THE THEORY OF MARX AND THE EARLIER SOCIALISTS SUMMARISED
All radical revolutions which are advocated in the interests of the
people are commended to the people, and the people are invited to
accomplish them, on the ground that majorities are, if they would only
realise it, capable of moulding society in any manner they please. As
applied to matters of legislation and government, this theory is
sufficiently familiar to everybody. It has been elaborated in endless
detail, and has expressed itself in the constitutions of all modern
democracies. What Karl Marx did, and did for the first time, was to
invest this theory of the all-efficiency of the majority with a
definiteness, in respect of distribution of wealth, similar to that with
which it had been invested already in respect of the making of laws and
the dictation of national policies.
The practical outcome of the scientific reasoning of Marx is summed up
in the formula which has figured as the premise and conclusion of every
congress of his followers, of every book or manifesto published by
them, and of every propagandist oration uttered by them at
street-corners, namely, "All wealth is produced by labour, therefore to
the labourers all wealth is due"--a doctrine in itself not novel if
taken as a pious generality, but presented by Marx as the outcome of an
elaborate system of economics.
The efficiency of this doctrine as an instrument of agitation is
obvious. It appeals at once to two universal instincts: the instinct of
cupidity and the instinct of universal justice. It stimulates the
labourers to demand more than they receive already, and it stimulates to
demand the more on the ground that they themselves have produced it. It
teaches them that the wealth of every man who is not a manual labourer
is something stolen from themselves which ought to be and which can be
restored to them.
Now, whatever may be the value of such teaching as a contribution to
economic science, it illustrates by its success one cardinal truth, and
by implication it bears witness to another. The first truth is that, no
matter how desirable any object may be which is obtruded on the
imagination of anybody, nobody will bestir himself in a practical way to
demand it until he can be persuaded to believe that its attainment is
practically possible. The other is this: that the possibilities of
redistributing wealth depend on the causes by which wealth is produced.
All wealth, says Marx, can practically be appropriated by the
labourers. But why? Because the labourers themselves comprise in their
own labour all the forces that produce it. If its production
necessitated the activity of any persons other than themselves, these
other persons would inevitably have some control over its distribution;
since if it were distributed in a manner of which these other persons
disapproved, it would be open to them to refuse to take part in its
production any longer; and there would, in consequence, be no wealth, or
less wealth, to distribute.
Let us, then, examine the precise sense and manner in which this theory
of labour as the sole producer of wealth is elaborated and defended by
Marx in his Bible of Scientific Socialism. His argument, though the
expression of it is very often pedantic and encumbered with superfluous
mathematical formulæ, is ingenious and interesting, and is associated
with historical criticism which, in spite of its defects, is valuable.
Marx was, indeed, foremost among those thinkers already referred to who
first insisted on the fact that the economic conditions of to-day are
mainly a novel development of others which went before them, and that,
having their roots in history, they must be studied by the historical
method. He recognised, however, that for practical purposes each age
must concern itself with its own environment; and his logical
starting-point is an analysis of wealth-production as it exists to-day.
He begins by insisting on the fact that labour in the modern world is
divided with such a general and such an increasing minuteness that each
labour produces one kind of product only, of which he himself can
consume but a small fraction, and often consumes nothing. His own
product, therefore, has for him the character of wealth only because he
is able to exchange it for commodities of other kinds; and the amount of
wealth represented by it depends upon what the quantity of other
assorted commodities, which he can get in exchange for it, is. What,
then, is the common measure, in accordance with which, as a fact, one
kind of commodity will exchange for any other, or any others? For his
answer to this question Marx goes to the orthodox economists of his
time--the recognised exponents of the system against which his own
arguments were directed--and notably, among these, to Ricardo; and,
adopting Ricardo's conclusions, as though they were axiomatic, he
asserts that the measure of exchange between one class of commodities
and another--such, for example, as cigars, printed books, and
chronometers--is the amount of manual labour, estimated in terms of
time, which is on an average necessary to the production of each of
them. His meaning in this respect is illustrated with pictorial
vividness by his teaching with regard to the form in which the measure
of exchange should embody itself. This, he said, ought not to be gold or
silver, but "labour-certificates," which would indicate that whoever
possessed them had laboured for so many hours in producing no matter
what, and which would purchase anything else, or any quantity of
anything else, representing an equal expenditure of labour of any other
kind.
Having thus settled, as it seemed to him beyond dispute, that manual
labour, estimated in terms of time, is the sole source and measure of
economic values or of wealth, Marx goes on to point out that, by the
improvement of industrial methods, labour in the modern world has been
growing more and more productive, so that each labour-hour results in an
increased yield of commodities. Thus a man who a couple of centuries ago
could have only just kept himself alive by the products of his entire
labour-day, can now keep himself alive by the products of half or a
quarter of it. The products of the remainder of his labour-day are what
Marx called a "surplus value," meaning by this phrase all that output of
wealth which is beyond what is practically necessary to keep the
labourer alive. But what, he asks, becomes of this surplus? Does it go
to the labourers who have produced it? No, he replies. On the contrary,
as fast as it is produced, it is abstracted from the labourer in a
manner, which he goes on to analyse, by the capitalist.
Marx here advances to the second stage of his argument. Capital, as he
conceives of it, is the tools or instruments of production; and modern
capital for him means those vast aggregates of machinery by the use of
which in most industries the earlier implements have been displaced.
Now, here, says Marx, the capitalist is sure to interpose with the
objection that the increased output of wealth is due, not to labour, but
to the machinery, and that the labourer, as such, has consequently no
claim on it. But to this objection Marx is ready with the following
answer--that the machinery itself is nothing but past labour in
disguise. It is past labour crystallised, or embodied in an external
form, and used by present labour to assist itself in its own operations.
Every wheel, crank, and connecting-rod, every rivet in every boiler,
owes its shape and its place to labour, and labour only. Labour,
therefore--the labour of the average multitude--remains the sole agent
in the production of wealth, after all.
Capital, however, as thus understood, has, he says, this
peculiarity--that, being labour in an externalised and also in a
permanent form, it is capable of being detached from the labourers and
appropriated by other people; and the essence of modern capitalism is
neither more nor less than this--the appropriation of the instruments of
production by a minority who are not producers. So long as the
implements of production were small and simple, and such that each could
be used by one man or family, the divorce between the labourer and his
implements was not easy to accomplish; but in proportion as these simple
implements were developed into the aggregated mechanisms of the factory,
each of which aggregates was used in common by hundreds and even by
thousands of labourers, the link between the implement and the user was
broken by an automatic process; for a single organised mechanism used by
a thousand men could not, in the nature of things, be owned by each one
of the thousand individually, and collective ownership by all of them
was an idea as yet unborn. Under these circumstances, with the growth of
modern machinery, the ownership of the implements of production passed,
by what Marx looked upon as a kind of historical fatality, into the
hands of a class whose activities were purely acquisitive, and had no
true connection with the process of production at all; and this class,
he said, constitutes the capitalists of the modern world.
The results of this process have, according to him, been as follows:
Society has become divided into two contrasted groups--an enormous
group, and a small one. The enormous group--the great body of every
nation--the people--the labouring mass--the one true producing
power--has been left without any implements by means of which its labour
can exert itself, and these implements have been monopolised by the
small group alone. The people at large, in fact, have become like the
employés of a single mill-owner, who have no choice but to work within
the walls of that mill or starve; and the possessing class at large has
become like the owner of such a single mill, who, holding the keys of
life and death in his hands, is able to impose on the mill-workers
almost any terms he pleases as the price of admission to his premises
and to the privilege of using his machinery; and the price which such an
owner, so situated, will exact (such was the contention of Marx)
inevitably must come, and historically has come, to this--namely, the
entire amount of goods which the labouring class produces, except such a
minimum as will just enable its members to keep themselves in working
order, and to reproduce their kind. Thus all capital, as at present
owned, all profits, and all interest on capital, are neither more nor
less than thefts from the labouring class of commodities which are
produced by the labouring class alone.
The argument of Marx is not, however, finished yet. There remains a
third part of it which we still have to consider. Writing as he did,
almost half a century ago, he said that the process of capitalistic
appropriation had not--yet completed itself. A remnant of producers on a
restricted scale survived, still forming a middle class, which was
neither rich nor poor. But, he continued, in all capitalistic countries,
a new movement, inevitable from the first, had set in, and its pace was
daily accelerating. Just as the earlier capitalists swallowed up most of
the small producers, so were the great capitalists swallowing up the
smaller, and the middle class which survived was disappearing day by
day. Wages, meanwhile, were regulated by an iron law. Under the system
of capitalism it was an absolute impossibility that they could rise. As
he put it, in language which has since become proverbial, "The rich are
getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class is being crushed out,"
and the time, he continued, was in sight already--it would arrive,
according to him, before the end of the nineteenth century--when nothing
would be left but a handful of idle and preposterous millionaires on the
one hand, and a mass of miserable ragamuffins who provided all the
millions on the other, having for themselves only enough food and
clothing to enable them to move their muscles and protect their
nakedness from the frost. Then, said Marx, when this contrast has
completed itself, the situation will be no longer tolerable. "Then the
knell of the capitalistic system will have sounded." The producers will
assert themselves under the pressure of an irresistible impulse; they
will repossess themselves of the implements of production of which they
have been so long deprived. "The expropriators will in their turn be
expropriated," and the labourers thenceforth owning the implements of
production collectively, all the wealth of the world will forever
afterwards be theirs.
This concluding portion of the gospel of Marx--its prophecies--has been
in many of its details so completely falsified by events that even his
most ardent disciples no longer insist on it. I have only mentioned it
here because of the further light which it throws on what alone, in
this discussion, concerns us--namely, the Marxian theory of labour as
the sole producer of wealth, and the absolute nullity, so far as
production goes, of every form of activity associated with the
possession of capital, or with any class but the labouring.
This theory of production, then, which has been the foundation of
socialism as a party--or, as Gronlünd, a disciple of Marx, calls it,
"its _idée mère_"--and which is still its foundation for the great
majority of socialists, we will now examine in detail, and, considering
how complex are the processes of production in the modern world, ask how
far it gives us, or fails to give us, even an approximately complete
account of them.
We shall find that, in spite of the plausibility with which the talent
of Marx invested it, this basic doctrine of so-called scientific
socialism is the greatest intellectual mare's-nest of the century which
has just ended; and when once we have realised with precision on what,
in the modern world, the actual efficiency of the productive process
depends, we shall see that the analysis of Marx bears about the same
relation to the economic facts of to-day that the child's analysis of
matter into the four traditional elements, or the doctrine of Thales
that everything is made of water, bears to the facts of chemistry as
modern science has revealed them to us.