THE ERRORS OF MARX, CONTINUED.
CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF ABILITY
The human activities and faculties, then, which are involved in the
production of modern wealth, are not, as Marx says--and as the orthodox
economists said, whom he rightly calls his masters, and as their
followers still say--of one kind--namely, those embodied in the
individual task-work of the individual, to which Marx, Ricardo, and Mill
alike give the name of "labour"; they are of two kinds. And this,
indeed, the earlier economists recognised, as we may see by Mill's
casual admission that the progress of industrial effort depends before
all things on thought and the advance of knowledge. But they recognised
the fact in a general way only. How thought and knowledge affected the
industrial process they made no attempt to explain, otherwise than by
comprehending them on occasion under the common name of labour, which
they assigned throughout most of their arguments to manual task-work
only.
Now, it is doubtless true that, as a mere matter of verbal propriety,
this general sense may be given to the word "labour," if we please; but
if in discussing the efforts which produce wealth we admit that these
efforts are not of one kind but two, and if the word "labour" is, in
nine cases out of ten, employed with the definite intention of
designating only one of them, it is impossible to reason about the
industrial process intelligibly, so long as we apply also the same name
to the other. We might as well use the word "man"--as with reference to
some problems we are perfectly right in doing--to designate both men and
women, and then attempt to discuss the relations between the two sexes.
For the directive faculties, so essentially distinct from those to which
universal custom has allocated the name of labour, it is difficult to
find a name equally convenient and satisfying. In default of a better, I
have, on former occasions, applied to it the name of Ability; and this
will serve our purpose here--especially as it is a name which has been,
of recent years, applied by many of the more thoughtful socialists
themselves to certain activities of a mental and moral kind, which their
conception of labour cannot be made to include, but which they are
beginning to recognise as playing some part in production. We must
remember, however, that we are using it in a strictly technical sense,
which will in some respects be narrower than the ordinary, and in some
more comprehensive. It will exclude all kinds of cleverness unapplied
to economic production; and will include many powers, in so far as such
production is affected by them, to the expression of whose scope and
character it may sometimes appear inadequate.[1]
And now when we have come thus far, a quite new question arises. We have
seen how ability is, by its direction of labour, the chief agency in
that process which produces wealth to-day, and how it makes the amount
produced, relatively to the number of the producers, so incomparably
greater than it ever was under any previous system. We have now to
consider the means by which this faculty of direction is exercised.
In order to understand this, we must turn our attention again to
capital, as something distinct and detached from the human efforts that
have produced it; and we shall find that the conception of it which
dominated the thought of Marx, and that which dominates the thought of
the orthodox school of economists, either excludes altogether, or fails
to reveal the nature of, that particular force and function of it which,
in the modern world, are fundamental.
Capital is divided traditionally into two kinds, technically called
"fixed" and "circulating." By fixed capital, which is what Marx had
mainly in view, is meant machinery, and the works and structures
connected with it; and it is called "fixed" on account of its
comparative permanence. By circulating capital is meant, as Adam Smith
puts it, any stock of those consumable commodities which, produced by
the aid of machinery, the merchant or the store-keeper buys in order to
sell them at a profit; and it is called "circulating" because the
commodities which are sold to-day are replaced by new ones of an
equivalent kind to-morrow.
Now, as to fixed capital, or the endlessly elaborated machinery of the
modern world, we have seen already that this is, in its distinctive
features, not, as Marx declared it to be, a crystallisation of labour,
but a crystallisation of the ability by which labour has been directed;
but this revised explanation tells us nothing of the means by which the
direction is accomplished. Still less is any light thrown on the
question by the nature of circulating capital, as Adam Smith understands
it.
The kind of capital which alone concerns us here is a kind which
resembles circulating capital in respect of its material form, and is
often indeed in this respect identical with it; but it differs from
circulating capital in respect of the use made of it. Such capital we
may call wage-capital. Wage-capital, although in practice it disguises
itself under the form of money, is essentially a stock of goods which
are the daily necessaries of life, but which, instead of being sold to
the public, like the goods of the store-keeper, at a profit, are
distributed by their possessor among a special group of labourers on
conditions. The first of these is naturally that the labourers do work
of some sort. The second condition, and the one that concerns us here,
is that, besides doing work of some sort, each labourer shall do the
work which the distributer of the goods prescribes to him.
Here we have before us the means by which, in the modern world, the
ability of the few directs the labour of the many; and, in proportion to
the quality and intensity of the directive powers that are exercised,
adds to the value of the results which this labour would have produced
otherwise. Thus in wage-capital we have the capital of the modern world
in what dynamically is its primary and parent form--a kind of capital
which improved machinery is always tending to augment, but of whose use
the machinery itself, its renewal, and its continued improvement, are
the consequences.
That such is the case might be illustrated by any number of familiar
examples. A man invents a new machine having some useful purpose--let us
say the production of some new kind of manure, which will double the
fertility of every field in the country. In order to put this machine on
the market, and make it a fact instead of a mere conception, the first
thing necessary is, as every human being knows, that the inventor shall
possess, or acquire, the control of capital. And what is the next step?
When the capital is provided, how will it first be used? It will be used
in the form of wages, or articles of daily consumption, which will be
distributed among a certain number of mechanics and other labourers, on
condition that they set about fashioning, in certain prescribed groups,
so much metal into so many prescribed shapes--some of them shaping it
into wheels, some into knives and rollers, some into sieves, rods,
cranks, cams, and eccentrics, in accordance with patterns which have
never been followed previously; and of all these individual operations
the new machine, as a practical implement, is the result. The machine is
new, and it is an addition to the wealth-producing powers of the world,
not because it embodies so much labour, but because it embodies so much
labour directed in a new way; and it is only by means of the conditions
which the possession of wage-capital enables the inventor or his
partners to impose upon every one of the labourers that the machine, as
a practical implement, comes into existence at all.
Hence we see that Marx was at once right and wrong when he said that
modern capitalism is, in its essence, monopoly. It is monopoly; but it
is not primarily, as Marx thought, a passive monopoly of improved
instruments of production. It is primarily a monopoly of products which
are essential to the life of the labourer; and it is a monopoly of
these, not in the invidious sense that the monopolists retain them for
their own personal consumption, as they do in the case of rare wines and
fabrics, which can, from the nature of the case, be enjoyed by a few
only. It is a monopoly of them in the sense that the monopolists have
such a control over their distribution as enables them to control the
purely technical actions of those persons who ultimately own and consume
the whole of them.[2]
Modern capital, then, I repeat, is primarily wage-capital, such capital
as modern machinery being the direct result of its application; and
wage-capital is productive, not in virtue of any quality inherent in
itself, but merely because as a fact, under the modern system, it
constitutes the reins by which the exceptional ability of a few guides
the labour, skilled or unskilled, of the many. It is the means by which
the commonest labourer, who hardly knows the rule of three, is made to
work as though he were master of the abstruest branches of mathematics;
by which the artisan who only has a smattering--if he has as much as
that--of mechanics, metallurgy, chemistry, is made to work as though all
the sciences had been assimilated by his single brain.
Let any one consider, for example, one of the great steel bridges which
now throw their single spans over waters such as the Firth of Forth.
These structures are crystallised labour, doubtless, but they are, in
their distinctive features, not crystallised labour as such. They are
crystallised mechanics, crystallised chemistry, crystallised
mathematics--in short, crystallised intellect, knowledge, imagination,
and executive capacity, of kinds which hardly exist in a dozen minds out
of a million; and labour conduces to the production of such astonishing
structures only because it submits itself to the guidance of these
intellectual leaders. And the same is the case with modern production
generally. Though labour is essential to the production of wealth even
in the smallest quantities, the distinguishing productivity of industry
in the modern world depends not on the labour, but on the ability with
which the labour is directed; and in the modern world the primary
function of capital is that of providing ability with its necessary
instrument of direction.
No unprejudiced person, who is capable of coherent thought, can, when
the matter is thus plainly stated, possibly deny this. That it cannot be
denied will be shown in the two following chapters by recent admissions
on the part of socialists themselves, the more thoughtful of whom have
now virtually abandoned the earlier theoretical framework of socialism
altogether, and are trying to substitute a new one, with which we will
deal later, and which will indeed prove the main subject of our
inquiry.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] When I insisted on this distinction between "labour" and "ability"
in America, innumerable critics met me with two objections. One of
these, as stated by a writer who confessed himself otherwise in entire
agreement with me, was this: "It is impossible, as Mr. Mallock attempts
to do, to draw a hard-and-fast line between mental effort and muscular."
No such attempt is made. As I pointed out in one of my speeches, many
kinds of "labour" (_e.g._ that of the great painter) exhibit higher
mentality than do many kinds of ability. Further, I pointed out that, in
a technical sense, the same effort may be either an effort of labour or
ability, according to its application. Thus, if a singer sings to an
audience, his effort is technically "labour," because it ends with the
single task; but if he sings so as to produce a gramophone record, his
effort is an act of "ability," for he influences the products of other
men, by whom the records are multiplied. The second objection was
expressed by one of my critics thus: "I say that all productive effort
is labour.... I dare you to tell any one of these genii that they are
not labourers." Another critic said: "Just as 'land' in economics means
all the forces of nature, so does 'labour' mean all the forces of man.
Why, then, speak of ability?" These criticisms are purely verbal. If we
like to take "labour" as a collective name for all forms of human
effort, we can of course do so; but in that case we must find other
differential names for the different forces of effort individually. To
give them all the same name is not to explain them. It is to tie them
all up in a parcel.
[2] If this fact requires any further exemplification, we can find one
on a large scale in the pages of Marx himself. According to him the
first appreciable capitalistic movement--the first leaping of the modern
system in the womb--took place in the English cloth trade about four
hundred years ago. Now, if capitalism were merely, as according to Marx
it is, a passive monopoly by some men of implements which have been
produced by others, the pioneers of capitalism in the reign of Henry
VIII. would have got into their possession all the hand-looms then in
use; they would have taken their toll in kind from all whom they allowed
to use them; and there the matter would have ended. The looms of to-day
would be the looms of four hundred years ago. The passive ownership of
machines does nothing to improve their construction. If a gang of
ignorant thieves could steal all the watches in America, and then let
them out to the public at so much a month or year, this would not
convert the three-dollar watches into chronometers. And how little mere
labour, or the experience gained by labour, tends to improve the
implements which the labourer uses is shown by the fact that the looms
which wove Anne Boleyn's petticoats were practically the same as the
looms which wove those of Semiramis.