wasteful and industrially inefficient. That may be granted, but it does
not serve to explain the popular discontent, because the popular
opinion, in which the discontent resides, does notoriously not favor
that view. They further urge that the existing system is unjust, in that
it gives an advantage to one man over another. That contention may also
be true, but it is in itself no explanation, for it is true only if it
be granted that the institutions which make this advantage of one man
over another possible are unjust, and that is begging the question. This
last contention is, however, not so far out of line with popular
sentiment. The advantage complained of lies, under modern conditions, in
the possession of property, and there is a feeling abroad that the
existing order of things affords an undue advantage to property,
especially to owners of property whose possessions rise much above a
certain rather indefinite average. This feeling of injured justice is
not always distinguishable from envy; but it is, at any rate, a factor
that works towards a leveling policy. With it goes a feeling of slighted
manhood, which works in the same direction. Both these elements are to a
great extent of a subjective origin. They express themselves in the
general, objective form, but it is safe to say that on the average they
spring from a consciousness of disadvantage and slight suffered by the
person expressing them, and by persons whom he classes with himself. No
flippancy is intended in saying that the rich are not so generally
alive to the necessity of any leveling policy as are people of slender
means. Any question as to the legitimacy of the dissatisfaction, on
moral grounds, or even on grounds of expediency, is not very much to the
point; the question is as to its scope and its chances of persistence.
The modern industrial system is based on the institution of private
property under free competition, and it cannot be claimed that these
institutions have heretofore worked to the detriment of the material
interests of the average member of society. The ground of discontent
cannot lie in a disadvantageous comparison of the present with the past,
so far as material interests are concerned. It is notorious, and,
practically, none of the agitators deny, that the system of industrial
competition, based on private property, has brought about, or has at
least co-existed with, the most rapid advance in average wealth and
industrial efficiency that the world has seen. Especially can it fairly
be claimed that the result of the last few decades of our industrial
development has been to increase greatly the creature comforts within
the reach of the average human being. And, decidedly, the result has
been an amelioration of the lot of the less favored in a relatively
greater degree than that of those economically more fortunate. The claim
that the system of competition has proved itself an engine for making
the rich richer and the poor poorer has the fascination of epigram; but
if its meaning is that the lot of the average, of the masses of humanity
in civilised life, is worse to-day, as measured in the means of
livelihood, than it was twenty, or fifty, or a hundred years ago, then
it is farcical. The cause of discontent must be sought elsewhere than in
any increased difficulty in obtaining the means of subsistence or of
comfort. But there is a sense in which the aphorism is true, and in it
lies at least a partial explanation of the unrest which our conservative
people so greatly deprecate. The existing system has not made, and does
not tend to make, the industrious poor poorer as measured absolutely in
means of livelihood; but it does tend to make them relatively poorer, in
their own eyes, as measured in terms of comparative economic importance,
and, curious as it may seem at first sight, that is what seems to count.
It is not the abjectly poor that are oftenest heard protesting; and when
a protest is heard in their behalf it is through spokesmen who are from
outside their own class, and who are not delegated to speak for them.
They are not a negligible element in the situation, but the unrest which
is ground for solicitude does not owe its importance to them. The
protest comes from those who do not habitually, or of necessity, suffer
physical privation. The qualification "of necessity," is to be noticed.
There is a not inconsiderable amount of physical privation suffered by
many people in this country, which is not physically necessary. The
cause is very often that what might be the means of comfort is diverted
to the purpose of maintaining a decent appearance, or even a show of
luxury.
Man as we find him to-day has much regard to his good fame--to his
standing in the esteem of his fellowmen. This characteristic he always
has had, and no doubt always will have. This regard for reputation may
take the noble form of a striving after a good name; but the existing
organisation of society does not in any way preeminently foster that
line of development. Regard for one's reputation means, in the average
of cases, emulation. It is a striving to be, and more immediately to be
thought to be, better than one's neighbor. Now, modern society, the
society in which competition without prescription is predominant, is
preeminently an industrial, economic society, and it is
industrial--economic--excellence that most readily attracts the
approving regard of that society. Integrity and personal worth will, of
course, count for something, now as always; but in the case of a person
of moderate pretentions and opportunities, such as the average of us
are, one's reputation for excellence in this direction does not
penetrate far enough into the very wide environment to which a person is
exposed in modern society to satisfy even a very modest craving for
respectability. To sustain one's dignity--and to sustain one's
self-respect--under the eyes of people who are not socially one's
immediate neighbors, it is necessary to display the token of economic
worth, which practically coincides pretty closely with economic success.
A person may be well-born and virtuous, but those attributes will not
bring respect to the bearer from people who are not aware of his
possessing them, and these are ninety-nine out of every one hundred that
one meets. Conversely, by the way, knavery and vulgarity in any person
are not reprobated by people who know nothing of the person's
shortcomings in those respects.
In our fundamentally industrial society a person should be economically
successful, if he would enjoy the esteem of his fellowmen. When we say
that a man is "worth" so many dollars, the expression does not convey
the idea that moral or other personal excellence is to be measured in
terms of money, but it does very distinctly convey the idea that the
fact of his possessing many dollars is very much to his credit. And,
except in cases of extraordinary excellence, efficiency in any direction
which is not immediately of industrial importance, and does not redound
to a person's economic benefit, is not of great value as a means of
respectability. Economic success is in our day the most widely accepted
as well as the most readily ascertainable measure of esteem. All this
will hold with still greater force of a generation which is born into a
world already encrusted with this habit of a mind.
But there is a further, secondary stage in the development of this
economic emulation. It is not enough to possess the talisman of
industrial success. In order that it may mend one's good fame
efficiently, it is necessary to display it. One does not "make much of a
showing" in the eyes of the large majority of the people whom one meets
with, except by unremitting demonstration of ability to pay. That is
practically the only means which the average of us have of impressing
our respectability on the many to whom we are personally unknown, but
whose transient good opinion we would so gladly enjoy. So it comes about
that the appearance of success is very much to be desired, and is even
in many cases preferred to the substance. We all know how nearly
indispensable it is to afford whatever expenditure other people with
whom we class ourselves can afford, and also that it is desirable to
afford a little something more than others.
This element of human nature has much to do with the "standard of
living." And it is of a very elastic nature, capable of an indefinite
extension. After making proper allowance for individual exceptions and
for the action of prudential restraints, it may be said, in a general
way, that this emulation in expenditure stands ever ready to absorb any
margin of income that remains after ordinary physical wants and comforts
have been provided for, and, further, that it presently becomes as hard
to give up that part of one's habitual "standard of living" which is due
to the struggle for respectability, as it is to give up many physical
comforts. In a general way, the need of expenditure in this direction
grows as fast as the means of satisfying it, and, in the long run, a
large expenditure comes no nearer satisfying the desire than a smaller
one.
It comes about through the working of this principle that even the
creature comforts, which are in themselves desirable, and, it may even
be, requisite to a life on a passably satisfactory plane, acquire a
value as a means of respectability quite independent of, and out of
proportion to, their simple utility as a means of livelihood. As we are
all aware, the chief element of value in many articles of apparel is not
their efficiency for protecting the body, but for protecting the
wearer's respectability; and that not only in the eyes of one's
neighbors but even in one's own eyes. Indeed, it happens not very rarely
that a person chooses to go ill-clad in order to be well dressed. Much
more than half the value of what is worn by the American people may
confidently be put down to the element of "dress," rather than to that
of "clothing." And the chief motive of dress is emulation--"economic
emulation." The like is true, though perhaps in a less degree, of what
goes to food and shelter.
This misdirection of effort through the cravings of human vanity is of
course not anything new, nor is "economic emulation" a modern fact. The
modern system of industry has not invented emulation, nor has even this
particular form of emulation originated under that system. But the
system of free competition has accentuated this form of emulation, both
by exalting the industrial activity of man above the rank which it held
under more primitive forms of social organisation, and by in great
measure cutting off other forms of emulation from the chance of
efficiently ministering to the craving for a good fame. Speaking
generally and from the standpoint of the average man, the modern
industrial organization of society has practically narrowed the scope of
emulation to this one line; and at the same time it has made the means
of sustenance and comfort so much easier to obtain as very materially to
widen the margin of human exertion that can be devoted to purposes of
emulation. Further, by increasing the freedom of movement of the
individual and widening the environment to which the individual is
exposed--increasing the number of persons before whose eyes each one
carries on his life, and, _pari passu_, decreasing the chances which
such persons have of awarding their esteem on any other basis than that
of immediate appearances, it has increased the relative efficiency of
the economic means of winning respect through a show of expenditure for
personal comforts.
It is not probable that further advance in the same direction will lead
to a different result in the immediate future; and it is the _immediate_
future we have to deal with. A further advance in the efficiency of our
industry, and a further widening of the human environment to which the
individual is exposed, should logically render emulation in this
direction more intense. There are, indeed, certain considerations to be
set off against this tendency, but they are mostly factors of slow
action, and are hardly of sufficient consequence to reverse the general
rule. On the whole, other things remaining the same, it must be admitted
that, within wide limits, the easier the conditions of physical life for
modern civilised man become, and the wider the horizon of each and the
extent of the personal contact of each with his fellowmen, and the
greater the opportunity of each to compare notes with his fellows, the
greater will be the preponderance of economic success as a means of
emulation, and the greater the straining after economic respectability.
Inasmuch as the aim of emulation is not any absolute degree of comfort
or of excellence, no advance in the average well-being of the community
can end the struggle or lessen the strain. A general amelioration cannot
quiet the unrest whose source is the craving of everybody to compare
favorably with his neighbor.
Human nature being what it is, the struggle of each to possess more than
his neighbor is inseparable from the institution of private property.
And also, human nature being what it is, one who possesses less will, on
the average, be jealous of the one who possesses more; and "more" means
not more than the average share, but more than the share of the person
who makes the comparison. The criterion of complacency is, largely, the
_de facto_ possession or enjoyment; and the present growth of sentiment
among the body of the people--who possess less--favors, in a vague way,
a readjustment adverse to the interests of those who possess more, and
adverse to the possibility of legitimately possessing or enjoying
"more"; that is to say, the growth of sentiment favors a socialistic
movement. The outcome of modern industrial development has been, so far
as concerns the present purpose, to intensify emulation and the jealousy
that goes with emulation, and to focus the emulation and the jealousy on
the possession and enjoyment of material goods. The ground of the unrest
with which we are concerned is, very largely, jealousy,--envy, if you
choose; and the ground of this particular form of jealousy, that makes
for socialism, is to be found in the institution of private property.
With private property, under modern conditions, this jealousy and unrest
are unavoidable.
The corner-stone of the modern industrial system is the institution of
private property. That institution is also the objective point of all
attacks upon the existing system of competitive industry, whether open
or covert, whether directed against the system as a whole or against
any special feature of it. It is, moreover, the ultimate ground--and,
under modern conditions, necessarily so--of the unrest and discontent
whose proximate cause is the struggle for economic respectability. The
inference seems to be that, human nature being what it is, there can be
no peace from this--it must be admitted--ignoble form of emulation, or
from the discontent that goes with it, this side of the abolition of
private property. Whether a larger measure of peace is in store for us
after that event shall have come to pass, is of course not a matter to
be counted on, nor is the question immediately to the point.
This economic emulation is of course not the sole motive, nor the most
important feature, of modern industrial life; although it is in the
foreground, and it pervades the structure of modern society more
thoroughly perhaps than any other equally powerful moral factor. It
would be rash to predict that socialism will be the inevitable outcome
of a continued development of this emulation and the discontent which it
fosters, and it is by no means the purpose of this paper to insist on
such an inference. The most that can be claimed is that this emulation
is one of the causes, if not the chief cause, of the existing unrest and
dissatisfaction with things as they are; that this unrest is inseparable
from the existing system of industrial organisation; and that the growth
of popular sentiment under the influence of these conditions is
necessarily adverse to the institution of private property, and
therefore adverse to the existing industrial system of free competition.
* * * * *
The emulation to which attention has been called in the preceding
section of this paper is not only a fact of importance to an
understanding of the unrest that is urging us towards an untried path in
social development, but it has also a bearing on the question of the
practicability of any scheme for the complete nationalisation of
industry. Modern industry has developed to such a degree of efficiency
as to make the struggle of subsistence alone, under average conditions,
relatively easy, as compared with the state of the case a few
generations ago. As I have labored to show, the modern competitive
system has at the same time given the spirit of emulation such a
direction that the attainment of subsistence and comfort no longer
fixes, even approximately, the limit of the required aggregate labor on
the part of the community. Under modern conditions the struggle for
existence has, in a very appreciable degree, been transformed into a
struggle to keep up appearances. The ultimate ground of this struggle to
keep up appearance by otherwise unnecessary expenditure, is the
institution of private property. Under a regime which should allow no
inequality of acquisition or of income, this form of emulation, which is
due to the possibility of such inequality, would also tend to become
obsolete. With the abolition of private property, the characteristic of
human nature which now finds its exercise in this form of emulation,
should logically find exercise in other, perhaps nobler and socially
more serviceable, activities; it is at any rate not easy to imagine it
running into any line of action more futile or less worthy of human
effort.
Supposing the standard of comfort of the community to remain
approximately at its present average, the abolition of the struggle to
keep up economic appearances would very considerably lessen the
aggregate amount of labor required for the support of the community. How
great a saving of labor might be effected is not easy to say. I believe
it is within the mark to suppose that the struggle to keep up
appearances is chargeable, directly and indirectly, with one-half the
aggregate labor, and abstinence from labor--for the standard of
respectability requires us to shun labor as well as to enjoy the fruits
of it--on part of the American people. This does not mean that the same
community, under a system not allowing private property, could make its
way with half the labor we now put forth; but it means something more or
less nearly approaching that. Any one who has not seen our modern social
life from this point of view will find the claim absurdly extravagant,
but the startling character of the proposition will wear off with longer
and closer attention to this aspect of the facts of everyday life. But
the question of the exact amount of waste due to this factor is
immaterial. It will not be denied that is is a fact of considerable
magnitude, and that is all that the argument requires.
It is accordingly competent for the advocates of the nationalisation of
industry and property to claim that even if their scheme of organisation
should prove less effective for production of goods than the present, as
measured absolutely in terms of the aggregate output of our industry,
yet the community might readily be maintained at the present average
standard of comfort. The required aggregate output of the nation's
industry would be considerably less than at present, and there would
therefore be less necessity for that close and strenuous industrial
organisation and discipline of the members of society under the new
regime, whose evils unfriendly critics are apt to magnify. The chances
of practicability for the scheme should logically be considerably
increased by this lessening of the necessity for severe application. The
less irksome and exacting the new regime, the less chance of a reversion
to the earlier system.
Under such a social order, where common labor would no longer be a mark
of peculiar economic necessity and consequent low economic rank on part
of the laborer, it is even conceivable that labor might practically come
to assume that character of nobility in the eyes of society at large,
which it now sometimes assumes in the speculations of the well-to-do, in
their complacent moods. Much has sometimes been made of this possibility
by socialist speculators, but the inference has something of a utopian
look, and no one, certainly, is entitled to build institutions for the
coming social order on this dubious ground.
What there seems to be ground for claiming is that a society which has
reached our present degree of industrial efficiency would not go into
the Socialist or Nationalist state with as many chances of failure as a
community whose industrial development is still at the stage at which
strenuous labor on the part of nearly all members is barely sufficient
to make both ends meet.
In Mr. Spencer's essay, in conformity with the line of argument of his
"Principles of Sociology," it is pointed out that, as the result of
constantly operative social forces, all social systems, as regards the
form of organisation, fall into the one or the other of Sir Henry
Maine's two classes--the system of status or the system of contract. In
accordance with this generalisation it is concluded that whenever the
modern system of contract or free competition shall be displaced, it
will necessarily be replaced by the only other known system--that of
status; the type of which is the military organisation, or, also, a
hierarchy, or a bureaucracy. It is something after the fashion of the
industrial organisation of ancient Peru that Mr. Spencer pictures as the
inevitable sequel of the demise of the existing competitive system.
Voluntary cooeperation can be replaced only by compulsory cooeperation,
which is identified with the system of status and defined as the
subjection of man to his fellow-man.
Now, at least as a matter of speculation, this is not the only
alternative. These two systems, of status, or prescription, and of
contract, or competition, have divided the field of social organisation
between them in some proportion or other in the past. Mr. Spencer has
shown that, very generally, where human progress in its advanced stages
has worked towards the amelioration of the lot of the average member of
society, the movement has been away from the system of status and
towards the system of contract. But there is at least one, if not more
than one exception to the rule, as concerns the recent past. The latest
development of the industrial organisation among civilised
nations--perhaps in an especial degree in the case of the American
people--has not been entirely a continuation of the approach to a regime
of free contract. It is also, to say the least, very doubtful if the
movement has been towards a regime of status, in the sense in which Sir
Henry Maine uses the term. This is especially evident in the case of the
great industries which we call "natural monopolies"; and it is to be
added that the present tendency is for a continually increasing
proportion of the industrial activities of the community to fall into
the category of "natural monopolies." No revolution has been achieved;
the system of competition has not been discarded, but the course of
industrial development is not in the direction of an extension of that
system at all points; nor does the principle of status always replace
that of competition wherever the latter fails.
The classification of methods of social organisation under the two heads
of status or of contract, is not logically exhaustive. There is nothing
in the meaning of the terms employed which will compel us to say that
whenever man escapes from the control of his fellow man, under a system
of status, he thereby falls into a system of free contract. There is a
conceivable escape from the dilemma, and it is this conceivable, though
perhaps impracticable, escape from both these systems that the socialist
agitator wishes to effect. An acquaintance with the aims and position of
the more advanced and consistent advocates of a new departure leaves no
doubt but that the principles of contract and of status, both, are in
substance familiar to their thoughts--though often in a vague and
inadequate form--and that they distinctly repudiate both. This is
perhaps less true of those who take the socialist position mainly on
ethical grounds.
As bearing on this point it may be remarked that while the industrial
system, in the case of all communities with whose history we are
acquainted, has always in the past been organised according to a scheme
of status or of contract, or of the two combined in some proportion, yet
the social organisation has not in all cases developed along the same
lines, so far as concerns such social functions as are not primarily
industrial. Especially is this true of the later stages in the
development of those communities whose institutions we are accustomed to
contemplate with the most complacency, _e.g._, the case of the
English-speaking peoples. The whole system of modern constitutional
government in its latest developed forms, in theory at least, and, in a
measure, in practice, does not fall under the head of either contract or
status. It is the analogy of modern constitutional government through an
impersonal law and impersonal institutions, that comes nearest doing
justice to the vague notions of our socialist propagandists. It is true,
some of the most noted among them are fond of the analogy of the
military organisation, as a striking illustration of one feature of the
system they advocate, but that must after all be taken as an _obiter
dictum_.
Further, as to the manner of the evolution of existing institutions and
their relation to the two systems spoken of. So far as concerns the
communities which have figured largely in the civilised world, the
political organisation has had its origin in a military system of
government. So, also, has the industrial organisation. But while the
development of industry, during its gradual escape from the military
system of status, has been, at least until lately, in the direction of a
system of free contract, the development of the political organisation,
so far as it has escaped from the regime of status, has not been in that
direction. The system of status is a system of subjection to personal
authority,--of prescription and class distinctions, and privileges and
immunities; the system of constitutional government, especially as seen
at its best among a people of democratic traditions and habits of mind,
is a system of subjection to the will of the social organism, as
expressed in an impersonal law. This difference between the system of
status and the "constitutional system" expresses a large part of the
meaning of the boasted free institutions of the English-speaking people.
Here, subjection is not to the person of the public functionary, but to
the powers vested in him. This has, of course, something of the ring of
latter-day popular rhetoric, but it is after all felt to be true, not
only speculatively, but in some measure also in practice.
The right of eminent domain and the power to tax, as interpreted under
modern constitutional forms, indicate something of the direction of
development of the political functions of society at a point where they
touch the province of the industrial system. It is along the line
indicated by these and kindred facts that the socialists are advancing;
and it is along this line that the later developments made necessary by
the exigencies of industry under modern conditions are also moving. The
aim of the propagandists is to sink the industrial community in the
political community; or perhaps better, to identify the two
organisations; but always with insistence on the necessity of making the
political organisation, in some further developed form, the ruling and
only one in the outcome. Distinctly, the system of contract is to be
done away with; and equally distinctly, no system of status is to take
its place.
All this is pretty vague, and of a negative character, but it would
quickly pass the limits of legitimate inference from the accepted
doctrines of the socialists if it should attempt to be anything more. It
does not have much to say as to the practicability of any socialist
scheme. As a matter of speculation, there seems to be an escape from the
dilemma insisted on by Mr. Spencer. We may conceivably have nationalism
without status and without contract. In theory, both principles are
entirely obnoxious to that system. The practical question, as to whether
modern society affords the materials out of which an industrial
structure can be erected on a system different from either of these, is
a problem of constructive social engineering which calls for a
consideration of details far too comprehensive to be entered on here.
Still, in view of the past course of development of character and
institutions on the part of the people to which we belong, it is perhaps
not extravagant to claim that no form of organisation which should
necessarily eventuate in a thorough-going system of status could endure
among us. The inference from this proposition may be, either that a near
approach to nationalisation of industry would involve a regime of
status, a bureaucracy, which would be unendurable, and which would
therefore drive us back to the present system before it had been
entirely abandoned; or that the nationalisation would be achieved with
such a measure of success, in conformity with the requirements of our
type of character, as would make it preferable to what we had left
behind. In either case the ground for alarm does not seem so serious as
is sometimes imagined.
A reversion to the system of free competition, after it had been in
large part discarded, would no doubt be a matter of great practical
difficulty, and the experiment which should demonstrate the necessity of
such a step might involve great waste and suffering, and might seriously
retard the advance of the race toward something better than our present
condition; but neither a permanent deterioration of human society, nor a
huge catastrophe, is to be confidently counted on as the outcome of the
movement toward nationalisation, even if it should prove necessary for
society to retrace its steps.
It is conceivable that the application of what may be called the
"constitutional method" to the organisation of industry--for that is
essentially what the advocates of Nationalisation demand--would result
in a course of development analogous to what has taken place in the case
of the political organisation under modern constitutional forms. Modern
constitutional government--the system of modern free institutions--is by
no means an unqualified success, in the sense of securing to each the
rights and immunities which in theory are guaranteed to him.
Our modern republics have hardly given us a foretaste of that political
millennium whereof they proclaim the fruition. The average human nature
is as yet by no means entirely fit for self-government according to the
"constitutional method." Shortcomings are visible at every turn. These
shortcomings are grave enough to furnish serious arguments against the
practicability of our free institutions. On the continent of Europe the
belief seems to be at present in the ascendant that man must yet, for a
long time, remain under the tutelage of absolutism before he shall be
fit to organise himself into an autonomous political body. The belief is
not altogether irrational. Just how great must be the advance of society
and just what must be the character of the advance, preliminary to its
advantageously assuming the autonomous--republican--form of political
organisation, must be admitted to be an open question. Whether we, or
any people, have yet reached the required stage of the advance is also
questioned by many. But the partial success which has attended the
movement in this direction, among the English-speaking people for
example, goes very far towards proving that the point in the development
of human character at which the constitutional method may be
advantageously adopted in the political field, lies far this side the
point at which human nature shall have become completely adapted for
that method. That is to say, it does not seem necessary, as regards the
functions of society which we are accustomed to call political, to be
entirely ready for nationalisation before entering upon it. How far the
analogy of this will hold when applied to the industrial organisation of
society is difficult to say, but some significance the analogy must be
admitted to possess.
Certainly, the fact that constitutional government--the nationalisation
of political functions--seems to have been a move in the right direction
is not to be taken as proof of the advisability of forthwith
nationalising the industrial functions. At the same time this fact does
afford ground for the claim that a movement in this direction may prove
itself in some degree advantageous, even if it takes place at a stage
in the development of human nature at which mankind is still far from
being entirely fit for the duties which the new system shall impose. The
question, therefore, is not whether we have reached the perfection of
character which would be necessary in order to a perfect working of the
scheme of nationalisation of industry, but whether we have reached such
a degree of development as would make an imperfect working of the scheme
possible.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Reprinted by permission from the _Annals of American Academy of
Political and Social Science_, Vol. II, 1892.
[2] Introductory paper of _A Plea for Liberty_; edited by Thomas Mackay.
THE SOCIALIST ECONOMICS OF KARL MARX AND HIS FOLLOWERS[1]
I. THE THEORIES OF KARL MARX
The system of doctrines worked out by Marx is characterised by a certain
boldness of conception and a great logical consistency. Taken in detail,
the constituent elements of the system are neither novel nor
iconoclastic, nor does Marx at any point claim to have discovered
previously hidden facts or to have invented recondite formulations of
facts already known; but the system as a whole has an air of originality
and initiative such as is rarely met with among the sciences that deal
with any phase of human culture. How much of this distinctive character
the Marxian system owes to the personal traits of its creator is not
easy to say, but what marks it off from all other systems of economic
theory is not a matter of personal idiosyncrasy. It differs
characteristically from all systems of theory that had preceded it, both
in its premises and in its aims. The (hostile) critics of Marx have not
sufficiently appreciated the radical character of his departure in both
of these respects, and have, therefore, commonly lost themselves in a
tangled scrutiny of supposedly abstruse details; whereas those writers
who have been in sympathy with his teachings have too commonly been
disciples bent on exegesis and on confirming their fellow-disciples in
the faith.
Except as a whole and except in the light of its postulates and aims,
the Marxian system is not only not tenable, but it is not even
intelligible. A discussion of a given isolated feature of the system
(such as the theory of value) from the point of view of classical
economics (such as that offered by Boehm-Bawerk) is as futile as a
discussion of solids in terms of two dimensions.
Neither as regards his postulates and preconceptions nor as regards the
aim of his inquiry is Marx's position an altogether single-minded one.
In neither respect does his position come of a single line of
antecedents. He is of no single school of philosophy, nor are his ideals
those of any single group of speculators living before his time. For
this reason he takes his place as an originator of a school of thought
as well as the leader of a movement looking to a practical end.
As to the motives which drive him and the aspirations which guide him,
in destructive criticism and in creative speculation alike, he is
primarily a theoretician busied with the analysis of economic phenomena
and their organisation into a consistent and faithful system of
scientific knowledge; but he is, at the same time, consistently and
tenaciously alert to the bearing which each step in the progress of his
theoretical work has upon the propaganda. His work has, therefore, an
air of bias, such as belongs to an advocate's argument; but it is not,
therefore, to be assumed, nor indeed to be credited, that his
propagandist aims have in any substantial way deflected his inquiry or
his speculations from the faithful pursuit of scientific truth. His
socialistic bias may color his polemics, but his logical grasp is too
neat and firm to admit of any bias, other than that of his metaphysical
preconceptions, affecting his theoretical work.
There is no system of economic theory more logical than that of Marx.
No member of the system, no single article of doctrine, is fairly to be
understood, criticised, or defended except as an articulate member of
the whole and in the light of the preconceptions and postulates which
afford the point of departure and the controlling norm of the whole. As
regards these preconceptions and postulates, Marx draws on two distinct
lines of antecedents,--the Materialistic Hegelianism and the English
system of Natural Rights. By his earlier training he is an adept in the
Hegelian method of speculation and inoculated with the metaphysics of
development underlying the Hegelian system. By his later training he is
an expert in the system of Natural Rights and Natural Liberty, ingrained
in his ideals of life and held inviolate throughout. He does not take a
critical attitude toward the underlying principles of Natural Rights.
Even his Hegelian preconceptions of development never carry him the
length of questioning the fundamental principles of that system. He is
only more ruthlessly consistent in working out their content than his
natural-rights antagonists in the liberal-classical school. His polemics
run against the specific tenets of the liberal school, but they run
wholly on the ground afforded by the premises of that school. The ideals
of his propaganda are natural-rights ideals, but his theory of the
working out of these ideals in the course of history rests on the
Hegelian metaphysics of development, and his method of speculation and
construction of theory is given by the Hegelian dialectic.
* * * * *
What first and most vividly centered interest on Marx and his
speculations was his relation to the revolutionary socialistic movement;
and it is those features of his doctrines which bear immediately on the
propaganda that still continue to hold the attention of the greater
number of his critics. Chief among these doctrines, in the apprehension
of his critics, is the theory of value, with its corollaries: (_a_) the
doctrines of the exploitation of labor by capital; and (_b_) the
laborer's claim to the whole product of his labor. Avowedly, Marx traces
his doctrine of labor-value to Ricardo, and through him to the classical
economists.[2] The laborer's claim to the whole product of labor, which
is pretty constantly implied, though not frequently avowed by Marx, he
has in all probability taken from English writers of the early
nineteenth century,[3] more particularly from William Thompson. These
doctrines are, on their face, nothing but a development of the
conceptions of natural rights which then pervaded English speculation
and afforded the metaphysical ground of the liberal movement. The more
formidable critics of the Marxian socialism have made much of these
doctrinal elements that further the propaganda, and have, by laying the
stress on these, diverted attention from other elements that are of more
vital consequence to the system as a body of theory. Their exclusive
interest in this side of "scientific socialism" has even led them to
deny the Marxian system all substantial originality, and make it a
(doubtfully legitimate) offshoot of English Liberalism and natural
rights.[4] But this is one-sided criticism. It may hold as against
certain tenets of the so-called "scientific socialism," but it is not
altogether to the point as regards the Marxian system of theory. Even
the Marxian theory of value, surplus value, and exploitation, is not
simply the doctrine of William Thompson, transcribed and sophisticated
in a forbidding terminology, however great the superficial resemblance
and however large Marx's unacknowledged debt to Thompson may be on these
heads. For many details and for much of his animus Marx may be indebted
to the Utilitarians; but, after all, his system of theory, taken as a
whole, lies within the frontiers of neo-Hegelianism, and even the
details are worked out in accord with the preconceptions of that school
of thought and have taken on the complexion that would properly belong
to them on that ground. It is, therefore, not by an itemised scrutiny of
the details of doctrine and by tracing their pedigree in detail that a
fair conception of Marx and his contribution to economics may be
reached, but rather by following him from his own point of departure out
into the ramifications of his theory, and so overlooking the whole in
the prospective which the lapse of time now affords us, but which he
could not himself attain, since he was too near to his own work to see
why he went about it as he did.
* * * * *
The comprehensive system of Marxism is comprised within the scheme of
the Materialistic Conception of History.[5] This materialistic
conception is essentially Hegelian,[6] although it belongs with the
Hegelian Left, and its immediate affiliation is with Feuerbach, not with
the direct line of Hegelian orthodoxy. The chief point of interest here,
in identifying the materialistic conception with Hegelianism, is that
this identification throws it immediately and uncompromisingly into
contrast with Darwinism and the post-Darwinian conceptions of evolution.
Even if a plausible English pedigree should be worked out for this
Materialistic Conception, or "Scientific Socialism," as has been
attempted, it remains none the less true that the conception with which
Marx went to his work was a transmuted framework of Hegelian
dialectic.[7]
Roughly, Hegelian materialism differs from Hegelian orthodoxy by
inverting the main logical sequence, not by discarding the logic or
resorting to new tests of truth or finality. One might say, though
perhaps with excessive crudity, that, where Hegel pronounces his dictum,
_Das Denken ist das Sein_, the materialists, particularly Marx and
Engels, would say _Das Sein macht das Denken_. But in both cases some
sort of a creative primacy is assigned to one or the other member of the
complex, and in neither case is the relation between the two members a
causal relation. In the materialistic conception man's spiritual
life--what man thinks--is a reflex of what he is in the material
respect, very much in the same fashion as the orthodox Hegelian would
make the material world a reflex of the spirit. In both, the dominant
norm of speculation and formulation of theory is the conception of
movement, development, evolution, progress; and in both the movement is
conceived necessarily to take place by the method of conflict or
struggle. The movement is of the nature of progress,--gradual advance
toward a goal, toward the realisation in explicit form of all that is
implicit in the substantial activity involved in the movement. The
movement is, further, self-conditioned and self-acting: it is an
unfolding by inner necessity. The struggle which constitutes the method
of movement or evolution is, in the Hegelian system proper, the struggle
of the spirit for self-realisation by the process of the well-known
three-phase dialectic. In the materialistic conception of history this
dialectical movement becomes the class struggle of the Marxian system.
The class struggle is conceived to be "material," but the term
"material" is in this connection used in a metaphorical sense. It does
not mean mechanical or physical, or even physiological, but economic. It
is material in the sense that it is a struggle between classes for the
material means of life. "The materialistic conception of history
proceeds on the principle that production and, next to production, the
exchange of its products is the groundwork of every social order."[8]
The social order takes its form through the class struggle, and the
character of the class struggle at any given phase of the unfolding
development of society is determined by "the prevailing mode of economic
production and exchange." The dialectic of the movement of social
progress, therefore, moves on the spiritual plane of human desire and
passion, not on the (literally) material plane of mechanical and
physiological stress, on which the developmental process of brute
creation unfolds itself. It is a sublimated materialism, sublimated by
the dominating presence of the conscious human spirit; but it is
conditioned by the material facts of the production of the means of
life.[9] The ultimately active forces involved in the process of
unfolding social life are (apparently) the material agencies engaged in
the mechanics of production; but the dialectic of the process--the
class struggle--runs its course only among and in terms of the secondary
(epigenetic) forces of human consciousness engaged in the valuation of
the material products of industry. A consistently materialistic
conception, consistently adhering to a materialistic interpretation of
the process of development as well as of the facts involved in the
process, could scarcely avoid making its putative dialectic struggle a
mere unconscious and irrelevant conflict of the brute material forces.
This would have amounted to an interpretation in terms of opaque cause
and effect, without recourse to the concept of a conscious class
struggle, and it might have led to a concept of evolution similar to the
unteleological Darwinian concept of natural selection. It could scarcely
have led to the Marxian notion of a conscious class struggle as the one
necessary method of social progress, though it might conceivably, by the
aid of empirical generalisation, have led to a scheme of social process
in which a class struggle would be included as an incidental though
perhaps highly efficient factor.[10] It would have led, as Darwinism
has, to a concept of a process of cumulative change in social structure
and function; but this process, being essentially a cumulative sequence
of causation, opaque and unteleological, could not, without an infusion
of pious fancy by the speculator, be asserted to involve progress as
distinct from retrogression or to tend to a "realisation" or
"self-realisation" of the human spirit or of anything else. Neither
could it conceivably be asserted to lead up to a final term, a goal to
which all lines of the process should converge and beyond which the
process would not go, such as the assumed goal of the Marxian process of
class struggle, which is conceived to cease in the classless economic
structure of the socialistic final term. In Darwinism there is no such
final or perfect term, and no definitive equilibrium.
The disparity between Marxism and Darwinism, as well as the disparity
within the Marxian system between the range of material facts that are
conceived to be the fundamental forces of the process, on the one hand,
and the range of spiritual facts within which the dialectic movement
proceeds,--this disparity is shown in the character assigned the class
struggle by Marx and Engels. The struggle is asserted to be a conscious
one, and proceeds on a recognition by the competing classes of their
mutually incompatible interests with regard to the material means of
life. The class struggle proceeds on motives of interest, and a
recognition of class interest can, of course, be reached only by
reflection on the facts of the case. There is, therefore, not even a
direct causal connection between the material forces in the case and the
choice of a given interested line of conduct. The attitude of the
interested party does not result from the material forces so immediately
as to place it within the relation of direct cause and effect, nor even
with such a degree of intimacy as to admit of its being classed as a
tropismatic, or even instinctive, response to the impact of the material
force in question. The sequence of reflection, and the consequent choice
of sides to a quarrel, run entirely alongside of a range of material
facts concerned.
A further characteristic of the doctrine of class struggle requires
mention. While the concept is not Darwinian, it is also not legitimately
Hegelian, whether of the Right or the Left. It is of a utilitarian
origin and of English pedigree, and it belongs to Marx by virtue of his
having borrowed its elements from the system of self-interest. It is in
fact a piece of hedonism, and is related to Bentham rather than to
Hegel. It proceeds on the grounds of the hedonistic calculus, which is
equally foreign to the Hegelian notion of an unfolding process and to
the post-Darwinian notions of cumulative causation. As regards the
tenability of the doctrine, apart from the question of its derivation
and its compatibility with the neo-Hegelian postulates, it is to be
added that it is quite out of harmony with the later results of
psychological inquiry,--just as is true of the use made of the
hedonistic calculus by the classical (Austrian) economics.
* * * * *
Within the domain covered by the materialistic conception, that is to
say within the domain of unfolding human culture, which is the field of
Marxian speculation at large, Marx has more particularly devoted his
efforts to an analysis and theoretical formulation of the present
situation,--the current phase of the process, the capitalistic system.
And, since the prevailing mode of the production of goods determines the
institutional, intellectual, and spiritual life of the epoch, by
determining the form and method of the current class struggle, the
discussion necessarily begins with the theory of "capitalistic
production," or production as carried on under the capitalistic
system.[11]
Under the capitalistic system, that is to say under the system of modern
business traffic, production is a production of commodities,
merchantable goods, with a view to the price to be obtained for them in
the market. The great fact on which all industry under this system
hinges is the price of marketable goods. Therefore it is at this point
that Marx strikes into the system of capitalistic production, and
therefore the theory of value becomes the dominant feature of his
economics and the point of departure for the whole analysis, in all its
voluminous ramifications.[12]
It is scarcely worth while to question what serves as the beginning of
wisdom in the current criticisms of Marx; namely, that he offers no
adequate proof of his labor-value theory.[13] It is even safe to go
farther, and say that he offers no proof of it. The feint which occupies
the opening paragraphs of the _Kapital_ and the corresponding passages
of _Zur Kritik_, etc., is not to be taken seriously as an attempt to
prove his position on this head by the ordinary recourse to argument. It
is rather a self-satisfied superior's playful mystification of those
readers (critics) whose limited powers do not enable them to see that
his proposition is self-evident. Taken on the Hegelian (neo-Hegelian)
ground, and seen in the light of the general materialistic conception,
the proposition that value = labor-cost is self-evident, not to say
tautological. Seen in any other light, it has no particular force.
In the Hegelian scheme of things the only substantial reality is the
unfolding life of the spirit. In the neo-Hegelian scheme, as embodied in
the materialistic conception, this reality is translated into terms of
the unfolding (material) life of man in society.[14] In so far as the
goods are products of industry, they are the output of this unfolding
life of man, a material residue embodying a given fraction of this
forceful life-process. In this life-process lies all substantial
reality, and all finally valid relations of quantivalence between the
products of this life-process must run in its terms. The life-process,
which, when it takes the specific form of an expenditure of labor power,
goes to produce goods, is a process of material forces, the spiritual or
mental features of the life-process and of labor being only its
insubstantial reflex. It is consequently only in the material changes
wrought by this expenditure of labor power that the metaphysical
substance of life--labor power--can be embodied; but in these changes of
material fact it cannot but be embodied, since these are the end to
which it is directed.
This balance between goods in respect of their magnitude as output of
human labor holds good indefeasibly, in point of the metaphysical
reality of the life-process, whatever superficial (phenomenal)
variations from this norm may occur in men's dealings with the goods
under the stress of the strategy of self-interest. Such is the value of
the goods in reality; they are equivalents of one another in the
proportion in which they partake of this substantial quality, although
their true ratio of equivalence may never come to an adequate expression
in the transactions involved in the distribution of the goods. This real
or true value of the goods is a fact of production, and holds true under
all systems and methods of production, whereas the exchange value (the
"phenomenal form" of the real value) is a fact of distribution, and
expresses the real value more or less adequately according as the scheme
of distribution in force at the given time conforms more or less closely
to the equities given by production. If the output of industry were
distributed to the productive agents strictly in proportion to their
shares in production, the exchange value of the goods would be presumed
to conform to their real value. But, under the current, capitalistic
system, distribution is not in any sensible degree based on the equities
of production, and the exchange value of goods under this system can
therefore express their real value only with a very rough, and in the
main fortuitous, approximation. Under a socialistic regime, where the
laborer would get the full product of his labor, or where the whole
system of ownership, and consequently the system of distribution, would
lapse, values would reach a true expression, if any.
Under the capitalistic system the determination of exchange value is a
matter of competitive profit-making, and exchange values therefore
depart erratically and incontinently from the proportions that would
legitimately be given them by the real values whose only expression
they are. Marx's critics commonly identify the concept of "value" with
that of "exchange value,"[15] and show that the theory of "value" does
not square with the run of the facts of price under the existing system
of distribution, piously hoping thereby to have refuted the Marxian
doctrine; whereas, of course, they have for the most part not touched
it. The misapprehension of the critics may be due to a (possibly
intentional) oracular obscurity on the part of Marx. Whether by his
fault or their own, their refutations have hitherto been quite
inconclusive. Marx's severest stricture on the iniquities of the
capitalistic system is that contained by implication in his development
of the manner in which actual exchange value of goods systematically
diverges from their real (labor-cost) value. Herein, indeed, lies not
only the inherent iniquity of the existing system, but also its fateful
infirmity, according to Marx.
The theory of value, then, is _contained in_ the main postulates of the
Marxian system rather than derived from them. Marx identifies this
doctrine, in its elements, with the labor-value theory of Ricardo,[16]
but the relationship between the two is that of a superficial
coincidence in their main propositions rather than a substantial
identity of theoretic contents. In Ricardo's theory the source and
measure of value is sought in the effort and sacrifice undergone by the
producer, consistently, on the whole, with the Benthamite-utilitarian
position to which Ricardo somewhat loosely and uncritically adhered. The
decisive fact about labor, that quality by virtue of which it is assumed
to be the final term in the theory of production, is its irksomeness.
Such is of course not the case in the labor-value theory of Marx, to
whom the question of the irksomeness of labor is quite irrelevant, so
far as regards the relation between labor and production. The
substantial diversity or incompatibility of the two theories shows
itself directly when each is employed by its creator in the further
analysis of economic phenomena. Since with Ricardo the crucial point is
the degree of irksomeness of labor, which serves as a measure both of
the labor expended and the value produced, and since in Ricardo's
utilitarian philosophy there is no more vital fact underlying this
irksomeness, therefore no surplus-value theory follows from the main
position. The productiveness of labor is not cumulative, in its own
working; and the Ricardian economics goes on to seek the cumulative
productiveness of industry in the functioning of the products of labor
when employed in further production and in the irksomeness of the
capitalist's abstinence. From which duly follows the general position of
classical economics on the theory of production.
With Marx, on the other hand, the labor power expended in production
being itself a product and having a substantial value corresponding to
its own labor-cost, the value of the labor power expended and the value
of the product created by its expenditure need not be the same. They are
not the same, by supposition, as they would be in any hedonistic
interpretation of the facts. Hence a discrepancy arises between the
value of the labor power expended in production and the value of the
product created, and this discrepancy is covered by the concept of
surplus value. Under the capitalistic system, wages being the value
(price) of the labor power consumed in industry, it follows that the
surplus product of their labor cannot go to the laborers, but becomes
the profits of capital and the source of its accumulation and increase.
From the fact that wages are measured by the value of labor power rather
than by the (greater) value of the product of labor, it follows also
that the laborers are unable to buy the whole product of their labor,
and so that the capitalists are unable to sell the whole product of
industry continuously at its full value, whence arise difficulties of
the gravest nature in the capitalistic system, in the way of
overproduction and the like.
But the gravest outcome of this systematic discrepancy between the value
of labor power and the value of its product is the accumulation of
capital out of unpaid labor, and the effect of this accumulation on the
laboring population. The law of accumulation, with its corollary, the
doctrine of the industrial reserve army, is the final term and the
objective point of Marx's theory of capitalist production, just as the
theory of labor value is his point of departure.[17] While the theory of
value and surplus value are Marx's explanation of the possibility of
existence of the capitalistic system, the law of the accumulation of
capital is his exposition of the causes which must lead to the collapse
of that system and of the manner in which the collapse will come. And
since Marx is, always and everywhere, a socialist agitator as well as a
theoretical economist, it may be said without hesitation that the law of
accumulation is the climax of his great work, from whatever point of
view it is looked at, whether as an economic theorem or as a tenet of
socialistic doctrine.
The law of capitalistic accumulation may be paraphrased as follows:[18]
Wages being the (approximately exact) value of the labor power bought in
the wage contract; the price of the product being the (similarly
approximate) value of the goods produced; and since the value of the
product exceeds that of the labor power by a given amount (surplus
value), which by force of the wage contract passes into the possession
of the capitalist and is by him in part laid by as savings and added to
the capital already in hand, it follows (_a_) that, other things equal,
the larger the surplus value, the more rapid the increase of capital;
and, also (_b_), that the greater the increase of capital relatively to
the labor force employed, the more productive the labor employed and the
larger the surplus product available for accumulation. The process of
accumulation, therefore, is evidently a cumulative one; and, also
evidently, the increase added to capital is an unearned increment drawn
from the unpaid surplus product of labor.
But with an appreciable increase of the aggregate capital a change takes
place in its technological composition, whereby the "constant" capital
(equipment and raw materials) increases disproportionately as compared
with the "variable" capital (wages fund). "Labor-saving devices" are
used to a greater extent than before, and labor is saved. A larger
proportion of the expenses of production goes for the purchase of
equipment and raw materials, and a smaller proportion--though perhaps
an absolutely increased amount--goes for the purchase of labor power.
Less labor is needed relatively to the aggregate capital employed as
well as relatively to the quantity of goods produced. Hence some portion
of the increasing labor supply will not be wanted, and an "industrial
reserve army," a "surplus labor population," an army of unemployed,
comes into existence. This reserve grows relatively larger as the
accumulation of capital proceeds and as technological improvements
consequently gain ground; so that there result two divergent cumulative
changes in the situation,--antagonistic, but due to the same set of
forces and, therefore, inseparable: capital increases, and the number of
unemployed laborers (relatively) increases also.
This divergence between the amount of capital and output, on the one
hand, and the amount received by laborers as wages, on the other hand,
has an incidental consequence of some importance. The purchasing power
of the laborers, represented by their wages, being the largest part of
the demand for consumable goods, and being at the same time, in the
nature of the case, progressively less adequate for the purchase of the
product, represented by the price of the goods produced, it follows that
the market is progressively more subject to glut from overproduction,
and hence to commercial crises and depression. It has been argued, as if
it were a direct inference from Marx's position, that this maladjustment
between production and markets, due to the laborer not getting the full
product of his labor, leads directly to the breakdown of the
capitalistic system, and so by its own force will bring on the
socialistic consummation. Such is not Marx's position, however, although
crises and depression play an important part in the course of
development that is to lead up to socialism. In Marx's theory,
socialism is to come by way of a conscious class movement on the part of
the propertyless laborers, who will act advisedly on their own interest
and force the revolutionary movement for their own gain. But crises and
depression will have a large share in bringing the laborers to a frame
of mind suitable for such a move.
Given a growing aggregate capital, as indicated above, and a concomitant
reserve of unemployed laborers growing at a still higher rate, as is
involved in Marx's position, this body of unemployed labor can be, and
will be, used by the capitalists to depress wages, in order to increase
profits. Logically, it follows that, the farther and faster capital
accumulates, the larger will be the reserve of unemployed, both
absolutely and relatively to the work to be done, and the more severe
will be the pressure acting to reduce wages and lower the standard of
living, and the deeper will be the degradation and misery of the working
class and the more precipitately will their condition decline to a still
lower depth. Every period of depression, with its increased body of
unemployed labor seeking work, will act to hasten and accentuate the
depression of wages, until there is no warrant even for holding that
wages will, on an average, be kept up to the subsistence minimum.[19]
Marx, indeed, is explicit to the effect that such will be the
case,--that wages will decline below the subsistence minimum; and he
cites English conditions of child labor, misery, and degeneration to
substantiate his views.[20] When this has gone far enough, when
capitalist production comes near enough to occupying the whole field of
industry and has depressed the condition of its laborers sufficiently to
make them an effective majority of the community with nothing to lose,
then, having taken advice together, they will move, by legal or
extra-legal means, by absorbing the state or by subverting it, to
establish the social revolution.
Socialism is to come through class antagonism due to the absence of all
property interests from the laboring class, coupled with a generally
prevalent misery so profound as to involve some degree of physical
degeneration. This misery is to be brought about by the heightened
productivity of labor due to an increased accumulation of capital and
large improvements in the industrial arts; which in turn is caused by
the fact that under a system of private enterprise with hired labor the
laborer does not get the whole product of his labor; which, again, is
only saying in other words that private ownership of capital goods
enables the capitalist to appropriate and accumulate the surplus product
of labor. As to what the regime is to be which the social revolution
will bring in, Marx has nothing particular to say, beyond the general
thesis that there will be no private ownership, at least not of the
means of production.
* * * * *
Such are the outlines of the Marxian system of socialism. In all that
has been said so far no recourse is had to the second and third volumes
of _Kapital_. Nor is it necessary to resort to these two volumes for the
general theory of socialism. They add nothing essential, although many
of the details of the processes concerned in the working out of the
capitalist scheme are treated with greater fullness, and the analysis is
carried out with great consistency and with admirable results. For
economic theory at large these further two volumes are important
enough, but an inquiry into their contents in that connection is not
called for here.
Nothing much need be said as to the tenability of this theory. In its
essentials, or at least in its characteristic elements, it has for the
most part been given up by latter-day socialist writers. The number of
those who hold to it without essential deviation is growing gradually
smaller. Such is necessarily the case, and for more than one reason. The
facts are not bearing it out on certain critical points, such as the
doctrine of increasing misery; and the Hegelian philosophical
postulates, without which the Marxism of Marx is groundless, are for the
most part forgotten by the dogmatists of to-day. Darwinism has largely
supplanted Hegelianism in their habits of thought.
The particular point at which the theory is most fragile, considered
simply as a theory of social growth, is its implied doctrine of
population,--implied in the doctrine of a growing reserve of unemployed
workmen. The doctrine of the reserve of unemployed labor involves as a
postulate that population will increase anyway, without reference to
current or prospective means of life. The empirical facts give at least
a very persuasive apparent support to the view expressed by Marx, that
misery is, or has hitherto been, no hindrance to the propagation of the
race; but they afford no conclusive evidence in support of a thesis to
the effect that the number of laborers must increase independently of an
increase of the means of life. No one since Darwin would have the
hardihood to say that the increase of the human species is not
conditioned by the means of living.
But all that does not really touch Marx's position. To Marx, the
neo-Hegelian, history, including the economic development, is the
life-history of the human species; and the main fact in this
life-history, particularly in the economic aspect of it, is the growing
volume of human life. This, in a manner of speaking, is the base-line of
the whole analysis of the process of economic life, including the phase
of capitalist production with the rest. The growth of population is the
first principle, the most substantial, most material factor in this
process of economic life, so long as it is a process of growth, of
unfolding, of exfoliation, and not a phase of decrepitude and decay. Had
Marx found that his analysis led him to a view adverse to this position,
he would logically have held that the capitalist system is the mortal
agony of the race and the manner of its taking off. Such a conclusion is
precluded by his Hegelian point of departure, according to which the
goal of the life-history of the race in a large way controls the course
of that life-history in all its phases, including the phase of
capitalism. This goal or end, which controls the process of human
development, is the complete realisation of life in all its fullness,
and the realisation is to be reached by a process analogous to the
three-phase dialectic, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, into which
scheme the capitalist system, with its overflowing measure of misery and
degradation, fits as the last and most dreadful phase of antithesis.
Marx, as a Hegelian,--that is to say, a romantic philosopher,--is
necessarily an optimist, and the evil (antithetical element) in life is
to him a logically necessary evil, as the antithesis is a necessary
phase of the dialectic; and it is a means to the consummation, as the
antithesis is a means to the synthesis.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The substance of lectures before students in Harvard University in
April, 1906. Reprinted by permission from _The Quarterly Journal of
Economics_, Vol. XX, Aug., 1906
[2] _Cf._ _Critique of Political Economy_, chap. i, "Notes on the
History of the Theory of Commodities," pp. 56-73 (English translation,
New York, 1904).
[3] See Menger, _Right to the Whole Produce of Labor_, sections iii-v
and viii-ix, and Foxwell's admirable Introduction to Menger.
[4] See Menger and Foxwell, as above, and Schaeffle, _Quintessence of
Socialism_, and _The Impossibility of Social Democracy_.
[5] See Engels, _The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science_,
especially section ii and the opening paragraphs of section iii; also
the preface of _Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie_.
[6] See Engels, as above, and also his _Feuerbach: The Roots of
Socialist Philosophy_ (translation, Chicago, Kerr & Co., 1903).
[7] See _e.g._, Seligman, _The Economic Interpretation of History_, Part
I.
[8] Engels, _Development of Socialism_, beginning of section iii.
[9] _Cf._, on this point, Max Adler, "Kausalitaet und Teleologie im
Streite um die Wissenschaft" (included in _Marx-Studien_, edited by
Adler and Hilfendirg, vol. i), particularly section xi; _cf._ also
Ludwig Stein, _Die soziale Frage im Lichte der Philosophie_, whom Adler
criticises and claims to have refuted.
[10] _Cf._ Adler, as above.
[11] It may be noted, by way of caution to readers familiar with the
terms only as employed by the classical (English and Austrian)
economists, that in Marxian usage "capitalistic production" means
production of goods for the market by hired labor under the direction of
employers who own (or control) the means of production and are engaged
in industry for the sake of a profit. "Capital" is wealth (primarily
funds) so employed. In these and other related points of terminological
usage Marx is, of course, much more closely in touch with colloquial
usage than those economists of the classical line who make capital
signify "the products of past industry used as aids to further
production." With Marx "Capitalism" implies certain relations of
ownership, no less than the "productive use" which is alone insisted on
by so many later economists in defining the term.
[12] In the sense that the theory of value affords the point of
departure and the fundamental concepts out of which the further theory
of the workings of capitalism is constructed,--in this sense, and in
this sense only, is the theory of value the central doctrine and the
critical tenet of Marxism. It does not follow that the Marxist doctrine
of an irresistible drift towards a socialistic consummation hangs on the
defensibility of the labor-value theory, nor even that the general
structure of the Marxist economics would collapse if translated into
other terms than those of this doctrine of labor-value. _Cf_.
Boehm-Bawerk, _Karl Marx and the Close of his System_; and, on the
other hand, Franz Oppenheimer, _Das Grundgesetz der Marx'schen
Gesellschaftslehre_; and Rudolf Goldscheid, _Verelendungs- oder
Meliorationstheorie_.
[13] _Cf._, _e.g._, Boehm-Bawerk, as above; Georg Adler, _Grundlagen der
Karl Marx'schen Kritik_.
[14] In much the same way, and with an analogous effect on their
theoretical work, in the preconceptions of the classical (including the
Austrian) economists, the balance of pleasure and pain is taken to be
the ultimate reality in terms of which all economic theory must be
stated and to terms of which all phenomena should finally be reduced in
any definitive analysis of economic life. It is not the present purpose
to inquire whether the one of these uncritical assumptions is in any
degree more meritorious or more serviceable than the other.
[15] Boehm-Bawerk, _Capital and Interest_, Book VI, chap, iii; also _Karl
Marx and the Close of his System_, particularly chap. iv; Adler,
_Grundlagen_, chaps. ii. and iii.
[16] _Cf._ _Kapital_, vol. i, chap. xv, p. 486 (4th ed.). See also notes
9 and 16 to chap. i of the same volume, where Marx discusses the
labor-value doctrines of Adam Smith and an earlier (anonymous) English
writer, and compares them with his own. Similar comparisons with the
early--classical--value theories recur from time to time in the later
portions of _Kapital_.
[17] Oppenheimer (_Das Grundgesetz der Marx'schen Gesellschaftslehre_)
is right in making the theory of accumulation the central element in the
doctrines of Marxist socialism, but it does not follow, as Oppenheimer
contends, that this doctrine is the keystone of Marx's economic
theories. It follows logically from the theory of surplus value, as
indicated above, and rests on that theory in such a way that it would
fail (in the form in which it is held by Marx) with the failure of the
doctrine of surplus value.
[18] See _Kapital_, vol. i, chap. xxiii.
[19] The "subsistence minimum" is here taken in the sense used by Marx
and the classical economists, as meaning what is necessary to keep up
the supply of labor at its current rate of efficiency.
[20] See _Kapital_, vol. i, chap, xxiii, sections 4 and 5.
THE SOCIALIST ECONOMICS OF KARL MARX AND HIS FOLLOWERS[1]
II. THE LATER MARXISM
Marx worked out his system of theory in the main during the third
quarter of the nineteenth century. He came to the work from the
standpoint given him by his early training in German thought, such as
the most advanced and aggressive German thinking was through the middle
period of the century, and he added to this German standpoint the
further premises given him by an exceptionally close contact with and
alert observation of the English situation. The result is that he brings
to his theoretical work a twofold line of premises, or rather of
preconceptions. By early training he is a neo-Hegelian, and from this
German source he derives his peculiar formulation of the Materialistic
Theory of History. By later experience he acquired the point of view of
that Liberal-Utilitarian school which dominated English thought through
the greater part of his active life. To this experience he owes
(probably) the somewhat pronounced individualistic preconceptions on
which the doctrines of the Full Product of Labor and the Exploitation of
Labor are based. These two not altogether compatible lines of doctrine
found their way together into the tenets of scientific[2] socialism, and
gives its characteristic Marxian features to the body of socialist
economics.
The socialism that inspires hopes and fears to-day is of the school of
Marx. No one is seriously apprehensive of any other so-called
socialistic movement, and no one is seriously concerned to criticise or
refute the doctrines set forth by any other school of "socialists." It
may be that the socialists of the Marxist observance are not always or
at all points in consonance with the best accepted body of Marxist
doctrine. Those who make up the body of the movement may not always be
familiar with the details--perhaps not even with the general
features--of the Marxian scheme of economics; but with such consistency
as may fairly be looked for in any popular movement, the socialists of
all countries gravitate toward the theoretical position of the avowed
Marxism. In proportion as the movement in any given community grows in
mass, maturity, and conscious purpose, it unavoidably takes on a more
consistently Marxian complexion. It is not the Marxism of Marx, but the
materialism of Darwin, which the socialists of to-day have adopted. The
Marxist socialists of Germany have the lead, and the socialists of other
countries largely take their cue from the German leaders.
The authentic spokesmen of the current international socialism are
avowed Marxists. Exceptions to that rule are very few. On the whole, the
substantial truth of the Marxist doctrines is not seriously questioned
within the lines of the socialists, though there may be some appreciable
divergence as to what the true Marxist position is on one point and
another. Much and eager controversy circles about questions of that
class.
The keepers of the socialist doctrines are passably agreed as to the
main position and the general principles. Indeed, so secure is this
current agreement on the general principles that a very lively
controversy on matters of detail may go on without risk of disturbing
the general position. This general position is avowedly Marxism. But it
is not precisely the position held by Karl Marx. It has been modernised,
adapted, filled out, in response to exigencies of a later date than
those which conditioned the original formulation of the theories. It is,
of course, not admitted by the followers of Marx that any substantial
change or departure from the original position has taken place. They are
somewhat jealously orthodox, and are impatient of any suggested
"improvements" on the Marxist position, as witness the heat engendered
in the "revisionist" controversy of a few years back. But the jealous
protests of the followers of Marx do not alter the fact that Marxism has
undergone some substantial change since it left the hands of its
creator. Now and then a more or less consistent disciple of Marx will
avow a need of adapting the received doctrines to circumstances that
have arisen later than the formulation of the doctrines; and amendments,
qualifications, and extensions, with this need in view, have been
offered from time to time. But more pervasive though unavowed changes
have come in the teachings of Marxism by way of interpretation and an
unintended shifting of the point of view. Virtually, the whole of the
younger generation of socialist writers shows such a growth. A citation
of personal instances would be quite futile.
* * * * *
It is the testimony of his friends as well as of his writings that the
theoretical position of Marx, both as regards his standpoint and as
regards his main tenets, fell into a definitive shape relatively early,
and that his later work was substantially a working out of what was
contained in the position taken at the outset of his career.[3] By the
latter half of the forties, if not by the middle of the forties, Marx
and Engels had found the outlook on human life which came to serve as
the point of departure and the guide for their subsequent development of
theory. Such is the view of the matter expressed by Engels during the
later years of his life.[4] The position taken by the two great leaders,
and held by them substantially intact, was a variant of neo-Hegelianism,
as has been indicated in an earlier section of this paper.[5] But
neo-Hegelianism was short-lived, particularly considered as a standpoint
for scientific theory. The whole romantic school of thought, comprising
neo-Hegelianism with the rest, began to go to pieces very soon after it
had reached an approach to maturity, and its disintegration proceeded
with exceptional speed, so that the close of the third quarter of the
century saw the virtual end of it as a vital factor in the development
of human knowledge. In the realm of theory, primarily of course in the
material sciences, the new era belongs not to romantic philosophy, but
to the evolutionists of the school of Darwin. Some few great figures, of
course, stood over from the earlier days, but it turns out in the sequel
that they have served mainly to mark the rate and degree in which the
method of scientific knowledge has left them behind. Such were Virchow
and Max Mueller, and such, in economic science, were the great figures of
the Historical School, and such, in a degree, were also Marx and Engels.
The later generation of socialists, the spokesmen and adherents of
Marxism during the closing quarter of the century, belong to the new
generation, and see the phenomena of human life under the new light. The
materialistic conception in their handling of it takes on the color of
the time in which they lived, even while they retain the phraseology of
the generation that went before them.[6]
The difference between the romantic school of thought, to which Marx
belonged, and the school of the evolutionists into whose hands the
system has fallen,--or perhaps, better, is falling,--is great and
pervading, though it may not show a staring superficial difference at
any one point,--at least not yet. The discrepancy between the two is
likely to appear more palpable and more sweeping when the new method of
knowledge has been applied with fuller realisation of its reach and its
requirement in that domain of knowledge that once belonged to the
neo-Hegelian Marxism. The supplanting of the one by the other has been
taking place slowly, gently, in large measure unavowedly, by a sort of
precession of the point of view from which men size up the facts and
reduce them to intelligible order.
The neo-Hegelian, romantic, Marxian standpoint was wholly personal,
whereas the evolutionistic--it may be called Darwinian--standpoint is
wholly impersonal. The continuity sought in the facts of observation and
imputed to them by the earlier school of theory was a continuity of a
personal kind,--a continuity of reason and consequently of logic. The
facts were construed to take such a course as could be established by an
appeal to reason between intelligent and fair-minded men. They were
supposed to fall into a sequence of logical consistency. The romantic
(Marxian) sequence of theory is essentially an intellectual sequence,
and it is therefore of a teleological character. The logical trend of it
can be argued out. That is to say, it tends to a goal. On the other
hand, in the Darwinian scheme of thought, the continuity sought in and
imputed to the facts is a continuity of cause and effect. It is a scheme
of blindly cumulative causation, in which there is no trend, no final
term, no consummation. The sequence is controlled by nothing but the
_vis a tergo_ of brute causation, and is essentially mechanical. The
neo-Hegelian (Marxian) scheme of development is drawn in the image of
the struggling ambitious human spirit: that of Darwinian evolution is of
the nature of a mechanical process.[7]
What difference, now, does it make if the materialistic conception is
translated from the romantic concepts of Marx into the mechanical
concepts of Darwinism? It distorts every feature of the system in some
degree, and throws a shadow of doubt on every conclusion that once
seemed secure.[8] The first principle of the Marxian scheme is the
concept covered by the term "Materialistic," to the effect that the
exigencies of the material means of life control the conduct of men in
society throughout, and thereby indefeasibly guide the growth of
institutions and shape every shifting trait of human culture. This
control of the life of society by the material exigencies takes effect
through men's taking thought of material (economic) advantages and
disadvantages, and choosing that which will yield the fuller material
measure of life. When the materialistic conception passes under the
Darwinian norm, of cumulative causation, it happens, first, that this
initial principle itself is reduced to the rank of a habit of thought
induced in the speculator who depends on its light, by the circumstances
of his life, in the way of hereditary bent, occupation, tradition,
education, climate, food supply, and the like. But under the Darwinian
norm the question of whether and how far material exigencies control
human conduct and cultural growth becomes a question of the share which
these material exigencies have in shaping men's habits of thought,
_i.e._, their ideals and aspirations, their sense of the true, the
beautiful, and the good. Whether and how far these traits of human
culture and the institutional structure built out of them are the
outgrowth of material (economic) exigencies becomes a question of what
kind and degree of efficiency belongs to the economic exigencies among
the complex of circumstances that conduce to the formation of habits. It
is no longer a question of whether material exigencies rationally should
guide men's conduct, but whether, as a matter of brute causation, they
do induce such habits of thought in men as the economic interpretation
presumes, and whether in the last analysis economic exigencies alone
are, directly or indirectly, effective in shaping human habits of
thought.
Tentatively and by way of approximation some such formulation as that
outlined in the last paragraph is apparently what Bernstein and others
of the "revisionists" have been seeking in certain of their
speculations,[9] and, sitting austere and sufficient on a dry shoal up
stream, Kautsky has uncomprehendingly been addressing them advice and
admonition which they do not understand.[10] The more intelligent and
enterprising among the idealist wing--where intellectual enterprise is
not a particularly obvious trait--have been struggling to speak for the
view that the forces of the environment may effectually reach men's
spiritual life through other avenues than the calculus of the main
chance, and so may give rise to habitual ideals and aspirations
independent of, and possibly alien to, that calculus.[11]
So, again, as to the doctrine of the class struggle. In the Marxian
scheme of dialectical evolution the development which is in this way
held to be controlled by the material exigencies must, it is held,
proceed by the method of the class struggle. This class struggle is held
to be inevitable, and is held inevitably to lead at each revolutionary
epoch to a more efficient adjustment of human industry to human uses,
because, when a large proportion of the community find themselves ill
served by the current economic arrangements, they take thought, band
together, and enforce a readjustment more equitable and more
advantageous to them. So long as differences of economic advantage
prevail, there will be a divergence of interests between those more
advantageously placed and those less advantageously placed. The members
of society will take sides as this line of cleavage indicated by their
several economic interests may decide. Class solidarity will arise on
the basis of this class interest, and a struggle between the two classes
so marked off against each other will set in,--a struggle which, in the
logic of the situation, can end only when the previously less fortunate
class gains the ascendancy,--and so must the class struggle proceed
until it shall have put an end to that diversity of economic interest on
which the class struggle rests. All this is logically consistent and
convincing, but it proceeds on the ground of reasoned conduct, calculus
of advantage, not on the ground of cause and effect. The class struggle
so conceived should always and everywhere tend unremittingly toward the
socialistic consummation, and should reach that consummation in the end,
whatever obstructions or diversions might retard the sequence of
development along the way. Such is the notion of it embodied in the
system of Marx. Such, however, is not the showing of history. Not all
nations or civilisations have advanced unremittingly toward a
socialistic consummation, in which all divergence of economic interest
has lapsed or would lapse. Those nations and civilisations which have
decayed and failed, as nearly all known nations and civilisations have
done, illustrate the point that, however reasonable and logical the
advance by means of the class struggle may be, it is by no means
inevitable. Under the Darwinian norm it must be held that men's
reasoning is largely controlled by other than logical, intellectual
forces; that the conclusion reached by public or class opinion is as
much, or more, a matter of sentiment than of logical inference; and that
the sentiment which animates men, singly or collectively, is as much, or
more, an outcome of habit and native propensity as of calculated
material interest. There is, for instance, no warrant in the Darwinian
scheme of things for asserting _a priori_ that the class interest of the
working class will bring them to take a stand against the propertied
class. It may as well be that their training in subservience to their
employers will bring them again to realise the equity and excellence of
the established system of subjection and unequal distribution of
wealth. Again, no one, for instance, can tell to-day what will be the
outcome of the present situation in Europe and America. It may be that
the working classes will go forward along the line of the socialistic
ideals and enforce a new deal, in which there shall be no economic class
discrepancies, no international animosity, no dynastic politics. But
then it may also, so far as can be foreseen, equally well happen that
the working class, with the rest of the community in Germany, England,
or America, will be led by the habit of loyalty and by their
sportsmanlike propensities to lend themselves enthusiastically to the
game of dynastic politics, which alone their sportsmanlike rulers
consider worth while. It is quite impossible on Darwinian ground to
foretell whether the "proletariat" will go on to establish the
socialistic revolution or turn aside again, and sink their force in the
broad sands of patriotism. It is a question of habit and native
propensity and of the range of stimuli to which the proletariat are
exposed and are to be exposed, and what may be the outcome is not a
matter of logical consistency, but of response to stimulus.
So, then, since Darwinian concepts have begun to dominate the thinking
of the Marxists, doubts have now and again come to assert themselves
both as to the inevitableness of the irrepressible class struggle and to
its sole efficacy. Anything like a violent class struggle, a seizure of
power by force, is more and more consistently deprecated. For resort to
force, it is felt, brings in its train coercive control with all its
apparatus of prerogative, mastery, and subservience.[12]
So, again, the Marxian doctrine of progressive proletarian distress, the
so-called _Verelendungstheorie_, which stands pat on the romantic ground
of the original Marxism, has fallen into abeyance, if not into
disrepute, since the Darwinian conceptions have come to prevail. As a
matter of reasoned procedure, on the ground of enlightened material
interest alone, it should be a tenable position that increasing misery,
increasing in degree and in volume, should be the outcome of the present
system of ownership, and should at the same time result in a
well-advised and well-consolidated working-class movement that would
replace the present system by a scheme more advantageous to the
majority. But so soon as the question is approached on the Darwinian
ground of cause and effect, and is analysed in terms of habit and of
response to stimulus, the doctrine that progressive misery must effect a
socialistic revolution becomes dubious, and very shortly untenable.
Experience, the experience of history, teaches that abject misery
carries with it deterioration and abject subjection. The theory of
progressive distress fits convincingly into the scheme of the Hegelian
three-phase dialectic. It stands for the antithesis that is to be merged
in the ulterior synthesis; but it has no particular force on the ground
of an argument from cause to effect.[13]
It fares not much better with the Marxian theory of value and its
corollaries and dependent doctrines when Darwinian concepts are brought
in to replace the romantic elements out of which it is built up. Its
foundation is the metaphysical equality between the volume of human life
force productively spent in the making of goods and the magnitude of
these goods considered as human products. The question of such an
equality has no meaning in terms of cause and effect, nor does it bear
in any intelligible way upon the Darwinian question of the fitness of
any given system of production or distribution. In any evolutionary
system of economics the central question touching the efficiency and
fitness of any given system of production is necessarily the question as
to the excess of serviceability in the product over the cost of
production.[14] It is in such an excess of serviceability over cost that
the chance of survival lies for any system of production, in so far as
the question of survival is a question of production, and this matter
comes into the speculation of Marx only indirectly or incidentally, and
leads to nothing in his argument.
And, as bearing on the Marxian doctrines of exploitation, there is on
Darwinian ground no place for a natural right to the full product of
labor. What can be argued in that connection on the ground of cause and
effect simply is the question as to what scheme of distribution will
help or hinder the survival of a given people or a given
civilisation.[15]
But these questions of abstruse theory need not be pursued, since they
count, after all, but relatively little among the working tenets of the
movement. Little need be done by the Marxists to work out or to adapt
the Marxian system of value theory, since it has but slight bearing on
the main question,--the question of the trend towards socialism and of
its chances of success. It is conceivable that a competent theory of
value dealing with the excess of serviceability over cost, on the one
hand, and with the discrepancy between price and serviceability, on the
other hand, would have a substantial bearing upon the advisability of
the present as against the socialistic regime, and would go far to clear
up the notions of both socialists and conservatives as to the nature of
the points in dispute between them. But the socialists have not moved in
the direction of this problem, and they have the excuse that their
critics have suggested neither a question nor a solution to a question
along any such line. None of the value theorists have so far offered
anything that could be called good, bad, or indifferent in this
connection, and the socialists are as innocent as the rest. Economics,
indeed, has not at this point yet begun to take on a modern tone, unless
the current neglect of value theory by the socialists be taken as a
negative symptom of advance, indicating that they at least recognise the
futility of the received problems and solutions, even if they are not
ready to make a positive move.
* * * * *
The shifting of the current point of view, from romantic philosophy to
matter-of-fact, has affected the attitude of the Marxists towards the
several articles of theory more than it has induced an avowed alteration
or a substitution of new elements of theory for the old. It is always
possible to make one's peace with a new standpoint by new
interpretations and a shrewd use of figures of speech, so far as the
theoretical formulation is concerned, and something of this kind has
taken place in the case of Marxism; but when, as in the case of Marxism,
the formulations of theory are drafted into practical use, substantial
changes of appreciable magnitude are apt to show themselves in a changed
attitude towards practical questions. The Marxists have had to face
certain practical problems, especially problems of party tactics, and
the substantial changes wrought in their theoretical outlook have come
into evidence here. The real gravity of the changes that have overtaken
Marxism would scarcely be seen by a scrutiny of the formal professions
of the Marxists alone. But the exigencies of a changing situation have
provoked readjustments of the received doctrinal position, and the
shifting of the philosophical standpoint and postulates has come into
evidence as marking the limits of change in their professions which the
socialistic doctrinaires could allow themselves.
The changes comprised in the cultural movement that lies between the
middle and the close of the nineteenth century are great and grave, at
least as seen from so near a standpoint as the present day, and it is
safe to say that, in whatever historical perspective they may be seen,
they must, in some respects, always assert themselves as unprecedented.
So far as concerns the present topic, there are three main lines of
change that have converged upon the Marxist system of doctrines, and
have led to its latter-day modification and growth. One of these--the
change in the postulates of knowledge, in the metaphysical foundations
of theory--has been spoken of already, and its bearing on the growth of
socialist theory has been indicated in certain of its general features.
But, among the circumstances that have conditioned the growth of the
system, the most obvious is the fact that since Marx's time his
doctrines have come to serve as the platform of a political movement,
and so have been exposed to the stress of practical party politics
dealing with a new and changing situation. At the same time the
industrial (economic) situation to which the doctrines are held to
apply--of which they are the theoretical formulation--has also in
important respects changed its character from what it was when Marx
first formulated his views. These several lines of cultural change
affecting the growth of Marxism cannot be held apart in so distinct a
manner as to appraise the work of each separately. They belong
inextricably together, as do the effects wrought by them in the system.
In practical politics the Social Democrats have had to make up their
account with the labor movement, the agricultural population, and the
imperialistic policy. On each of these heads the preconceived programme
of Marxism has come in conflict with the run of events, and on each head
it has been necessary to deal shrewdly and adapt the principles to the
facts of the time. The adaptation to circumstances has not been
altogether of the nature of compromise, although here and there the
spirit of compromise and conciliation is visible enough. A conciliatory
party policy may, of course, impose an adaptation of form and color
upon the party principles, without thereby seriously affecting the
substance of the principles themselves; but the need of a conciliatory
policy may, even more, provoke a substantial change of attitude toward
practical questions in a case where a shifting of the theoretical point
of view makes room for a substantial change.
Apart from all merely tactical expedients, the experience of the past
thirty years has led the German Marxists to see the facts of the labor
situation in a new light, and has induced them to attach an altered
meaning to the accepted formulations of doctrine. The facts have not
freely lent themselves to the scheme of the Marxist system, but the
scheme has taken on such a new meaning as would be consistent with the
facts. The untroubled Marxian economics, such as it finds expression in
the _Kapital_ and earlier documents of the theory, has no place and no
use for a trade-union movement, or, indeed, for any similar
non-political organisation among the working class, and the attitude of
the Social-Democratic leaders of opinion in the early days of the
party's history was accordingly hostile to any such movement,[16]--as
much so, indeed, as the loyal adherents of the classical political
economy. That was before the modern industrial era had got under way in
Germany, and therefore before the German socialistic doctrinaires had
learned by experience what the development of industry was to bring with
it. It was also before the modern scientific postulates had begun to
disintegrate the neo-Hegelian preconceptions as to the logical sequence
in the development of institutions.
In Germany, as elsewhere, the growth of the capitalistic system
presently brought on trade-unionism; that is to say, it brought on an
organised attempt on the part of the workmen to deal with the questions
of capitalistic production and distribution by business methods, to
settle the problems of working-class employment and livelihood by a
system of non-political, businesslike bargains. But the great point of
all socialist aspiration and endeavor is the abolition of all business
and all bargaining, and, accordingly, the Social Democrats were heartily
out of sympathy with the unions and their endeavors to make business
terms with the capitalist system, and make life tolerable for the
workmen under that system. But the union movement grew to be so serious
a feature of the situation that the socialists found themselves obliged
to deal with unions, since they could not deal with the workmen over the
heads of the unions. The Social Democrats, and therefore the Marxian
theorists, had to deal with a situation which included the union
movement, and this movement was bent on improving the workman's
conditions of life from day to day. Therefore it was necessary to figure
out how the union movement could and must further the socialistic
advance; to work into the body of doctrines a theory of how the unions
belong in the course of economic development that leads up to socialism,
and to reconcile the unionist efforts at improvement with the ends of
Social Democracy. Not only were the unions seeking improvement by
unsocialistic methods, but the level of comfort among the working
classes was in some respects advancing, apparently as a result of these
union efforts. Both the huckstering animus of the workmen in their
unionist policy and the possible amelioration of working-class
conditions had to be incorporated into the socialistic platform and into
the Marxist theory of economic development. The Marxist theory of
progressive misery and degradation has, accordingly, fallen into the
background, and a large proportion of the Marxists have already come to
see the whole question of working-class deterioration in some such
apologetic light as is shed upon it by Goldscheid in his
_Verelendungs-oder Meliorationstheorie_. It is now not an unusual thing
for orthodox Marxists to hold that the improvement of the conditions of
the working classes is a necessary condition to the advance of the
socialistic cause, and that the unionist efforts at amelioration must be
furthered as a means toward the socialistic consummation. It is
recognised that the socialistic revolution must be carried through not
by an anaemic working class under the pressure of abject privation, but
by a body of full-blooded workingmen gradually gaining strength from
improved conditions of life. Instead of the revolution being worked out
by the leverage of desperate misery, every improvement in working-class
conditions is to be counted as a gain for the revolutionary forces. This
is a good Darwinism, but it does not belong in the neo-Hegelian Marxism.
Perhaps the sorest experience of the Marxist doctrinaires has been with
the agricultural population. Notoriously, the people of the open country
have not taken kindly to socialism. No propaganda and no changes in the
economic situation have won the sympathy of the peasant farmers for the
socialistic revolution. Notoriously, too, the large-scale industry has
not invaded the agricultural field, or expropriated the small
proprietors, in anything like the degree expected by the Marxist
doctrinaires of a generation ago. It is contained in the theoretical
system of Marx that, as modern industrial and business methods gain
ground, the small proprietor farmers will be reduced to the ranks of the
wage-proletariat, and that, as this process of conversion goes on, in
the course of time the class interest of the agricultural population
will throw them into the movement side by side with the other
wage-workmen.[17] But at this point the facts have hitherto not come out
in consonance with the Marxist theory. And the efforts of the Social
Democrats to convert the peasant population to socialism have been
practically unrewarded. So it has come about that the political leaders
and the keepers of the doctrines have, tardily and reluctantly, come to
see the facts of the agrarian situation in a new light, and to give a
new phrasing to the articles of Marxian theory that touch on the
fortunes of the peasant farmer. It is no longer held that either the
small properties of the peasant farmer must be absorbed into larger
properties, and then taken over by the State, or that they must be taken
over by the State directly, when the socialistic revolution is
established. On the contrary, it is now coming to be held that the
peasant proprietors will not be disturbed in their holdings by the great
change. The great change is to deal with capitalistic enterprise, and
the peasant farming is not properly "capitalistic." It is a system of
production in which the producer normally gets only the product of his
own labor. Indeed, under the current regime of markets and credit
relations, the small agricultural producer, it is held, gets less than
the product of his own labor, since the capitalistic business
enterprises with which he has to deal are always able to take advantage
of him. So it has become part of the overt doctrine of socialists that
as regards the peasant farmer it will be the consistent aim of the
movement to secure him in the untroubled enjoyment of his holding, and
free him from the vexatious exactions of his creditors and the ruinous
business traffic in which he is now perforce involved. According to the
revised code, made possible by recourse to Darwinian concepts of
evolution instead of the Hegelian three-phase dialectic, therefore, and
contrary to the earlier prognostications of Marx, it is no longer held
that agricultural industry must go through the capitalistic mill; and it
is hoped that under the revised code it may be possible to enlist the
interest and sympathy of this obstinately conservative element for the
revolutionary cause. The change in the official socialist position on
the agricultural question has come about only lately, and is scarcely
yet complete, and there is no knowing what degree of success it may meet
with either as a matter of party tactics or as a feature of the
socialistic theory of economic development. All discussions of party
policy, and of theory so far as bears on policy, take up the question;
and nearly all authoritative spokesmen of socialism have modified their
views in the course of time on this point.