THE JUST REWARD OF LABOUR AS ESTIMATED BY ITS ACTUAL PRODUCTS
Since the educated socialists of to-day admit that in the modern world
wealth is produced by two functionally different classes--a majority who
labour and a minority by whom this labour is directed; or by two
different faculties--namely, labour and directive ability--the question
of how much of the total product or its value is produced by one class
or agency, and how much by the other, is, for all social reformers, and
not for socialists only, a question of the first importance; for in the
minds of numbers, who care little about ideal transfigurations of
society, the doctrines of socialism leave one vivid conviction, which is
this--that, though the labourers in the modern world do not produce
everything, though the ability of those directing them is a productive
agent also, and though part of the wealth of modern nations is
undoubtedly produced by this, yet the men of ability produce much less
than they manage to keep, while the labourers produce much more than is
represented by the wages which they get; that labour in this way, even
if in no other, is suffering at present a general and intolerable wrong;
and that socialism is simply a system by which this wrong will be
righted.[18]
Now, this alleged wrong is essentially an affair of quantity. If the
products of any typical firm--one, let us say, which produces
chemicals--are represented by the number a hundred, and if fifty
represents the amount which at present is the share of labour, the rest
being taken by men of directive ability--a picked body of organisers,
chemists, and inventors--labour, it is contended, produces more than the
fifty, which is all that it at present gets. Yes; but how much more? It
is not contended that it produces the entire hundred. Does it produce,
then, sixty, or sixty-five, or seventy, or eighty-three, or what? Unless
such a wrong as this can have some extent assigned to it--unless it can
be measured approximately by reference to some intelligible standard--it
is not only difficult to deal with it; it is impossible to be sure that
it exists. Of course we are here not contemplating individual cases.
That some employés may, under existing conditions, get less than their
work is worth, is possible and likely enough. It is equally likely or
possible that others may get more. We must confine ourselves to what
happens generally. We must take labour as a whole, on the one hand, and
directive ability on the other, and ask how we may estimate, with rough
but substantial accuracy, the proportion of the joint product
respectively produced by each.
At first sight it may seem that this problem is incapable of any
definite solution; and some socialistic writers have done their best to
obscure it. The efficiency of labour, they say, is in the modern world
largely due, no doubt, to the action of directive ability; but ability
could produce nothing unless it had labour to direct; whence it is
inferred that the claim of labour on the product may in justice be
almost anything short of the absolute total. To this abstract argument
we will presently come back; but we will first examine another urged by
a celebrated thinker, which, though less extreme in its implications,
would, were it only sound, be even more fatal to our chances of arriving
at the conclusion sought for. The thinker to whom I refer is Mill, who
assigns to this argument a very prominent place in the opening chapter
of his _Principles of Political Economy_.
Certain economists have, so he says, debated "whether nature gives more
assistance to labour in one kind of industry than in another"; and he
endeavours to show that the question is in its very essence
unanswerable. "When two conditions," he proceeds, "are equally necessary
for producing the effect at all, it is unmeaning to say that so much is
produced by one, and so much by the other. It is like attempting to
decide which of the factors five and six contributes most to the
production of thirty." And if this argument is true of nature and
labour, it is equally true of labour and the ability by which labour is
directed. Thus a great ocean liner which, in Mill's language, would be
"the effect," could not be produced at all without the labour of several
thousand labourers; and it is equally true that it could not be produced
at all unless the masters of various sciences, designers, inventors, and
organisers, directed the labour of the labourers in certain specific
ways. Both conditions, then, being "necessary for producing the effect
at all," the portions of it due to each would, according to Mill's
argument, be indeterminable. Let us consider, therefore, if Mill's
argument is sound. We shall find that it is vitiated by a fallacy which
will, as soon as we have perceived it, show us the way to the truth of
which we are now in search. Let us begin with taking the argument as he
himself applies it.
He brings it forward with special reference to agriculture, and aims it
at the contention of a certain school of economists that nature in
agriculture did more than in other industries. To urge this, says Mill,
is nonsense, for the simple reason that though nature in agriculture
does something, it is impossible to determine whether the something is
relatively much or little. Let us, he says in effect, take the products
of any farm, which we may for convenience' sake symbolise as so many
loaves; and it is obviously absurd to inquire which produces most of
them--the soil or the farm labourers. The soil without the labourers
would produce no loaves at all. The labourers would produce no loaves if
they had not the soil to work upon.
Now, if there were only one farm in the world, and one grade of labour,
and if every acre of this farm, when the same labour was applied to it,
would always yield the same amount of produce--let us say one
loaf--Mill's argument would be true. The actual state of the case is,
however, very different. Acres vary very greatly in quality; and if we
take four acres of varying degrees of fertility, to all of which is
applied the same amount of labour, then, while from the worst of the
acres this labour will elicit one loaf, it will elicit from the others,
let us say, according to their degrees of fertility, two loaves, three
loaves, and four loaves respectively. Here the labour being in each of
the four cases the same, and the additional loaves resulting in three
cases only, it is obvious that the difference between the larger
products and the less is not due to the labour, but to certain
additional qualities present, in the three superior acres and not
present in the worst one. In other words, although in producing
loaves--or, as Mill describes it, "the effect"--the parts played by
labour and nature are indefinite and incommensurable so long as the
land, the labour, and the effect remain all three the same, the parts
become immediately measurable when the effect begins to vary, and one of
the causes, and only one of them, at the same time varies also.
This truth can be yet further elucidated by the very illustration which
Mill cities in disproof of it. It is absurd to ask, he says, whether the
number five or six does most, when they are multiplied together, to
produce "the effect" thirty. This is true so long as "the effect" thirty
is constant; but if on occasions the thirty is increased to forty, and
if whenever this happens the six has increased to eight, we know that
the extra ten which our multiplication yields us is not due to the five,
the number which remains unchanged, but to an extra two now present in
the number that was once six. Or again let us take as "the effect" the
speed of a motor-car which is raced over a mile of road. Unless two
conditions were present--the engine and some ground to run upon--the car
could not run at all; and if there were only one road and one car in
the world, it would be absurd to inquire how much of the speed was due
to the merits of the engine, and how much to the character of the road's
surface. But if, the car remaining unchanged, the surface of the road
was improved, and a speed was thereupon developed of thirty miles an
hour instead of twenty, we should, with regard to the increment, at once
be able to say that it was due to the surface of the road, and was not
due to the engine. Conversely, if the road were unchanged, but the car
had a new engine, and the speed under these conditions increased in the
same way, the increment would be evidently attributable to the engine
and not the road.
And the same observations apply to labour and directive ability,
whenever the operations of both are essential to a given product. If the
ability and the labour were always inevitably constant, and the product
as to quality and amount were similarly constant also, we could not say
that so much or so little of the effect was due to one cause, and so
much or so little to the other. If there were in the world only a
thousand shipwrights, and these men, working always under the same
director, always produced in a year one ship of an unchanging kind, we
could not say which of its parts or how much of its value were due to
the man directing, and which or how much were due to the men directed.
But if for one year this director were to retire and another was to take
his place, and, the same labourers being directed by this new master,
the result was the production not of one ship but of two; and if, when
the year was ended, and the old master came back again, the annual
product once more was not the two ships but one, we could then say, as a
matter of common-sense with regard to the year during which the two
vessels were built, that the second vessel, whatever might be the case
with the first, was due wholly to the ability of the master, and not to
the labour of the men. In other words, the ability of the director of
labour produces so much of the product, or of that product's value as
exceeds what was produced by the labourers before their labour was
directed by him, and would cease to be produced any longer as soon as
his direction was withdrawn.
That in the case of any result which requires separable causes for its
production, this method of allocating to these causes respectively so
much of the result and so much of it only, is a method always adopted in
all practical reasoning, may be seen by taking a result which is not
beneficial but criminal. Twenty Russian labourers, all loyal to the
Czar, are, let us say, employed to dig out a cellar under a certain
street, and to fill it with cases which ostensibly contain wine.
Subsequently, as the Czar is passing, he is killed by a huge explosion.
It then becomes apparent that the so-called cellar was a mine, and the
harmless-looking cases had really been filled with dynamite. Now, if all
those concerned in the consummation of this catastrophe were tried, it
is perfectly evident that the part played by the labourers would be
sharply discriminated from that played by the man employing them; and,
although they contributed something which was necessary to the
production of the result, it would certainly have been admitted by
General Trepoff himself that they had contributed nothing to its
essential and criminal elements. It is equally evident that the
increment of wealth which results from the obedience of labourers to
injunctions which do not emanate from themselves, is produced by the man
who gives the injunctions, and not by the men who obey them.
But here we must return to the argument, already mentioned in passing,
which may be restated thus: A thousand labourers, directed by their own
intelligence only, produce a product whose amount we will call a
thousand. The same labourers are directed by a man of ability, and the
product rises from one thousand to two. But if the production of this
second thousand is to be credited to the man of ability on the ground
that, were the ability absent, no second thousand would be produced, we
may reach by the same reasoning a conclusion precisely opposite, and
credit not only the first, but both the thousands to labour, on the
ground that, if the labour were absent, nothing would be produced at
all. The argument is plausible; and in order to understand its fallacy
we must give our attention to a fact, not generally realised, which is
involved in all practical reasoning about all causes whatsoever.
If we use the word "cause" in its strict speculative sense, the number
of causes involved in the simplest effect is infinite. Let us take, for
example, the speed of a horse which wins a race. Why does the speed of
this horse exceed that of the others? We may in answer point to
qualities of its individual organism. But these will carry us back to
all its recorded ancestors--sires and dams for a large number of
generations: and even so we shall have been taken but a small part of
our way. The remotest of these ancestors--why were they horses at all?
For our answer we must travel through the stages of organic evolution,
till we reach the point at which animal and vegetable life were one. Had
any of these antecedents been missing, the winning race-horse would not
have won the race. Nor is this all. We have to include in our causes
air, gravitation, and the fact that the earth is solid. No horse could
win on turf which was based on vapour. But by all the thousands who
witness a great race this whole mass of ulterior, though necessary,
causes is ignored. The only causes which for them have any practical
interest are those comprised in the organism of the winning horse
itself. Who would contend that this horse had not won its own victory,
on the ground that part of its own speed--a part which could not be
calculated--was contributed by the crust of the earth, or the general
constitution of the universe? Any one arguing thus would be howled down
as a madman. Now, why is this? Why would the common-sense of mankind, in
a practical matter like a race, instinctively exercise this kind of
eclecticism, concentrating itself on certain causes and absolutely
ignoring others? Such behaviour is not arbitrary. It depends on a
principle inherent in all practical reasoning whatsoever. Let us see
what this principle is.
When, with any practical purpose in view, we insist that anything is the
cause of anything else, or produces anything else, we are always
selecting, out of an incalculable number of causes, one cause or agency
which, under the circumstances in view, may or may not be present; which
a careless person may neglect to introduce; which an ignorant person may
be persuaded to take away; or a recognition of which will influence
human conduct somehow; while all other causes, which no one proposes to
take away, or which no one is able to take away, are assumed by all
parties, but they are not considered by anybody. Why should they be
considered? Not only are they so numerous that no intellect could deal
with them, but they have, since with regard to them there is no
difference of opinion, no place in any practical discussion at all. If a
ton of stone is to be placed on a piece of framework, men may reasonably
discuss whether the framework is strong enough to bear it, or whether
material is not being wasted in making it stronger than necessary. What
will happen without an additional girder? Or what will happen if we take
two girders away? Will the stone fall or not? These questions belong to
the domain of practical reasoning because to take a girder away, or else
introduce fresh ones, lies within the power of the disputants. But no
practical men would think of complicating the discussion by calculating
what would happen if they suspended the action of gravitation, in which
case the stone would need no support whatever; for to suspend the action
of gravitation is within the power of nobody. If two men are debating in
the middle of the night at midsummer whether there is enough oil in the
lamp to keep it alight till sunrise, they are debating a question of a
strictly practical kind: for it rests with them to put in more oil or
not. What will happen if they do not? That is the point at issue. But
they neither of them would debate what would happen if the movement of
the earth were retarded, and the midsummer morning were delayed till the
hour at which it dawns in winter. They do not discuss this contingency,
for they rightly assume it to be impossible, and consequently the
discussion of it would have no practical meaning.
And now let us go back to the question of labour and ability; and we
shall see, in the case of products to the production of which both are
essential, that, while ability is the practical cause of all such
amounts or values as exceed what would have been produced by labour if
there were no ability to direct it, it cannot be claimed in any similar
sense that all amounts and values are conversely produced by labour,
which exceed what would have been produced by the action of directive
ability, if no labour existed for such ability to direct.
The reason why labour, in this respect, differs from ability is as
follows: Whether directive ability shall or shall not exert itself
depends upon human volitions which, according to circumstances, are
alterable, just as it depends upon alterable human volitions whether a
framework of steel be constructed in this way or in that; or whether a
lamp be replenished with oil or no. But whether ordinary manual labour
shall or shall not exert itself, is not similarly dependent on human
volition at all. Let a nation be organised, no matter on what
principles, the majority of the citizens will have to labour in any
case. The supposition of their labouring is bound up with the
supposition of their existence. To suppose that the labourers as a whole
could permanently cease to labour, is like supposing that they could
exist and yet permanently cease to breathe. They can cease to labour for
moments, just as for moments a man can hold his breath, as they do on
the occasion of a strike; but they can do so for moments only. Except in
a region where climatic conditions are exceptional, what makes men
labour is not an employing class, but nature. Directive ability does not
_make_ them labour; it finds them labouring. It finds them like wheels
which are driven by an eternal stream, and which must turn and turn for
ever, until they fall to pieces. To inquire, then, what would happen if
labour ceased to exert itself is like inquiring what would happen if the
earth were to retard its diurnal motion, or if some natural force--for
example, that of gravitation--were to strike work for the sake of
intimidating the cause of all things. Such suppositions are for
practical purposes meaningless. But with the directive ability of the
few, as opposed to the directed labour of the many, the case is
dramatically different. For while there never can be any question of the
directive faculties of the few being left alone in a world where there
is no labour--for in the case of the majority, nature, the eternal
taskmaster, will always make labour compulsory, so long as stomachs want
food and naked backs want clothing--there constantly has been, and there
may be again, a question of whether this mass of ordinary human labour
shall find any exceptional ability so developed and so organised as to
direct it. In the earlier states of society no such ability was
operative. In savage communities it is not operative now; and there is
constantly a question, among modern civilised nations, whenever the
security of social institutions is threatened, of the action of this
faculty being temporarily suspended altogether, either because those
persons possessing it are deprived of the motives without which they
will not exert it, or else because the labourers individually, on one
ground or another, are impatient of submitting themselves to the
direction of any intelligences but their own.
In other words, when we are seeking to measure the products due
respectively to directive ability and to labour, by computing what would
happen if either of these agencies were withdrawn, the withdrawal of one
of them--that is to say, of ability--can alone be taken as possible by
any practical reasoner. We have before us practically two alternatives
only. One is a condition of things under which the exceptional ability
of the few directs and co-ordinates the labour of the average many. The
other is a condition of things under which the labour of the average
many has to exert itself with the same severe continuity, but is guided,
co-ordinated, and stimulated by none of those special faculties which
raise a few men above the general level of efficiency. When these
special faculties are applied to the direction of average labour, the
output of wealth increases. When their application is interfered with or
ceases, the output of wealth declines; and in the only practical sense
of the words "cause" or "producer," these faculties of direction, or the
exceptional persons who exercise them, are the true causes or producers
of the whole of that portion of wealth which comes into being with their
activity, and disappears or dwindles with their inaction.
The practical validity of this method of computation has been formally
recognised, though not completely understood, by some of the later
socialists themselves. Mr. Webb, for example, and his associates, have
admitted that, of the wealth of the modern world a considerable part
consists of "the rent of business ability."[19] This way of expressing
the matter is true so far as it goes. It expresses, however, one-half of
the truth only. Mr. Webb and his friends mean that, if we take the world
as it is, the products due to ability in any given industry consist of
the quantity by which the products of one firm, because it is managed by
a man of superior talent, exceed the products of another firm which
differs from the first only in the fact that it is managed by another
man whose talent is not so great. They assume as their starting-point,
in every case, the presence of directive ability sufficient to organise
the labourers in such a way that the products of the entire group shall
provide the labourers with wages which are up to a certain standard, and
a minimum of profit or of surplus values besides. This lowest grade of
ability is one of the postulates of their argument, just as in
calculating agricultural rent the first postulate of our argument is a
lowest grade of land.
Now, in connection with many questions of a more or less limited kind,
this assimilation of the products of superior ability to rent, and of
ability of a lower grade to land which is practically rentless, will
serve our purpose well enough. Between the two cases, however, there is
a vast and underlying difference; and when we consider our present
problem under its widest and most vital aspect, it is the difference,
not the likeness, between them, which constitutes our main concern. The
nature of this difference has been pointed out already. When we are
discussing rent and agriculture, land is a necessary assumption, for
unless there were land, there could be no agriculture at all; but there
can be, has been, and still is in the world, abundance of labour without
directive ability; and while it would be meaningless to ask what would
happen to rent if all land disappeared, the question of what would
happen to labour if all ability were in abeyance is precisely the
question raised by all schemes of economic revolution, and one which has
been constantly illustrated by the facts of economic history.
Of such facts we may take the following, picturesque example: In the
eighteenth century the Jesuit Fathers in Uruguay succeeded in teaching
the natives a variety of Western arts, among others that of
watch-making, and so long as the Jesuits were on the spot to direct them
the natives exhibited much manual skill. But when, owing to political
causes, the Jesuits were driven from the country, the natives sank back
into their previous industrial helplessness. The temporary efficiency of
their labour had been due to the ability that directed it; and as soon
as that ability was withdrawn, the labour, left to itself, shrank again
to its old relative inefficiency. Now, here we have a case precisely
analogous to that which we have to deal with when considering at the
present day how much of the products of any civilised nation is produced
by the labour of the average units of the population, and how much by
the ability of the exceptional men directing them. It is not a question
of how much this or that group of labourers, which is directed by a man
of the highest grade of ability, produces in excess of the products of
some similar group which is directed by another man whose ability is
somewhat inferior; it is a question of how much the same nation would
produce, if every director of other men's labour were withdrawn, and the
present labouring units left to their own devices.
These two questions, though not mutually exclusive, differ as much as
the question of why one of two balloons rises above the earth to a
height of three miles and a furlong, while a second balloon reaches the
height of three miles only, differs from the question of why either of
them rises in the air at all. Mr. Webb and his friends, with their
theory of the rent of ability, confine themselves to the first of
these--namely, the question of why one balloon rises a furlong higher
than the other. The real question which we have to deal with here is why
both balloons lift their aeronauts at least three miles into the clouds,
while other men who have no balloon to lift them can get no higher than
the top of the church steeple. Or to come back to literal fact, our
problem must be expressed thus: Let us take the present population of
Great Britain or America, and, having noted the wealth at present
annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly
qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with,
every man, who, in virtue of his assimilated scientific knowledge, his
inventive gifts, his constructive and practical imagination, his energy,
his initiative, and his natural powers of leadership, was better able to
direct others than the other nine were to direct themselves?
We cannot make this experiment in precisely the way described; but
history will provide us with equivalents which are sufficiently accurate
for our purpose. There are, for example, in the case of Great Britain,
data which have enabled statisticians with a considerable degree of
unanimity to estimate the values produced per head of the industrial
population at various periods from the reign of Charles II. till to-day,
and to reduce these values to comparable terms of money. Now, we need
not insist too much on the accuracy of the figures in question; but one
broad fact is unmistakably shown by them--that the product per head
towards the close of the nineteenth century was, to say the least of it,
from four to five times as great as it was towards the close of the
sixteenth. To what, then, was this increase in industrial productivity
due? It was not due to any change in the spontaneous workings of nature.
It can only have been due to some change in the character of human
effort--either in that of the effort of each separate manual labourer,
or else in that of the men by whom the labour of others is directed. The
average labourer, however, at the close of the nineteenth century did
not differ, as an isolated labouring unit, from the average labourer as
he was at the time of the fire of London. The increase in industrial
productivity must therefore be necessarily due to a change in the
ability of those by whom the labourers are organised and directed. And
here _a priori_ reasoning is confirmed by actual facts, for the change
which has taken place in the class which directs the labour of others
has been, during the period in question, of the most notorious and
astonishing kind. That class had been progressively absorbing into
itself, and concentrating on the conduct of industry, ambitions,
intelligences, and strong practical wills, which formerly found their
outlets in very different channels--ecclesiastical, political, and more
especially military. Man for man, then, industry became more productive,
because to an increasing degree the ablest men of the nation
concentrated their exceptional powers on directing the business of
production; and any one who wished to push things to an extreme
conclusion might contend that the entire amount--some four or five
hundred per cent.--by which the product per head in the year 1880
exceeded the product per head some two hundred years before, was due to
directive ability, and directive ability only; and that the labourers,
in their capacity of labourers, had no claim whatsoever to it. We will,
however, put the case in a much more moderate form. We will, for
argument's sake, concede to self-directed labour all that increase in
the values produced per head, which took place between the time of
Charles II. and the general establishment in Great Britain of the modern
industrial system, with its huge mills and factories, and its
concomitant differentiation of the directing class from the directed--an
event which had been securely accomplished at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. In making this concession, we shall, indeed, be
defying fact, and ignoring the improvements, alike in manufacture and
agriculture, which had taken place during the hundred years preceding,
especially during the last fifty of them, and which were solely due to
a minority of exceptionally able men.[20] We shall thus be conceding to
the labourer far more than his due. Certainly no one can contend that we
concede too little.
Let us take, then, the beginning of the nineteenth century as our
standing-point; and, assuming that labour was the sole producer then,
compare its productivity per head with the productivity of industrial
effort--of labour and ability combined--some eight or nine decades
later. The labourers of Great Britain as a body, to the exclusion of all
other classes, actually divided among themselves, about the year 1880,
more wealth per head--something like forty-five per cent.--than would
have been theirs if they had lived in the days of their own
grandfathers, and been able to appropriate as wages the income of the
entire country.
Let us, then, repeat the question which we asked just now. Where has
this addition to the income of labour come from? That part of it is
attributable to ability--the ability of the Watts, the Stephensons, the
Arkwrights, the Bessemers, the Edisons, and so forth--nobody in his
senses will deny. Can it be said that any of it is attributable to
labour? The period now under consideration is so brief that this
question is not hard to answer. It can easily be shown that man, as a
labourer skilled or unskilled, has acquired individually no new
efficiencies since--to say the least of it--the days of the Greeks and
Romans. An ancient gem-engraver would to-day be eminent among modern
craftsmen. The implements of the Roman surgeons, the proportional
compasses used by the Roman architects, the force-pumps and taps used in
the Roman houses--all things that could be produced by a man directing
his own muscles--were produced in the Rome of Nero as perfectly as they
could be produced to-day. To this fact our museums bear ample and minute
witness; while the Colosseum and the Parthenon are quite enough to show
that the masons of the ancient world were at least the equals of our
own. If no advance, then, in the quality of manual labour as such has
taken place in the course of two thousand years, it is idle to contend
that its powers have increased in the course of eighty. But a still more
remarkable proof that they actually have not done so, and that no such
increase has contributed to the increase of modern wealth, is supplied
by events belonging to these eighty years themselves. I refer to the
policy pursued by the trade-unions of reducing the practical efficiency
of all their members alike to the level which can be reached by those of
them who are least active and dexterous. Bricklayers, for example, are
forbidden by the English unions to lay, in a given time, more than a
certain number of bricks, though by many of them this number could be
doubled, and by some trebled, with ease. Now, although, from the point
of view of those bodies who adopt it, such a policy has many advantages,
and is perhaps a tactical necessity, this levelling down of labour to
the minimum of individual efficiency is denounced by many critics as a
prelude to industrial suicide, and the alarm which these persons feel is
doubtless intelligible enough. It is, however, largely superfluous. The
levelling process in question must of course involve a certain amount of
waste; but its effect on production as a whole is under most
circumstances inappreciable. Building as a whole is not checked by the
fact that the best bricklayers may do no more than the worst. All kinds
of commodities are multiplied, improved, and cheapened, while thousands
of the operatives whose labour is involved in their production are
allowed to attend to but one machine, when they might easily attend to
three. In a word, while the unions have been doing their effective best
to keep labour, as a productive agent, stationary, or even to diminish
its efficiency, the product of industry as a whole exhibits an unchecked
increase. And what is the explanation of this? Little as the
trade-unions realise the fact themselves, their own policy is an
object-lesson which supplies us with the simple answer. The answer is
that the increase of modern wealth--certainly its increase during the
past eighty years--has not been due to any change in the efficiency of
labour at all; that labour is merely a unit which directive ability
multiplies; that if in the year 1800 labour produced everything, and
its total products then be expressed by the number five, the products of
the industrial population would be five per head still, if ability, as a
multiplying number, successively expressible by two and three and four,
had not increased the quotient to ten, fifteen, and twenty; ability thus
being the producer, not indeed of the five with which we start, but of
all the increasing differences between this and the larger numbers.
To return then to definite facts, since in the year 1800 an equal
division of all the wealth of Great Britain would have yielded to each
family an income of eighty pounds, and since eighty years later an equal
division of the total which was actually appropriated as wages by
wage-paid labour alone, would have yielded to each labourer's family
some twenty-five pounds in addition, the labouring class as a whole in
Great Britain to-day, instead of receiving less than its labour
produces, receives on the lowest computation from thirty to thirty-three
per cent. more. Or, to put the matter otherwise, more than a fourth of
its present income is drawn from a fund which would cease to have any
existence if it were not for the continued activity of a specially
gifted class, by whose brains the data of science are being constantly
remastered and re-assimilated, and by whose energy they are applied to
the minds and muscles of the many from the earliest hour of each working
day to the latest. And what is true labour, its products, and receipts
in Great Britain, is broadly true of them in America and all other
countries also, where modern capitalism has arrived at the same stage of
development.
We are, let me say once more, not here contemplating individual cases.
Of the total wage-fund divided among the labourers in any given country,
too much may be given to some men, and too little to others; but of
every million pounds which a million of such men receive, some two
hundred and fifty thousand are distributed well or ill, which have not
been produced by the efforts of these men themselves, but are due to the
efforts of a class which is definitely outside their own.[21] If, then,
it is contended that the just reward of labour is that total of wealth
which labour itself produces, the idea that labour, in respect of its
pecuniary remuneration, is, under present conditions, the victim of any
general wrong, is so far from having any justification in fact that it
only touches fact at all by representing a direct inversion of it.
Labour, as a whole, does not, under existing conditions, get less than
it produces.[22] It gets a very great deal more. If, therefore, the
claims of labour are based on, and limited to, the amount of wealth
which is produced by labour itself--that is to say, the total which it
would now produce were the faculties of the directing and organising
minority paralysed--what labour, thus appropriating the entire product,
would receive, would be far less, not more, than what it actually
receives to-day. Instead of defrauding it of any part of its due, the
existing system is treating it with an extreme and even wanton
generosity.
Is it, then, here contended, many readers will ask, that if matters are
determined by ideal justice, or anything like practical wisdom, the
remuneration of labour in general ought henceforth to be lessened, or at
all events precluded from any possibility of increase? Is it contended
that the employing and directing class should attempt or even desire to
take back from those directed by it every increment of wealth possessed
by them which is not produced by themselves? If any one thinks that such
is the conclusion which is here suggested, let him suspend his opinion
until, as we shall do in another chapter, we return to the subject and
deal with it in a more comprehensive way. Our conclusion, as for the
moment we must now be content to leave it, is not that the labourers
have not a claim, practically valid, to the only portion of their income
which has any tendency to grow, but merely that they should understand
the source from which this portion is drawn--a source which consists of
the efforts of other men, not of their own.
And now, before we return to this particular question, we will go on to
deal with another which to a certain extent overlaps it, but is narrower
in its compass, and seems, for that very reason, to many minds of
greater practical moment. I mean the question of interest, or the income
which comes to its recipients without any necessary effort on their own
part to correspond to it.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] I met an interesting embodiment of this mood of mind in America, in
the person of a slim young man, well-dressed, well-educated, refined in
his speech and manners, who worked as a clerk or accountant in some
large financial house. To my great astonishment he introduced himself to
me as a socialist. "I don't believe like Marx," he said, "that labour
produces everything, but I maintain that the task-work of the employed
and directed labourer, of whatever grade--whether he uses a pen or a
chisel--is always worth more than the wages which the employers pay him
for performing it. I feel this myself with regard to my own firm. Month
by month I am worth to it more than the sums it gives me. This," he went
on, with an odd gleam in his eyes, "is what I may not endure to think
of--that others should be always appropriating values which I have
produced myself; and nine out of ten of the men who become socialists,
do so because they feel as I do about this particular point."
[19] General Walker also seeks to assimilate the product of ability to
rent; and my criticism of Mr. Webb in this respect applies to him also.
General Walker's book was mentioned frequently in connection with my
late addresses in America; and it was said by one or two critics that I
had borrowed from, and ought to have acknowledged my debt to, him. As a
matter of fact, I never saw his book till after my return to England,
when I read it with interest and admiration. His doctrines with regard
to the _entrepreneur_ is, so far as it goes, fundamentally identical
with the main argument of this volume. My criticism of him would be that
he does not give to this particular part of his doctrine the foremost
place which logically belongs to it; and that though attributing to the
_entrepreneur_ some special productive faculty distinct from labour, he
starts his work with re-enumerating the old doctrine that labour,
capital, and law are the only factors in production.
[20] For example, the silk factory at Derby, erected by Lombe, in the
reign of George II., the machinery of which comprised 26,000 wheels.
[21] These figures represent less than the truth. They are merely given
in order to indicate the general character of the situation to-day, as
compared with that of an earlier, but still comparatively recent period.
To go into details minutely would involve extensive and here needless
discussion.
[22] A letter was sent me by a friend in America, from a writer who,
commenting on my late addresses in that country, said that in the main
he entirely agreed with my arguments, as against socialism; but that he
could not divest himself of the belief that labour as a whole got less
than it produced, and was thus as a whole suffering a chronic wrong. He
suggested, however, a method, fundamentally analogous to that set forth
in the text, of computing what labour, as such, does produce in reality.
He gave his own opinion as to actual facts, as an impression merely; but
how misleading impressions may be can be seen from his statements "that
all _very great_ fortunes, at all events, must be derived from the
underpayment of labour." Had he only considered the case in detail, he
would have seen that labour received the highest wages from some of the
richest employers. According to his theory the wages of labour, in such
cases, would touch the minimum.