private form of property is best,
then let the State maintain it; but if the collective form is best, then
the State is bound, even on the principles of Liberals themselves, to
introduce it. The question can only be determined by experience of the
comparative economic utility of the two. Without offering any detailed
proof of his proposition from experience Marlo then affirms that the
most advantageous form of property is reached when the instruments of
production are the collective property of associations, and the
instruments of enjoyment (except wells, bridges, and the like) are the
property of individuals. Each man's house would still be his castle; his
house and the fulness thereof would still belong to him; but outside of
it he could acquire no individual possessions. Of land and the means of
labour, he should be joint-proprietor with others, or rather
joint-tenant with them under the Crown. Industrial property would be
held in common by the associations that worked it, and these
associations would be organized by authority with distinct charters of
powers and functions.
Marlo thus arrives at the same practical scheme as Marx, though by a
slightly different road. Marx builds his claim on Ricardo's theory of
value and Ricardo's law of necessary wages. Marlo builds his on man's
natural right, as a sharer in the dominion of nature, to the most
advantageous exercise of that dominion.