THE ROOT ERROR OF THE MARXIAN THEORY.
ITS OMISSION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY.
ABILITY AND LABOUR DEFINED
In approaching the opinions of another, from whom we are about to
differ, we gain much in clearness if at starting we can find some point
of agreement with him. In the case of Marx we can find this without
difficulty, for the first observation which our subject will naturally
suggest to us is an admission that, within limits, his theory of
production is true. Whatever may be the agencies which are required to
produce wealth, human effort is one of them; and into whatever kinds
this necessary agency may divide itself, one kind must always be labour,
in the sense in which Marx understood it--in other words, that use of
the hands and muscles by which the majority of mankind have always
gained their livelihood.
It is, moreover, easy to point out actual cases in which all the wealth
that is produced is produced by labour only. The simplest of such cases
are supplied us by the lowest savages, who manage, by their utmost
exertions, to provide themselves with the barest necessaries. Such
cases show that labour, wherever it exists, produces at least a minimum
of what men require; for if it were not so there would be no men to
labour. Such cases show also another thing. The most primitive races
possess rude implements of some kind, which any pair of hands can
fashion, just as any pair of hands can use them. These rude implements
are capital in its embryonic form; and so far as they go, they verify
the Marxian theory that capital is nothing but past labour crystallised.
But we need not, in order to see labour, past and present, operating and
producing in a practically unalloyed condition, go to savage or even
semi-civilised countries. The same thing may be seen among groups of
peasant proprietors, which still survive here and there in the remoter
parts of Europe. These men and their families, by their own unaided
labour, produce nearly everything which they eat and wear and use. Mill,
in his treatise on _Political Economy_, gives us an account of this
condition of things, as prevailing among the peasants in certain
districts of Germany. "They labour early and late," he says, quoting
from a German eulogist. "They plod on from day to day and from year to
year, the most untirable of human animals." The German writer admires
them as men who are their own masters. Mill holds them up as a shining
and instructive example of the magic effect of ownership in intensifying
human labour. In any case such men are examples of two things--of
labour operating as the sole productive agency, and also of such labour
self-intensified to its utmost pitch. And what does the labour of these
men produce? According to the authority from which Mill quotes, it
produces just enough to keep them above the level of actual want. Here,
then, we have an unexceptionable example of the wealth-producing power
of labour pure and simple; and if we imagine an entire nation of men
who, as their own masters, worked under liked conditions, we should have
an example of the same thing on a larger and more instructive scale. We
should have a whole nation which produced only just enough to keep it
above the level of actual bodily want.
And now let us turn from production in an imaginary nation such as this,
and compare it with production at large among the civilised nations of
to-day. Nobody could insist on the contrast between the efficiency of
the two processes more strongly than do the socialists themselves. The
aggregate wealth of the civilised nations to-day is, they say, so
enormous--it consists of such a multitude of daily renewed goods and
services--that luxuries undreamed of by the labourer of earlier times
might easily be made as abundant for every household as water. In other
words, if we take a million men, admittedly consisting of labourers pure
and simple in the first place, and the same number of men exerting
themselves under modern conditions in the second place, the industrial
efforts of the second million are, hour for hour, infinitely more
productive than the industrial efforts of the first. If, for example, we
take the case of England, and compare the product produced per head of
the industrial population towards the close of the seventeenth century,
with the product produced less than two centuries afterwards, at the
time when Marx was writing his work on _Capital_, the later product
will, according to the estimate of statisticians, stand to the earlier
in the proportion of thirty-three to seven.
Now, if we adopt the scientific theory of Marx that labour pure and
simple is the sole producer of wealth, and that labour is productive in
proportion to the hours devoted to it, how has it happened--this is our
crucial question--that the amount of labour which produced seven at one
period should produce thirty-three at another? How are we to explain the
presence of the additional twenty-six?
The answer of Marx, and of those who reason like him, is that, owing to
the development of knowledge, mechanical and chemical especially, and
the consequent development of industrial methods and machinery, labour
as a whole has itself become more productive. But to say this is merely
begging the question. To what is this development of knowledge, of
methods, and of machinery due? Is it due to such labour as that of the
"untirable human animals," to which Mill refers as an example of labour
in its intensest form? In a word, does ordinary labour, or the
industrial effort of the majority, contain in itself any principle of
advance at all?
We must, in order to do justice to any theory, consider not only the
points on which its exponents lay the greatest stress, but also those
which they recognise as implied in it, or which we may see to be implied
in it ourselves. And if we consider the theory of Marx in this way, we
shall see that labour, in the sense in which he understands the word,
does contain principles of advance which are of two distinguishable
kinds.
One of these is recognised by Marx himself. Just as, when he says that
labour is the sole productive agency, he assumes the gifts of nature,
which provide it with something to work upon, so, when he conceives of
labour as the effort of hand and muscle, he assumes a human mind behind
these by which hand and muscle are directed. Such being the case, he
expressly admits also that mind is in some cases a more efficient
director than in others, and is able to train the hands and muscles of
the labourer, so that these acquire the quality which is commonly called
skill. Ruskin, who asserted, like Marx, that labour is the sole
producer, used in this respect a precisely similar argument. He defined
skill as faculty which exceptional powers of mind impart to the hands of
those by whom such powers are possessed, from the bricklayer who, in
virtue of mere alertness and patience, can lay in an hour more bricks
than his fellows, up to a Raphael, whose hands can paint a Madonna,
while another man's could hardly be trusted to distemper a wall evenly.
Now, in skill, as thus defined, we have doubtless a correct explanation
of how mere labour--the manual effort of the individual--may produce, in
the case of some men, goods whose value is great, and goods, in the case
of other men, whose value is comparatively small; and since some epochs
are more fertile in developed skill than others, an equal amount of
labour on the part of the same community may produce, in one century,
goods of greater aggregate value than it was able to produce in the
century that went before it. But these goods, whose superior value is
due to exceptional skill--or, as would commonly be said, to qualities of
superior craftsmanship--though they form some of the most coveted
articles of the wealth of the modern world, are not typical of it; and
from the point of view of the majority, they are the part of it which is
least important. The goods whose value is due to exceptional
craftsmanship--such as an illuminated manuscript, for example, or a vase
by Benvenuto Cellini--are always few in number, and can be possessed by
the few only. The distinctive feature of wealth-production in the modern
world, on the contrary, is the multiplication of goods relatively to the
number of the producers of them, and the consequent cheapening of each
article individually. The skill of the craftsman gives an exceptional
value to the particular articles on which his own hands are engaged. It
does not communicate itself to the labour of the ordinary men around
him. The agency which causes the increasing and sustains the increased
output of necessaries, comforts, and conveniences in the progressive
nations of to-day must necessarily be an agency of some kind or other
which raises the productivity of industrial exertion as a whole. Those,
therefore, who, in spite of the fact that the productivity of modern
communities has, relatively to their numbers, undergone an increase
which is general, still maintain that the sole productive agency is
labour, must seek for an explanation of this increase in some other fact
than skill.
And without transgressing the limits which the theory of Marx imposes on
us, such a further fact is very easy to find. Adam Smith opens his
_Wealth of Nations_ with a discussion of it. The chief cause, he says,
which in all progressive countries increases the productive power of the
individual labourer, is not the development among a few of
potentialities which are above the average, but a more effective
development of potentialities common to all, in consequence of labour
being divided, so that each man devotes his life to the doing of some
one thing. Thus if ten ordinary men were to engage in the business of
pin-making, each making every part of every pin for himself, each man
would probably complete but one pin in a day. But if each man makes one
part, and nothing else but that, thus repeating incessantly a single
series of motions, each will acquire the knack of working with such
rapidity that the ten together will make daily, not ten pins, but some
thousands. Here we have labour divided by its different applications,
but not requiring different degrees of capacity. We have the average
labour of the average man still. And here we have a fact which, unlike
the fact of skill--a thing in its nature confined to the few
only--affords a real explanation, up to a certain point, of how ordinary
labour as a whole, without ceasing to be ordinary labour, may rise from
a lower to a higher grade of efficiency.
But such simple divisions of labour as those which are here in question
fail, for a reason which will be specified in another moment, to carry
us far in the history of industrial progress. They do but bring us to
the starting-point of production as it exists to-day. The efficiency of
productive effort has made all its most astounding advances since the
precise time at which the _Wealth of Nations_ was written; and these
advances we shall find that it is quite impossible to explain merely by
a further division of average and equal labour. Such a further division
has no doubt been an element of the process; but it is an explanation
which itself requires explaining. Even in Adam Smith's time two other
factors were at work, which have ever since been growing in magnitude
and importance; and the secret of modern production lies, we shall find,
in these. I call them two, but fundamentally there is only one, for
that which is most obvious, and of which I shall speak first, is
explainable only as the direct result of the second. This, the most
obvious factor, is the modern development of machinery. The other is the
growing application of exceptional mental powers, not to the _manual
labour of the men by whom these powers are possessed_, but to the
_process of directing and co-ordinating the divided labours of others_.
Now, as to machinery, Marx and his followers, as we have seen, maintain
that it represents nothing but the average labour of the past; and so
long as it exists only in its smaller and simpler forms, the devising
and constructing of which are not referable to any faculties which we
are able to distinguish from those of the average labourer, we have
further seen that the theory of Marx holds good. Labour produces alike
both the finished goods and its implements. But in proportion as
machines or other contrivances, such as vessels, grow in size or
complexity, and embody, as they do in their more modern developments,
ingenuity of the highest and knowledge of the most abstruse kinds, the
situation changes; and we are able to identify certain faculties as
essential to the ultimate result, which affect the work of the
labourers, but which do not emanate from themselves. Any three men of
average strength and intelligence might make a potter's wheel together,
or build a small boat together, as they frequently do now, their
several tasks being interchangeable, or assigned to each of them by easy
mutual agreement. The business of directing labour has not separated
itself from the actual business of labouring. Each man knows the object
of what he does, and can co-ordinate that object with the object of what
is done by his fellows. But when the ultimate result is something so
vast and complicated that a thousand men instead of three have to
co-operate in the production of it, when a million pieces of metal, some
large and some minute, have to be cast, filed, turned, rolled, or bent,
so that finally they may all coalesce into a single mechanical organism,
no one labourer sees further than the task which he performs himself. He
cannot adjust his work to that of another man, who is probably working a
quarter of a mile away from him, and he has in most cases no idea
whatever of how the two pieces of work are related to each other. Each
labourer has simply to perform his work in accordance with directions
which emanate from some mind other than his own, and the whole practical
value of what the labourers do depends on the quality of the directions
which are thus given to each.
In other words, in proportion as the industrial process is enhanced in
productivity by the concentration on it of the higher faculties of
mankind, there is an increasing fission of this process as a whole into
two kinds of activity represented by two different groups. We have no
longer _merely_--although we have this _still_--an increasing division
of labour; but we have the labourers of all kinds and grades separating
themselves into one group on the one hand, and the men who direct their
labour, as a separate group, on the other hand.
The function of the directive faculties, as applied thus to the
operations of modern labour, can perhaps be most easily illustrated by
the case of a printed book. Let us take two editions of ten thousand
copies each, similarly printed, and priced at six shillings a copy; the
one being an edition of a book so dull that but twenty copies can be
sold of it, the other of a book so interesting that the public buys the
whole ten thousand. Now, apart from its negligible value as so many tons
of waste paper, each pile of books represents economic wealth only in
proportion to the quantity of it for which the vendors can find
purchasers. Hence we have in the present case two piles of printed paper
which, regarded as paper patterned with printer's ink, are similar, but
one of which is wealth to the extent of three thousand pounds, while the
other is wealth to the extent of no more than six pounds. And to what is
the difference between these two values due? It obviously cannot be due
to the manual labour of the compositors, for this, both in kind and
quantity, is in each case the same. It is due to the special directions
under which the labour of the compositors is performed. But these
directions do not emanate from the men by whose hands the types are
arranged in a given order.
They come from the author, who conveys them to the compositors through
his manuscript; which manuscript, considered under its economic aspect,
is neither more nor less than a series of minute orders, which modify
from second to second every movement of the compositors' hands, and
determine the subsequent results of every impress of the type on paper;
one mind thus, by directing the labour of others, imparting the quality
of much wealth or of little or of none, to every one of the ten thousand
copies of which the edition is composed.
Similarly when a man invents, and brings into practical use, some new
and successful apparatus such, let us say, as the telephone, the same
situation repeats itself. The new apparatus is an addition to the
world's wealth, not because so many scraps of wood, brass, nickel,
vulcanite, and such and such lengths of wire are shaped, stretched, and
connected with sufficient manual dexterity--for the highest dexterity is
very often employed in the making of contrivances which turn out to be
futile--but because each of its parts is fashioned in obedience to
certain designs with which this dexterity, as such, has nothing at all
to do. The apparatus is successful, and an addition to the world's
wealth, because the designs of the inventor, just like the author's
manuscript, constitute a multitude of injunctions proceeding from a
master-mind, which is not the mind of those by whose hands they are
carried into execution.
And with the direction of labour generally, whether in the production of
machinery or the use of the machinery in the production of goods for the
public, the case is again the same. We have manual labour of a given
kind and quality, which assists in producing what is wanted or not
wanted--what is so much wealth or simply so much refuse, in accordance
with the manner in which all this labour is directed by faculties
specifically different from those exercised by the manual labourers
themselves.
And now we are in a position to sum up in a brief and decisive formula
what the difference between the sets of faculties thus contrasted is. It
is not essentially a difference between lower and higher, for some forms
of labour, such as that of the great painter, may be morally higher than
some forms of direction. The difference is one not of degree, but of
kind, and includes two different psycho-physical processes. Labour, from
the most ordinary up to the rarest kind, _is the mind or the brain of
one man affecting that man's own hands_, and the single task on which
his hands happen to be engaged. The directive faculties are _the mind or
the brain of one man simultaneously affecting the hands of any number of
other men_, and through their hands the simultaneous tasks of all of
them, no matter how various these tasks may be.