REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY
In saying that, up to the point which our argument has thus far reached,
the more thoughtful among the socialists to-day concede and even assert
its truth, I have evidence in view of a very opposite kind. When I
delivered, as I did recently, a series of addresses on socialism to
various meetings in America, I approached the subject in the manner in
which I have approached it here. I began with the process of production
pure and simple, and I showed how crude and childish, as applied to
production in modern times, was the analysis of Marx and all the earlier
socialists. I showed, as I have shown here, that, the amount of labour
being given, the quantity and quality of wealth that will result from
its exercise depend on the ability with which by means of wage-capital
this labour is directed.
The two addresses in which these points were elaborated had no sooner
been delivered than, from all parts of the country, through newspapers
and private letters, and sometimes by word of mouth, socialists of
various types addressed themselves to the business of replying to me.
These replies, whatever may have been their differences otherwise, all
took the form of a declaration that I was only wasting my time in
exposing the doctrine that labour is the sole producer of wealth, and in
laying such stress on the part played by directive ability; for no
serious socialist of the present day any longer believed the one, or
failed to recognise the other. Thus one of my critics told me that what
I ought to do was "to discuss the principles of socialism as understood
and accepted by the intelligent disciples, and not the worn-out and
discredited theories of Marx." Another was good enough to tell me that I
had "cleverly accomplished the task of exposing the errors of Marx, both
of premise and of logic"; but the leaders of socialistic thought "in its
later developments" had, he proceeded to say, long ago outgrown these. A
third wrote me a letter bristling with all kinds of challenges, and
asked me if I thought, for example, that socialists were such fools as
not to recognise that the talents of an inventor like Mr. Edison
increased the productivity of labour by the new direction which they
gave to it. I might multiply similar quotations, but one more will be
enough here. It is taken from a long article directed against myself by
Mr. Hillquit--a writer to whom my special attention was called as by far
the most accomplished exponent, among the militant socialists of
America, of socialism in its most logical and most highly developed
form. "It requires," said Mr. Hillquit, "no special genius to
demonstrate that all labour is not alike, nor equally productive. It is
still more obvious that common manual labour is impotent to produce the
wealth of modern nations--that organisation, direction, and control are
essential to productive work in the field of modern production, and are
just as much a factor in it as mere physical effort."[3]
But we need not confine ourselves to my own late critics in America. The
general history of socialism as a reasoned theory is practically the
same in one country as in another. The intellectual socialists in
England, among whom Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Sidney Webb are prominent,
express themselves in even plainer terms with regard to the part which
directive ability, as opposed to labour, plays in the modern world.
"Ability," says Mr. Shaw, employing the very word, is often the factor
which determines whether a given industry shall make a loss of five per
cent. or else a profit of twenty; and Mr. Webb, as we shall have
occasion to see presently, carries the argument further, and states it
in greater detail.
Why, then, it may be asked, should a critic of contemporary socialism
think it worth while to expose with so much minuteness a fallacy which
intellectual socialists now all agree in repudiating, and to insist with
such emphasis on facts which they profess to recognise as self-evident?
To this question there are two answers.
One of these I indicated at the close of our opening chapter; and this
at the cost of what in logic is a mere digression, it will be desirable,
for practical purposes, to state it with greater fulness.
Admissions and assertions, such as those which I have just now quoted,
do, no doubt, represent a definite intellectual advance which has taken
place in the theory of socialism, among those who are its most
thoughtful exponents, and in a certain sense its leaders. They represent
what these leaders think and say among themselves, and what they put
forward when disputing with opponents who are competent to criticise
them. But what they do not represent is socialism as still preached to
the populace, or the doctrine which is still vital for socialists as a
popular party. This is still, just as it was originally, the socialism
of Marx in an absolutely unamended form. It is the doctrine that the
manual efforts of the vast multitude of labourers, directed only by the
minds of the individual labourers themselves, produce all the wealth of
the world; that the holding of any of this wealth by any other class
whatever stands for nothing but a system of legalised plunder; and that
the labourers need only inaugurate a legislation of a new kind in order
to secure and enjoy what always was by rights their own. Let me
illustrate this assertion by two examples, one supplied to us by
England, the other by America.
In England the body which calls itself the Social Democratic Federation,
and represents at this moment socialism of the more popular kind, began
its campaign with a manifesto which was headed with the familiar words,
"All wealth is due to labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is
due." This text or motto was followed by certain figures, with regard to
the total income of Great Britain, and the manner in which it is at
present distributed. Labour was represented as getting less than
one-fourth of the whole, and the labourers were informed that if they
would but "educate themselves, agitate, and organise," the remaining
three-fourths would automatically pass into their possession. This
document, it is true, was issued some twenty years ago;[4] but that the
form which socialism takes, when addressed to the masses of the
population, has not appreciably altered from that day to this, will be
made sufficiently clear by the following pertinent fact. Shortly after
my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active
disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a
challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most
important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and
republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these--and it
was signalised by an accompanying advertisement as fundamental--bore the
impressive title of, "Why the Working Man should be a Socialist," and
the answer to this question is given in the writer's opening words. "You
know," he says, addressing any labourer and the street-worker, "or you
ought to know, that you alone produce all the good things of life; and
you know, or you ought to know, that by so simple a process as that of
casting your ballot intelligently you will be able"--to do what? The
writer explains himself in language which, except for a difference in
his statistics, is almost a verbal repetition of that of his English
predecessors. He specifies two sums, one representing the income which
each working-man in America would receive were the entire wealth of the
country divided equally among the manual labourers; the other
representing the income which, on an average, he actually receives as
wages; and the writer tells every working man that, by "merely casting
his ballot intelligently," he can secure for himself the whole
difference between the larger sum and the less.[5]
But the fact that the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of
labour, and the consequent economic nullity of all other forms of
effort, still supplies the main ideas by which popular socialism is
vitalised, is shown perhaps even more distinctly by the popular hopes
and demands which result from this doctrine indirectly than it is by the
direct reassertion of the formal doctrine itself. One of the members of
the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the
polls by a letter to the _Times_, proclaiming that socialism was a
moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to
socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich,
was the achievement of "economic freedom," or, in other words, the
"emancipation of labour," or, in other words again, the abolition of the
system which he described as "wagedom." I merely mention the particular
letter in question in order to remind the reader of these familiar
phrases, which are current in every country where the theory of
socialism has spread itself.
Now, what does all this talk about the emancipation of labour mean? It
can only mean one or other of two things: either that the economic
prosperity of every nation in the future will depend on the emancipation
of every average mind from the guidance of any minds that are in any way
superior to itself, or are able to enhance the productivity of an
average pair of hands--a proposition so ludicrous that nobody would
consciously assent to it; or else it means a continued assent to the
theory which fails to correlate labour with directive ability at all,
and so never raises the question of whether the latter is necessary or
no.
What, then, becomes of that chorus of vehement protestations, with which
my critics in America were all so eager to overwhelm me, to the effect
that socialists to-day recognise as clearly as I do that "common manual
labour," as Mr. Hillquit puts it, "is impotent to produce the wealth of
modern nations," apart from the "organisation and control" of the minds
most competent to direct it? That the more intellectual socialists of
to-day do recognise this fact--some with greater and some with less
distinctness--is the very point on which I am anxious to insist. We
shall have abundant opportunities for considering it later on. For the
moment, however, I pause to ask them the following question.
Recognising, as they do, and eagerly proclaiming as they do, whenever
they address themselves to those who are capable of serious dispute with
them, that the original theory of socialism, which was the creed of such
bodies as the International, is absolutely false in itself, and in many
of the expectations which it stimulates, why do not they set themselves,
whenever they address the multitude, to expose and repudiate a fallacy
in which they no longer believe? Do they do this? Do they make an
attempt to do this? On the contrary, as a rule, though there are
doubtless many honourable exceptions, they endeavour to hide from the
multitude their intellectual change of front altogether; and, instead of
insisting that the undirected labour of the many is, in the modern
world, impotent to produce anything, they continue to speak of it as
though it produced everything, and as though no class other than the
labouring fulfilled any economic function or had any right to exist.[6]
Let me give the reader an example, which is curiously apt here. It is
taken from Mr. Hillquit's own attack on myself, which filled the front
sheet of a newspaper, and was distributed to the public at the door of
one of the buildings in which I spoke. Of the short passages, amounting
to some twenty lines out of six hundred, in which alone he condescended
to detailed argument, the first is that in which, as we have already
seen, he declares that all socialists know, without any instruction on
my part, that common manual labour, unless it is directed by ability, is
"impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations." But having made this
admission with much blowing of trumpets, he immediately drops it, and
instead of developing its consequences, he diverts the attention of his
readers from it by a long series of irrelevancies; nor does he return to
the question of directive ability at all till he is nearing the end of
his discourse, when he suddenly takes it up again, declaring that he
will meet and refute me on ground which I myself have chosen, and show
that wealth--at all events in the commercial sense--is still produced by
manual labour alone. He refers to my selection of the case of a printed
book, as illustrating, in the manner explained in an earlier chapter,
the part which directive ability plays in modern production. The
economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader
will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of
compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author
imposes on this labour through his manuscript--the author's mind being
typical of directive ability generally. And what has Mr. Hillquit--the
intellectual Ajax of the socialists--got to say about this? "Whether a
book," he says, "is a work of genius or mere rubbish will largely affect
its literary or artistic value; but it will have very little bearing on
its economic or commercial value." This, he goes on to argue, will,
despite all my objections, be found to depend on ordinary manual labour,
of which the labour of the hands of the compositors is that which
concerns us most. Nothing, according to him, can be more evident than
this. "For the market price," he says, "of a wretched detective story,
of the same length as Hamlet, and printed in the same way, will be
exactly the same as that of a copy of Hamlet itself."
Now, if we consider Mr. Hillquit as a purely literary critic, we can but
admire his subtlety in discovering that the literary value of a book is
largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish; but when
he descends from pure criticism to economics, it is difficult, unless we
suppose him to have taken leave of his senses, to imagine that he can
himself believe in the medley of nonsense propounded by him. For what
he is here doing--or more probably pretending to do--is to confuse the
cost of producing an edition of a book with the commercial value of that
edition when produced. The labour in question no doubt determines the
price at which the printed paper can be sold at a profit, or without
loss; but the number of copies which the public will be willing to buy,
or, in other words, the value of the edition commercially, depends on
qualities resident in the mind of the author, which render the book
attractive to but few readers, or to many. Whether these qualities
amount to genius in the higher sense of the word, or to nothing more
than a knack of titillating the curiosity of the vulgar, does not affect
the question. In either case--and this is the sole important fact--they
are qualities of the author's mind, and of the author's mind alone; and
the labour of the compositors conduces to the production of a pile of
volumes which is of large, of little, or of no value commercially, not
according to the dexterity with which this labour is performed, but
according to the manner in which the author's mind directs it.
Than any human being who is capable of perceiving that the literary
quality of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not
being rubbish, should seriously suppose that the saleable value of
editions--whether they are editions of a popular novel, or of a treatise
on the conchology of Kamchatka, is proportionate to the number of
letters in them arranged in parallel lines--for Mr. Hillquit's argument
means neither more nor less than this--is, let me repeat, incredible.
What, then, is the explanation of his indulging in a performance of this
degrading kind? The explanation is that he, like so many of his
colleagues, though recognising personally that labour among "modern
nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who
direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his
appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers;
and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that
directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he
endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to
convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he
actually manages to wind up with a repetition of the old Marxian moral
that the profits of ability mean nothing but labour which has not been
paid for.[7]
One of my reasons, then, for beginning the present examination of
socialism with exposing the fallacy of principles which the intellectual
socialists of to-day are so eager to proclaim that they have long since
abandoned, is the fact that these principles are still the principles of
the multitude; that for practical purposes they are those which most
urgently require refutation; and that the intellectual socialists who
have doubtless repudiated them personally, not only do not attempt to
discredit them in the eyes of the ignorant, but themselves continue to
appeal to them as instruments of popular agitation.
My other reason for following the course in question is that the theory
of socialism in its higher and more recent forms, which recognises
directive intellect in addition to manual effort as one of the forces
essential to the production of modern wealth, cannot be understood and
estimated in any profitable way, without a previous examination of those
earlier doctrines and ideas, some of which it still retains, while it
modifies and rejects others.
And now let us take up again the thread of our main argument. We laid
this down early in the present chapter, having emphasised the fact that,
the intellectual socialists of to-day agree, on their own admission,
with one proposition at all events which has been elucidated in this
volume--namely, that labour alone, as one of their spokesmen puts it,
"is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," the faculties and
the functions of the minority by whom labour is directed and organised
being no less essential to the result than the labour of the majority
itself. In the following chapter we shall see that this agreement
extends yet further.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Mr. Hillquit--a lawyer, who has adopted the business of propagating
socialism in America--is unknown in England; but his name, not long ago,
was to be found in the English papers, as that of one of the
representatives sent from America to a recent Socialistic Congress in
Europe. Amongst the socialists of the United States he holds a position
analogous to that enjoyed by Mr. Shaw, Mr. Webb, and Mr. Ramsey
Macdonald in England.
[4] Whilst this work was in the press a "Catechism," lately published in
England, for use of children, was sent me. It was proposed to use this
Catechism on Sundays in the London County Council Schools. The first
economic "lesson" in it begins thus: "Who creates all wealth? The
working-class. Who are the workers? Men who work for wages." All who are
not wage-workers are declared in this catechism to be absolutely idle
and not productive.
[5] The writer of this leaflet, Mr. Wilshire, has subsequently declared
in his published criticisms of myself, that I impute to socialists what
no socialists really say, and contends that, when he thus speaks of
"working-men" and "labourers," he includes all men who contribute
anything to the productive forces of a country--inventors like Mr.
Edison, and millionaire captains of industry, in so far as they are
active agents, and not mere recipients of interest. But that such is not
the meaning which he conveys, or desires to convey, to those to whom his
leaflet addresses itself, is plainly shown by his statistics, if by
nothing else; for the share of the national income, which goes, as he
asserts, to "labour," is avowedly the amount which, according to his
estimate, is paid to-day in America, as weekly wages to the mass of
manual labourers. To say that labour _in its more extended sense_ is the
producer of all wealth, is a mere meaningless platitude. It is to say
that there would be no wealth without effort of some kind. Does Mr.
Wilshire seriously wish us to believe that he is telling Mr. Edison that
"if he will only cast his ballot intelligently" he will be able to
treble his income at the expense of richer men?
[6] This applies to England no less than to America. Whenever any one of
the more educated amongst the socialistic agitators is taxed with
maintaining the popular doctrines of socialism with regard to labour, he
at once repudiates them, and accuses his opponents of imputing to him
and his fellows childish fallacies which no one in his senses would
maintain; but the propagation of these fallacies amongst the more
ignorant sections of the population continues just the same.
[7] According to Mr. Hillquit, Dickens, for example, made his whole
fortune by robbing his compositors.