A Critical Examination of Socialism
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Title: A Critical Examination of Socialism
Author: W. H. Mallock
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Language: English
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A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SOCIALISM
by
W.H. MALLOCK
London
John Murray, Albemarle Street, W.
1908
Printed by
Hazell, Watson and Viney, Ld.,
London and Aylesbury.
PREFACE
The Civic Federation of New York, an influential body which aims, in
various ways, at harmonising apparently divergent industrial interests
in America, having decided on supplementing its other activities by a
campaign of political and economic education, invited me, at the
beginning of the year 1907, to initiate a scientific discussion of
socialism in a series of lectures or speeches, to be delivered under the
auspices of certain of the great Universities in the United States. This
invitation I accepted, but, the project being a new one, some difficulty
arose as to the manner in which it might best be carried out--whether
the speeches or lectures should in each case be new, dealing with some
fresh aspect of the subject, or whether they should be arranged in a
single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of
the cities visited by me. The latter plan was ultimately adopted, as
tending to render the discussion of the subject more generally
comprehensible to each local audience. A series of five lectures,
substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York,
Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. But whilst this plan
secured continuity of treatment, it secured it at the expense of
comprehensiveness. Certain important points had to be passed over. In
the present volume the substance of the original lectures has been
entirely rearranged and rewritten, and more than half the matter is new.
Even in the present volume, however, it has been impossible to treat the
subject otherwise than in a general way. At almost every point a really
complete discussion would necessitate a much fuller analysis of facts
than it has been practicable to give here. Arguments here necessarily
confined to a few pages or to a chapter, would each, for their complete
elucidation, require a separate monograph. Most readers, however, will
be able to supply much of what is missing, by the light of their own
common sense; and general arguments, in which, as in block plans of
buildings, many details are suppressed, have for practical purposes the
great advantage of being generally and easily intelligible, whereas, if
stated in fuller and more complex form, they might confuse rather than
enlighten a large number of readers.
The fact that the fundamental arguments of this volume were
disseminated throughout the United States, not only at the meetings
addressed, but also in all the leading newspapers, has had the valuable
result, by means of the mass of criticisms which they elicited, of
illustrating the manner in which socialists attempt to meet them; and
has enabled me to revise, with a view to farther clearness, certain
passages which were intentionally or unintentionally misunderstood, and
also to emphasise the curious confusions of thought into which various
critics have been driven in their efforts to controvert or get round
them. I may specially mention a small volume by Mr. G. Wilshire of New
York--a leading publisher and disseminator of socialistic
literature--which was devoted to examining my own arguments seriatim. To
the principal criticisms of this writer allusions will be found in the
following pages. Most of my socialistic opponents (though to this rule
there were amusing exceptions) wrote, according to their varying degrees
of intelligence and education, with remarkable candour, and also with
great courtesy. Mr. Wilshire, in particular, whilst seeking to refute my
arguments as a whole, admitted the force of many of them; and did his
best, in his elaborate _résumé_ of them, to state them all fairly.
The contentions, and even the phraseology of socialists are in all
countries (with the possible exception of Russia) identical. All are
vitiated by the same distinctive errors, and it is indifferent whether,
for purposes of detail criticism, we go to speakers and writers in this
country or America. Except for the correction of a few verbal errors
which have escaped my notice in the American edition, and which obscure
the meaning of perhaps four or five sentences, for the introduction of a
few additional notes, and for the translation of dollars and cents into
pounds and shillings, the English and the American editions are the
same.
W. H. M.
_January, 1908._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORICAL BEGINNING OF SOCIALISM AS AN OSTENSIBLY
SCIENTIFIC THEORY
Socialism an unrealised theory. In order to discuss it, it must
be defined.
Being of no general interest except as a nucleus of some general
movement, we must identify it as a theory which has united large
numbers of men in a common demand for change.
As the definite theoretical nucleus of a party or movement,
socialism dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, when
it was erected into a formal system by Karl Marx.
We must begin our examination of it by taking it in this, its
earliest, systematic form.
CHAPTER II
THE THEORY OF MARX AND THE EARLIER SOCIALISTS SUMMARISED
The doctrine of Marx that all wealth is produced by labour.
His recognition that the possibilities of distribution rest on
the facts of production.
His theory of labour as the sole producer of wealth avowedly
derived from Ricardo's theory of value.
His theory of capital as consisting of implements of production,
which are embodiments of past labour, and his theory of modern
capitalism as representing nothing but a gradual abstraction by
a wholly unproductive class, of these implements from the men
who made them, and who alone contribute anything to their
present productive use.
His theory that wages could never rise, but must, under
capitalism, sink all over the world to the amount which would
just keep the labourers from starvation, when, driven by
necessity, they will rebel, and, repossessing themselves of
their own implements, will be rich forever afterwards by using
them for their own benefit.
CHAPTER III
THE ROOT ERROR OF THE MARXIAN THEORY.
ITS OMISSION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY.
ABILITY AND LABOUR DEFINED
The theory of Marx analysed. It is true as applied to primitive
communities, where the amount of wealth produced is very small,
but it utterly fails to account for the increased wealth of the
modern world.
Labour, as Marx conceived of it, can indeed increase in
productivity in two ways, but to a small degree only, neither of
which explains the vast increase of wealth during the past
hundred and fifty years.
The cause of this is the development of a class which, not
labouring itself, concentrates exceptional knowledge and energy
on the task of directing the labour of others, as an author does
when, by means of his manuscript, he directs the labour of
compositors.
Formal definition of the parts played respectively by the
faculties of the labouring and those of the directing classes.
CHAPTER IV
THE ERRORS OF MARX, CONTINUED.
CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF ABILITY
Two kinds of human effort being thus involved in modern
production, it is necessary for all purposes of intelligible
discussion to distinguish them by different names.
The word "labour" being appropriated by common custom to the
manual task-work of the majority, some other technical word must
be found to designate the directive faculties as applied to
productive industry. The word here chosen, in default of a
better, is "ability."
Ability, then, being the faculty which directs labour, by what
means does it give effect to its directions?
It gives effect to its directions by means of its control of
capital, in the form of wage-capital.
Ability, using wage-capital as its implement of direction, gives
rise to fixed capital, in the form of the elaborate implements
of modern production, which are the material embodiments of the
knowledge, ingenuity, and energy of the highest minds.
CHAPTER V
REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY
The more educated socialists of to-day, when the matter is put
plainly before them, admit that the argument of the preceding
chapters is correct, and repudiate the doctrine of Marx that
"labour" is the sole producer.
Examples of this admission on the part of American socialists.
The socialism of Marx, however, still remains the socialism of
the more ignorant classes, and also of the popular agitator.
It is, moreover, still used as an instrument of agitation by
many who personally repudiate it. The case of Mr. Hillquit.
The doctrine of Marx, therefore, still requires exposure.
Further, it is necessary to understand this earlier form of
socialistic theory in order to understand the later.
CHAPTER VI
REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS, CONTINUED.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF DIRECTIVE
ABILITY.
THEIR NEW POSITION, AND THEIR NEW THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES
The more educated socialists of to-day, besides virtually
accepting the argument of the preceding chapters with regard to
labour, virtually accept the argument set forth in them with
regard to capital.
Mr. Sidney Webb, for example, recognises it as an implement of
direction, the only alternative to which is a system of legal
coercion.
Other socialists advocate the continued use of wage-capital as
the implement of direction, but they imagine that the situation
would be radically changed by making the "state" the sole
capitalist.
But the "state," as some of them are beginning to realise, would
be merely the private men of ability--the existing
employers--turned into state officials, and deprived of most of
their present inducements to exert themselves.
A socialistic state theoretically could always command labour,
for labour can be exacted by force; but the exercise of ability
must be voluntary, and can only be secured by a system of
adequate rewards and inducements.
Two problems with which modern socialism is confronted: How
would it test its able men so as to select the best of them for
places of power? What rewards could it offer them which would
induce them systematically to develop, and be willing to
exercise, their exceptional faculties?
CHAPTER VII
PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES.
ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS
How are the men fittest for posts of industrial power to be
selected from the less fit?
This problem solved automatically by the existing system of
private and separate capitals.
The fusion of all private capitals into a single state capital
would make this solution impossible, and would provide no other.
The only machinery by which the more efficient directors of
labour could be discriminated from the less efficient would be
broken. Case of the London County Council's steamboats.
Two forms which the industrial state under socialism might
conceivably take: The official directors of industry might be
either an autocratic bureaucracy, or they might else be subject
to elected politicians representing the knowledge and opinions
prevalent among the majority.
Estimate of the results which would arise in the former case.
Illustrations from actual bureaucratic enterprise.
Estimate of the results which would arise in the latter case.
The state, as representing the average opinion of the masses,
brought to bear on scientific industrial enterprise.
Illustrations.
The state as sole printer and publisher. State capitalism would
destroy the machinery of industrial progress just as it would
destroy the machinery by which thought and knowledge develop.
But behind the question of whether socialism could provide
ability with the conditions or the machinery requisite for its
exercise is the question of whether it could provide it with any
adequate stimulus.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY.
SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT
Mr. Sidney Webb, and most modern socialists of the higher kind,
recognise that this problem of motive underlies all others.
They approach it indirectly by sociological arguments borrowed
from other philosophers, and directly by a psychology peculiar
to themselves.
The sociological arguments by which socialists seek to minimise
the claims of the able man.
These founded on a specific confusion of thought, which vitiated
the evolutionary sociology of that second half of the nineteenth
century. Illustrations from Herbert Spencer, Macaulay, Mr. Kidd,
and recent socialists.
The confusion in question a confusion between speculative truth
and practical.
The individual importance of the able man, untouched by the
speculative conclusions of the sociological evolutionists, as
may be seen by the examples adduced in a contrary sense by
Herbert Spencer. This is partially perceived by Spencer himself.
Illustrations from his works.
Ludicrous attempts, on the part of socialistic writers, to apply
the speculative generalisations of sociology to the practical
position of individual men.
The climax of absurdity reached by Mr. Sidney Webb.
CHAPTER IX
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED.
ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE
The individual motives of the able man as dealt with directly by
modern socialists.
They abandon their sociological ineptitudes altogether, and
betake themselves to a psychology which they declare to be
scientific, but which is based on no analysis of facts, and
consists really of loose assumptions and false analogies.
Their treatment of the motives of the artist, the thinker, the
religious enthusiast, and the soldier.
Their unscientific treatment of the soldier's motive, and their
fantastic proposal based on it to transfer this motive from the
domain of war to that of industry.
The socialists as their own critics when they denounce the
actual motives of the able man as he is and as they say he
always has been. They attack the typically able man of all
periods as a monster of congenital selfishness, and it is men of
this special type whom they propose to transform suddenly into
monsters of self-abnegation.
Their want of faith in the efficacy of their own moral suasion
and their proposal to supplement this by the ballot.
CHAPTER X
INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE AND DEMOCRACY
Exaggerated powers ascribed to democracy by inaccurate thinkers.
An example from an essay by a recent philosophic thinker, with
special reference to the rewards of exceptional ability.
This writer maintains that the money rewards of ability can be
determined by the opinion of the majority expressing itself
through votes and statutes.
The writer's typical error. A governing body might enact any
laws, but they would not be obeyed unless consonant with human
nature.
Laws are obliged to conform to the propensities of human nature
which it is their office to regulate.
Elaborate but unconscious admission of this fact by the writer
here quoted himself.
The power of democracy in the economic sphere, its magnitude and
its limits. The demands of the minority a counterpart of those
of the majority.
The demand of the great wealth-producer mainly a demand for
power.
Testimony of a well-known socialist to the impossibility of
altering the character of individual demand by outside
influence.
CHAPTER XI
CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR SECULAR DEMOCRACY
The meaning of Christian socialism, as restated to-day by a
typical writer.
His just criticism of the fallacy underlying modern ideas of
democracy. The impossibility of equalising unequal men by
political means.
Christian socialism teaches, he says, that the abler men should
make themselves equal to ordinary men by surrendering to them
the products of their own ability, or else by abstaining from
its exercise.
The author's ignorance of the nature of the modern industrial
process. His idea of steel.
He confuses the production of wealth on a great scale with the
acquisition of wealth when produced.
The only really productive ability which he distinctly
recognises is that of the speculative inventor.
He declares that inventors never wish to profit personally by
their inventions. Let the great capitalists, he says, who merely
monopolise inventions, imitate the self-abnegation of the
inventors, and Christian socialism will become a fact.
The confusion which reigns in the minds of sentimentalists like
the author here quoted. Their inability to see complex facts and
principles, in their connected integrity, as they are. Such
persons herein similar to devisers of perpetual motions and
systems for defeating the laws of chance at a roulette-table.
All logical socialistic conclusions drawn from premises in which
some vital truth or principle is omitted. Omission in the
premises of the earlier socialists. Corresponding omission in
the premises of the socialists of to-day.
Origin of the confusion of thought characteristic of Christian
as of all other socialists. Temperamental inability to
understand the complexities of economic life. This inability
further evidenced by the fact that, with few exceptions,
socialists themselves are absolutely incompetent as producers.
Certain popular contentions with regard to modern economic life,
urged by socialists, but not peculiar to socialism, still remain
to be considered in the following chapters.
CHAPTER XII
THE JUST REWARD OF LABOUR AS ESTIMATED BY ITS ACTUAL PRODUCTS
Modern socialists admit that of the wealth produced to-day
labour does not produce the whole, but that some part is
produced by directive ability. But they contend that labour
produces more than it gets. We can only ascertain if such an
assertion is correct by discovering how to estimate with some
precision the amount produced by labour and ability
respectively.
But since for the production of the total product labour and
ability are both alike necessary, how can we say that any
special proportion of it is produced by one or the other?
J.S. Mill's answer to this question.
The profound error of Mill's argument.
Practically so much of any effect is due to any one of its
causes as would be absent from this effect were the cause in
question taken away. Illustrations.
Labour itself produces as much as it would produce were there no
ability to direct it.
The argument which might be drawn from the case of a community
in which there was no labour.
Such an argument illusory; for a community in which there was no
labour would be impossible; but the paralysis of ability, or its
practical non-existence possible.
Practical reasoning of all kinds always confines itself to the
contemplation of possibilities. Illustrations.
Restatement of proposition as to the amount of the product of
labour.
The product of ability only partially described by assimilating
it to rent.
Ability produces everything which would not be produced if its
operation were hampered or suspended.
Increased reward of labour in Great Britain since the year 1800.
The reward now received by labour far in excess of what labour
itself produces.
In capitalistic countries generally labour gets, not less, but
far more than its due, if its due is to be measured by its own
products.
It is necessary to remember this; but its due is not to be
measured exclusively by its own products.
As will be seen in the concluding chapter.
CHAPTER XIII
INTEREST AND ABSTRACT JUSTICE
The proposal to confiscate interest for the public benefit, on
the ground that it is income unconnected with any corresponding
effort.
Is the proposal practicable? Is it defensible on grounds of
abstract justice?
The abstract moral argument plays a large part in the
discussion.
It assumes that a man has a moral right to what he produces,
interest being here contrasted with this, as a something which
he does not produce.
Defects of this argument. It ignores the element of time. Some
forms of effort are productive long after the effort itself has
ceased.
For examples, royalties on an acted play. Such royalties herein
typical of interest generally.
Industrial interest as a product of the forces of organic
nature. Henry George's defence of interest as having this
origin.
His argument true, but imperfect. His superficial criticism of
Bastiat.
Nature works through machine-capital just as truly as it does in
agriculture.
Machines are natural forces captured by men of genius, and set
to work for the benefit of human beings.
Interest on machine-capital is part of an extra product which
nature is made to yield by those men who are exceptionally
capable of controlling her.
By capturing natural forces, one man of genius may add more to
the wealth of the world in a year than an ordinary man could add
to it in a hundred lifetimes.
The claim of any such man on the products of his genius is
limited by a variety of circumstances; but, as a mere matter of
abstract justice, the whole of it belongs to him.
Abstract justice, however, in a case like this, gives us no
practical guidance, until we interpret it in connection with
concrete facts, and translate the just into terms of the
practicable.
CHAPTER XIV
THE SOCIALISTIC ATTACK ON INTEREST AND THE NATURE OF ITS SEVERAL
ERRORS
The practical outcome of the moral attack on interest is
logically an attack on bequest.
Modern socialism would logically allow a man to inherit
accumulations, and to spend the principal, but not to receive
interest on his money as an investment.
What would be the result if all who inherited capital spent it
as income, instead of living on the interest of it?
Two typical illustrations of these ways of treating capital.
The ultimate difference between the two results.
What the treatment of capital as income would mean, if the
practice were made universal. It would mean the gradual loss of
all the added productive forces with which individual genius has
enriched the world.
Practical condemnation of proposed attack on interest.
Another aspect of the matter.
Those who attack interest, as distinct from other kinds of
money-reward, admit that the possession of wealth is necessary
as a stimulus to production.
But the possession of wealth is desired mainly for its social
results far more than for its purely individual results.
Interest as connected with the sustentation of a certain mode of
social life.
Further consideration of the manner in which those who attack
interest ignore the element of time, and contemplate the present
moment only.
The economic functions of a class which is not, at a given
moment, economically productive.
Systematic failure of those who attack interest to consider
society as a whole, continually emerging from the past, and
dependent for its various energies on the prospects of the
future.
Consequent futility of the general attack on interest, though
interest in certain cases may be justly subjected to special but
not exaggerated burdens.
CHAPTER XV
EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
Equality of opportunity, as an abstract demand, is in an
abstract sense just; but it changes its character when applied
to a world of unequal individuals.
Equality of opportunity in the human race-course. To multiply
competitors is to multiply failures.
Educational opportunity. Unequal students soon make
opportunities unequal.
Opportunity in industrial life. Socialistic promises of equal
industrial opportunities for all. Each "to paddle his own
canoe."
These absurd promises inconsistent with the arguments of
socialists themselves.
A socialist's attempt to defend these promises by reference to
employés of the state post-office.
Equality of industrial opportunity for those who believe
themselves possessed of exceptional talent and aspire "to rise."
Opportunities for such men involve costly experiment, and are
necessarily limited.
Claimants who would waste them indefinitely more numerous than
those who could use them profitably.
Such opportunities mean the granting to one man the control of
other men by means of wage-capital.
Disastrous effects of granting such opportunities to all or even
most of those who would believe themselves entitled to them.
True remedy for the difficulties besetting the problem of
opportunity.
Ruskin on human demands. Needs and "romantic wishes." The former
not largely alterable. The latter depend mainly on education.
The problem practically soluble by a wise moral education only,
which will correlate demand and expectation with the personal
capacities of the individual.
Relative equality of opportunity, not absolute equality, the
true formula.
Equality of opportunity, though much talked about by socialists,
is essentially a formula of competition, and opposed to the
principles of socialism.
CHAPTER XVI
THE SOCIAL POLICY OF THE FUTURE
THE MORAL OF THIS BOOK
This book, though consisting of negative criticism and analysis
of facts, and not trenching on the domain of practical policy
and constructive suggestion, aims at facilitating a rational
social policy by placing in their true perspective the main
statical facts and dynamic forces of the modern economic world,
which socialism merely confuses.
In pointing out the limitations of labour as a productive
agency, and the dependence of the labourers on a class other
than their own, it does not seek to represent the aspirations of
the former to participate in the benefits of progress as
illusory, but rather to place such aspirations on a scientific
basis, and so to remove what is at present the principal
obstacle that stands in the way of a rational and scientific
social policy.
A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SOCIALISM
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORICAL BEGINNING OF SOCIALISM AS AN OSTENSIBLY SCIENTIFIC THEORY
Socialism, whatever may be its more exact definition, stands for an
organisation of society, and more especially for an economic
organisation, radically opposed to, and differing from, the organisation
which prevails to-day. So much we may take for granted; but here, before
going further, it is necessary to free ourselves from a very common
confusion. When socialism, as thus defined, is spoken of as a thing that
exists--as a thing that has risen and is spreading--two ideas are apt to
suggest themselves to the minds of all parties equally, of which one
coincides with facts, while the other does not, having, indeed, thus far
at all events, no appreciable connection with them; and it is necessary
to get rid of the false idea, and concern ourselves only with the true.
The best way in which I can make my meaning clear will be by referring
to a point with regard to which the earlier socialistic thinkers may be
fairly regarded as accurate and original critics. The so-called orthodox
economists of the school of Mill and Ricardo accepted the capitalistic
system as part of the order of nature, and their object was mainly to
analyse the peculiar operations incident to it. The abler among the
socialists were foremost in pointing out, on the contrary, a fact which
now would not be denied by anybody: that capitalism in its present form
is a comparatively modern phenomenon, owing its origin historically to
the dissolution of the feudal system, and not having entered on its
adolescence, or even on its independent childhood, till a time which may
be roughly indicated as the middle of the eighteenth century. The
immediate causes of its then accelerated development were, as the
socialists insist, the rapid invention of new kinds of machinery, and
more especially that of steam as a motor power, which together
inaugurated a revolution in the methods of production generally.
Production on a small scale gave way to production on a large. The
independent weavers, for example, each with his own loom, were wholly
unable to compete with the mechanisms of the new factory; their looms,
by being superseded, were virtually taken away from them; and these men,
formerly their own masters, working with their own implements, and
living by the sale of their own individual products, were compelled to
pass under the sway of a novel class, the capitalists; to work with
implements owned by the capitalists, not themselves; and to live by the
wages of their labour, not by their sale of the products of it.
Such, as the socialists insist, was the rise of the capitalistic system;
and when once it had been adequately organised, as it first was, in
England, it proceeded, they go on to observe, to spread itself with
astonishing rapidity, all other methods disappearing before it, through
their own comparative inefficiency. But when socialists or their
opponents turn from capitalism to socialism, and speak of how socialism
has risen and spread likewise, their language, as thus applied, has no
meaning whatever unless it is interpreted in a totally new sense. For in
the sense in which socialists speak of the rise and spread of
capitalism, socialism has, up to the present time, if we except a number
of small and unsuccessful experiments, never risen or spread or had any
existence at all. Capitalism rose and spread as an actual working
system, which multiplied and improved the material appliances of life in
a manner beyond the reach of the older system displaced by it. It
realised results of which previously mankind had hardly dreamed.
Socialism, on the other hand, has risen and spread thus far, not as a
system which is threatening to supersede capitalism by its actual
success as an alternative system of production, but merely as a theory
or belief that such an alternative is possible. Let us take any country
or any city we please--for example, let us say Chicago, in which
socialism is said to be achieving its most hopeful or most formidable
triumphs--and we shall look in vain for a sign that the general
productive process has been modified by socialistic principles in any
particular whatsoever. Socialism has produced resolutions at endless
public meetings; it has produced discontent and strikes; it has hampered
production constantly. But socialism has never inaugurated an improved
chemical process; it has never bridged an estuary or built an ocean
liner; it has never produced or cheapened so much as a lamp or a
frying-pan. It is a theory that such things could be accomplished by the
practical application of its principles; but, except for the abortive
experiments to which I have referred already, it is thus far a theory
only, and it is as a theory only that we can examine it.
What, then, as a theory, are the distinctive features of socialism? Here
is a question which, if we address it indiscriminately to all the types
of people who now call themselves socialists, seems daily more
impossible to answer; for every day the number of those is increasing
who claim for their own opinions the title of socialistic, but whose
quarrel with the existing system is very far from apparent, while less
apparent still is the manner in which they propose to alter it. The
persons to whom I refer consist mainly of academic students, professors,
clergymen, and also of emotional ladies, who enjoy the attention of
footmen in faultless liveries, and say their prayers out of
prayer-books with jewelled clasps. All these persons unite in the
general assertion that, whatever may be amiss with the world, the
capitalistic system is responsible for it, and that somehow or other
this system ought to be altered. But when we ask them to specify the
details as to which alteration is necessary--what precisely are the
parts of it which they wish to abolish and what, if these were
abolished, they would introduce as a substitute--one of them says one
thing, another of them says another, and nobody says anything on which
three of them could act in concert.
Now, if socialism were confined to such persons as these, who are in
America spoken of as the "parlour socialists," it would not only be
impossible to tell what socialism actually was, but what it was or was
not would be immaterial to any practical man. As a matter of fact,
however, between socialism of this negligible kind--this sheet-lightning
of sentiment reflected from a storm elsewhere--and the socialism which
is really a factor to be reckoned with in the life of nations, we can
start with drawing a line which, when once drawn, is unmistakable.
Socialism being avowedly a theory which, in the first instance at all
events, addresses itself to the many as distinct from and opposed to the
few, it is only or mainly the fact of its adoption by the many which
threatens to render it a practical force in politics. Its practical
importance accordingly depends upon two things--firstly, on its
possessing a form sufficiently definite to unite what would otherwise be
a mass of heterogeneous units, by developing in all of them a common
temper and purpose; and, secondly, on the number of those who can be
taught to adopt and welcome it. The theory of socialism is, therefore,
as a practical force, primarily that form of it which is operative among
the mass of socialists; and when once we realise this, we shall have no
further difficulty in discovering what the doctrines are with which, at
all events, we must begin our examination. We are guided to our
starting-point by the broad facts of history.
The rights of the many as opposed to the actual position of the few--a
society in which all should be equal, not only in political status, but
also in social circumstances; ideas such as these are as old as the days
of Plato, and they have, from time to time in the ancient and the modern
world, resulted in isolated and abortive attempts to realise them. In
Europe such ideas were rife during the sixty or seventy years which
followed the great political revolution in France. Schemes of society
were formulated which were to carry this revolution further, and
concentrate effort on industrial rather than political change. Pictures
were presented to the imagination, and the world was invited to realise
them, of societies in which all were workers on equal terms, and groups
of fraternal citizens, separated no longer by the egoisms of the private
home, dwelt together in palaces called "phalansteries," which appear to
have been imaginary anticipations of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Here
lapped in luxury, they were to feast at common tables; and between meals
the men were to work in the fields singing, while a lady accompanied
their voices on a grand piano under a hedge. These pictures, however,
agreeable as they were to the fancy, failed to produce any great effect
on the multitudes; for the multitudes felt instinctively that they were
too good to be true. That such was the case is admitted by socialistic
historians themselves. Socialism during this period was, they say, in
its "Utopian stage." It was not even sufficiently coherent to have
acquired a distinctive name till the word "socialism" was coined in
connection with the views of Owen, which suffered discredit from the
failure of his attempts to put them into practice. Socialism in those
days was a dream, but it was not science; and in a world which was
rapidly coming to look upon science as supreme, nothing could convince
men generally--not even the most ignorant--which had not, or was not
supposed to have, the authority of science at the back of it.
Such being the situation, as the socialists accurately describe it, an
eminent thinker arose who at last supplied what was wanting. He provided
the unorganised aspirations, which by this time were known as socialism,
with a formula which was at once definite, intelligible, and
comprehensive, and had all the air of being rigidly scientific also. By
this means thoughts and feelings, previously vague and fluid, like salts
held in solution, were crystallised into a clear-cut theory which was
absolutely the same for all; which all who accepted it could accept with
the same intellectual confidence; and which thus became a moral and
mental nucleus around which the efforts and hopes of a coherent party
could group themselves.
Such was the feat accomplished by Karl Marx, through his celebrated
treatise on Capital, which was published between fifty and sixty years
ago, and which has, since then, throughout all Europe and America, been
acclaimed as the Magna Charta, or the Bible, of "scientific socialism."
Whatever may be the change which, as a theory, socialism has
subsequently undergone--and changes there have been which will presently
occupy our attention--it is with the theory of Marx, and the temper of
mind resulting from it, that socialism, regarded as a practical force,
begins; and among the majority of socialists this theory is predominant
still. In view, therefore, of the requirements of logic, of history, and
of contemporary facts, our own examination must begin with the theory of
Marx likewise.
CHAPTER II
THE THEORY OF MARX AND THE EARLIER SOCIALISTS SUMMARISED
All radical revolutions which are advocated in the interests of the
people are commended to the people, and the people are invited to
accomplish them, on the ground that majorities are, if they would only
realise it, capable of moulding society in any manner they please. As
applied to matters of legislation and government, this theory is
sufficiently familiar to everybody. It has been elaborated in endless
detail, and has expressed itself in the constitutions of all modern
democracies. What Karl Marx did, and did for the first time, was to
invest this theory of the all-efficiency of the majority with a
definiteness, in respect of distribution of wealth, similar to that with
which it had been invested already in respect of the making of laws and
the dictation of national policies.
The practical outcome of the scientific reasoning of Marx is summed up
in the formula which has figured as the premise and conclusion of every
congress of his followers, of every book or manifesto published by
them, and of every propagandist oration uttered by them at
street-corners, namely, "All wealth is produced by labour, therefore to
the labourers all wealth is due"--a doctrine in itself not novel if
taken as a pious generality, but presented by Marx as the outcome of an
elaborate system of economics.
The efficiency of this doctrine as an instrument of agitation is
obvious. It appeals at once to two universal instincts: the instinct of
cupidity and the instinct of universal justice. It stimulates the
labourers to demand more than they receive already, and it stimulates to
demand the more on the ground that they themselves have produced it. It
teaches them that the wealth of every man who is not a manual labourer
is something stolen from themselves which ought to be and which can be
restored to them.
Now, whatever may be the value of such teaching as a contribution to
economic science, it illustrates by its success one cardinal truth, and
by implication it bears witness to another. The first truth is that, no
matter how desirable any object may be which is obtruded on the
imagination of anybody, nobody will bestir himself in a practical way to
demand it until he can be persuaded to believe that its attainment is
practically possible. The other is this: that the possibilities of
redistributing wealth depend on the causes by which wealth is produced.
All wealth, says Marx, can practically be appropriated by the
labourers. But why? Because the labourers themselves comprise in their
own labour all the forces that produce it. If its production
necessitated the activity of any persons other than themselves, these
other persons would inevitably have some control over its distribution;
since if it were distributed in a manner of which these other persons
disapproved, it would be open to them to refuse to take part in its
production any longer; and there would, in consequence, be no wealth, or
less wealth, to distribute.
Let us, then, examine the precise sense and manner in which this theory
of labour as the sole producer of wealth is elaborated and defended by
Marx in his Bible of Scientific Socialism. His argument, though the
expression of it is very often pedantic and encumbered with superfluous
mathematical formulæ, is ingenious and interesting, and is associated
with historical criticism which, in spite of its defects, is valuable.
Marx was, indeed, foremost among those thinkers already referred to who
first insisted on the fact that the economic conditions of to-day are
mainly a novel development of others which went before them, and that,
having their roots in history, they must be studied by the historical
method. He recognised, however, that for practical purposes each age
must concern itself with its own environment; and his logical
starting-point is an analysis of wealth-production as it exists to-day.
He begins by insisting on the fact that labour in the modern world is
divided with such a general and such an increasing minuteness that each
labour produces one kind of product only, of which he himself can
consume but a small fraction, and often consumes nothing. His own
product, therefore, has for him the character of wealth only because he
is able to exchange it for commodities of other kinds; and the amount of
wealth represented by it depends upon what the quantity of other
assorted commodities, which he can get in exchange for it, is. What,
then, is the common measure, in accordance with which, as a fact, one
kind of commodity will exchange for any other, or any others? For his
answer to this question Marx goes to the orthodox economists of his
time--the recognised exponents of the system against which his own
arguments were directed--and notably, among these, to Ricardo; and,
adopting Ricardo's conclusions, as though they were axiomatic, he
asserts that the measure of exchange between one class of commodities
and another--such, for example, as cigars, printed books, and
chronometers--is the amount of manual labour, estimated in terms of
time, which is on an average necessary to the production of each of
them. His meaning in this respect is illustrated with pictorial
vividness by his teaching with regard to the form in which the measure
of exchange should embody itself. This, he said, ought not to be gold or
silver, but "labour-certificates," which would indicate that whoever
possessed them had laboured for so many hours in producing no matter
what, and which would purchase anything else, or any quantity of
anything else, representing an equal expenditure of labour of any other
kind.
Having thus settled, as it seemed to him beyond dispute, that manual
labour, estimated in terms of time, is the sole source and measure of
economic values or of wealth, Marx goes on to point out that, by the
improvement of industrial methods, labour in the modern world has been
growing more and more productive, so that each labour-hour results in an
increased yield of commodities. Thus a man who a couple of centuries ago
could have only just kept himself alive by the products of his entire
labour-day, can now keep himself alive by the products of half or a
quarter of it. The products of the remainder of his labour-day are what
Marx called a "surplus value," meaning by this phrase all that output of
wealth which is beyond what is practically necessary to keep the
labourer alive. But what, he asks, becomes of this surplus? Does it go
to the labourers who have produced it? No, he replies. On the contrary,
as fast as it is produced, it is abstracted from the labourer in a
manner, which he goes on to analyse, by the capitalist.
Marx here advances to the second stage of his argument. Capital, as he
conceives of it, is the tools or instruments of production; and modern
capital for him means those vast aggregates of machinery by the use of
which in most industries the earlier implements have been displaced.
Now, here, says Marx, the capitalist is sure to interpose with the
objection that the increased output of wealth is due, not to labour, but
to the machinery, and that the labourer, as such, has consequently no
claim on it. But to this objection Marx is ready with the following
answer--that the machinery itself is nothing but past labour in
disguise. It is past labour crystallised, or embodied in an external
form, and used by present labour to assist itself in its own operations.
Every wheel, crank, and connecting-rod, every rivet in every boiler,
owes its shape and its place to labour, and labour only. Labour,
therefore--the labour of the average multitude--remains the sole agent
in the production of wealth, after all.
Capital, however, as thus understood, has, he says, this
peculiarity--that, being labour in an externalised and also in a
permanent form, it is capable of being detached from the labourers and
appropriated by other people; and the essence of modern capitalism is
neither more nor less than this--the appropriation of the instruments of
production by a minority who are not producers. So long as the
implements of production were small and simple, and such that each could
be used by one man or family, the divorce between the labourer and his
implements was not easy to accomplish; but in proportion as these simple
implements were developed into the aggregated mechanisms of the factory,
each of which aggregates was used in common by hundreds and even by
thousands of labourers, the link between the implement and the user was
broken by an automatic process; for a single organised mechanism used by
a thousand men could not, in the nature of things, be owned by each one
of the thousand individually, and collective ownership by all of them
was an idea as yet unborn. Under these circumstances, with the growth of
modern machinery, the ownership of the implements of production passed,
by what Marx looked upon as a kind of historical fatality, into the
hands of a class whose activities were purely acquisitive, and had no
true connection with the process of production at all; and this class,
he said, constitutes the capitalists of the modern world.
The results of this process have, according to him, been as follows:
Society has become divided into two contrasted groups--an enormous
group, and a small one. The enormous group--the great body of every
nation--the people--the labouring mass--the one true producing
power--has been left without any implements by means of which its labour
can exert itself, and these implements have been monopolised by the
small group alone. The people at large, in fact, have become like the
employés of a single mill-owner, who have no choice but to work within
the walls of that mill or starve; and the possessing class at large has
become like the owner of such a single mill, who, holding the keys of
life and death in his hands, is able to impose on the mill-workers
almost any terms he pleases as the price of admission to his premises
and to the privilege of using his machinery; and the price which such an
owner, so situated, will exact (such was the contention of Marx)
inevitably must come, and historically has come, to this--namely, the
entire amount of goods which the labouring class produces, except such a
minimum as will just enable its members to keep themselves in working
order, and to reproduce their kind. Thus all capital, as at present
owned, all profits, and all interest on capital, are neither more nor
less than thefts from the labouring class of commodities which are
produced by the labouring class alone.
The argument of Marx is not, however, finished yet. There remains a
third part of it which we still have to consider. Writing as he did,
almost half a century ago, he said that the process of capitalistic
appropriation had not--yet completed itself. A remnant of producers on a
restricted scale survived, still forming a middle class, which was
neither rich nor poor. But, he continued, in all capitalistic countries,
a new movement, inevitable from the first, had set in, and its pace was
daily accelerating. Just as the earlier capitalists swallowed up most of
the small producers, so were the great capitalists swallowing up the
smaller, and the middle class which survived was disappearing day by
day. Wages, meanwhile, were regulated by an iron law. Under the system
of capitalism it was an absolute impossibility that they could rise. As
he put it, in language which has since become proverbial, "The rich are
getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class is being crushed out,"
and the time, he continued, was in sight already--it would arrive,
according to him, before the end of the nineteenth century--when nothing
would be left but a handful of idle and preposterous millionaires on the
one hand, and a mass of miserable ragamuffins who provided all the
millions on the other, having for themselves only enough food and
clothing to enable them to move their muscles and protect their
nakedness from the frost. Then, said Marx, when this contrast has
completed itself, the situation will be no longer tolerable. "Then the
knell of the capitalistic system will have sounded." The producers will
assert themselves under the pressure of an irresistible impulse; they
will repossess themselves of the implements of production of which they
have been so long deprived. "The expropriators will in their turn be
expropriated," and the labourers thenceforth owning the implements of
production collectively, all the wealth of the world will forever
afterwards be theirs.
This concluding portion of the gospel of Marx--its prophecies--has been
in many of its details so completely falsified by events that even his
most ardent disciples no longer insist on it. I have only mentioned it
here because of the further light which it throws on what alone, in
this discussion, concerns us--namely, the Marxian theory of labour as
the sole producer of wealth, and the absolute nullity, so far as
production goes, of every form of activity associated with the
possession of capital, or with any class but the labouring.
This theory of production, then, which has been the foundation of
socialism as a party--or, as Gronlünd, a disciple of Marx, calls it,
"its _idée mère_"--and which is still its foundation for the great
majority of socialists, we will now examine in detail, and, considering
how complex are the processes of production in the modern world, ask how
far it gives us, or fails to give us, even an approximately complete
account of them.
We shall find that, in spite of the plausibility with which the talent
of Marx invested it, this basic doctrine of so-called scientific
socialism is the greatest intellectual mare's-nest of the century which
has just ended; and when once we have realised with precision on what,
in the modern world, the actual efficiency of the productive process
depends, we shall see that the analysis of Marx bears about the same
relation to the economic facts of to-day that the child's analysis of
matter into the four traditional elements, or the doctrine of Thales
that everything is made of water, bears to the facts of chemistry as
modern science has revealed them to us.
CHAPTER III
THE ROOT ERROR OF THE MARXIAN THEORY.
ITS OMISSION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY.
ABILITY AND LABOUR DEFINED
In approaching the opinions of another, from whom we are about to
differ, we gain much in clearness if at starting we can find some point
of agreement with him. In the case of Marx we can find this without
difficulty, for the first observation which our subject will naturally
suggest to us is an admission that, within limits, his theory of
production is true. Whatever may be the agencies which are required to
produce wealth, human effort is one of them; and into whatever kinds
this necessary agency may divide itself, one kind must always be labour,
in the sense in which Marx understood it--in other words, that use of
the hands and muscles by which the majority of mankind have always
gained their livelihood.
It is, moreover, easy to point out actual cases in which all the wealth
that is produced is produced by labour only. The simplest of such cases
are supplied us by the lowest savages, who manage, by their utmost
exertions, to provide themselves with the barest necessaries. Such
cases show that labour, wherever it exists, produces at least a minimum
of what men require; for if it were not so there would be no men to
labour. Such cases show also another thing. The most primitive races
possess rude implements of some kind, which any pair of hands can
fashion, just as any pair of hands can use them. These rude implements
are capital in its embryonic form; and so far as they go, they verify
the Marxian theory that capital is nothing but past labour crystallised.
But we need not, in order to see labour, past and present, operating and
producing in a practically unalloyed condition, go to savage or even
semi-civilised countries. The same thing may be seen among groups of
peasant proprietors, which still survive here and there in the remoter
parts of Europe. These men and their families, by their own unaided
labour, produce nearly everything which they eat and wear and use. Mill,
in his treatise on _Political Economy_, gives us an account of this
condition of things, as prevailing among the peasants in certain
districts of Germany. "They labour early and late," he says, quoting
from a German eulogist. "They plod on from day to day and from year to
year, the most untirable of human animals." The German writer admires
them as men who are their own masters. Mill holds them up as a shining
and instructive example of the magic effect of ownership in intensifying
human labour. In any case such men are examples of two things--of
labour operating as the sole productive agency, and also of such labour
self-intensified to its utmost pitch. And what does the labour of these
men produce? According to the authority from which Mill quotes, it
produces just enough to keep them above the level of actual want. Here,
then, we have an unexceptionable example of the wealth-producing power
of labour pure and simple; and if we imagine an entire nation of men
who, as their own masters, worked under liked conditions, we should have
an example of the same thing on a larger and more instructive scale. We
should have a whole nation which produced only just enough to keep it
above the level of actual bodily want.
And now let us turn from production in an imaginary nation such as this,
and compare it with production at large among the civilised nations of
to-day. Nobody could insist on the contrast between the efficiency of
the two processes more strongly than do the socialists themselves. The
aggregate wealth of the civilised nations to-day is, they say, so
enormous--it consists of such a multitude of daily renewed goods and
services--that luxuries undreamed of by the labourer of earlier times
might easily be made as abundant for every household as water. In other
words, if we take a million men, admittedly consisting of labourers pure
and simple in the first place, and the same number of men exerting
themselves under modern conditions in the second place, the industrial
efforts of the second million are, hour for hour, infinitely more
productive than the industrial efforts of the first. If, for example, we
take the case of England, and compare the product produced per head of
the industrial population towards the close of the seventeenth century,
with the product produced less than two centuries afterwards, at the
time when Marx was writing his work on _Capital_, the later product
will, according to the estimate of statisticians, stand to the earlier
in the proportion of thirty-three to seven.
Now, if we adopt the scientific theory of Marx that labour pure and
simple is the sole producer of wealth, and that labour is productive in
proportion to the hours devoted to it, how has it happened--this is our
crucial question--that the amount of labour which produced seven at one
period should produce thirty-three at another? How are we to explain the
presence of the additional twenty-six?
The answer of Marx, and of those who reason like him, is that, owing to
the development of knowledge, mechanical and chemical especially, and
the consequent development of industrial methods and machinery, labour
as a whole has itself become more productive. But to say this is merely
begging the question. To what is this development of knowledge, of
methods, and of machinery due? Is it due to such labour as that of the
"untirable human animals," to which Mill refers as an example of labour
in its intensest form? In a word, does ordinary labour, or the
industrial effort of the majority, contain in itself any principle of
advance at all?
We must, in order to do justice to any theory, consider not only the
points on which its exponents lay the greatest stress, but also those
which they recognise as implied in it, or which we may see to be implied
in it ourselves. And if we consider the theory of Marx in this way, we
shall see that labour, in the sense in which he understands the word,
does contain principles of advance which are of two distinguishable
kinds.
One of these is recognised by Marx himself. Just as, when he says that
labour is the sole productive agency, he assumes the gifts of nature,
which provide it with something to work upon, so, when he conceives of
labour as the effort of hand and muscle, he assumes a human mind behind
these by which hand and muscle are directed. Such being the case, he
expressly admits also that mind is in some cases a more efficient
director than in others, and is able to train the hands and muscles of
the labourer, so that these acquire the quality which is commonly called
skill. Ruskin, who asserted, like Marx, that labour is the sole
producer, used in this respect a precisely similar argument. He defined
skill as faculty which exceptional powers of mind impart to the hands of
those by whom such powers are possessed, from the bricklayer who, in
virtue of mere alertness and patience, can lay in an hour more bricks
than his fellows, up to a Raphael, whose hands can paint a Madonna,
while another man's could hardly be trusted to distemper a wall evenly.
Now, in skill, as thus defined, we have doubtless a correct explanation
of how mere labour--the manual effort of the individual--may produce, in
the case of some men, goods whose value is great, and goods, in the case
of other men, whose value is comparatively small; and since some epochs
are more fertile in developed skill than others, an equal amount of
labour on the part of the same community may produce, in one century,
goods of greater aggregate value than it was able to produce in the
century that went before it. But these goods, whose superior value is
due to exceptional skill--or, as would commonly be said, to qualities of
superior craftsmanship--though they form some of the most coveted
articles of the wealth of the modern world, are not typical of it; and
from the point of view of the majority, they are the part of it which is
least important. The goods whose value is due to exceptional
craftsmanship--such as an illuminated manuscript, for example, or a vase
by Benvenuto Cellini--are always few in number, and can be possessed by
the few only. The distinctive feature of wealth-production in the modern
world, on the contrary, is the multiplication of goods relatively to the
number of the producers of them, and the consequent cheapening of each
article individually. The skill of the craftsman gives an exceptional
value to the particular articles on which his own hands are engaged. It
does not communicate itself to the labour of the ordinary men around
him. The agency which causes the increasing and sustains the increased
output of necessaries, comforts, and conveniences in the progressive
nations of to-day must necessarily be an agency of some kind or other
which raises the productivity of industrial exertion as a whole. Those,
therefore, who, in spite of the fact that the productivity of modern
communities has, relatively to their numbers, undergone an increase
which is general, still maintain that the sole productive agency is
labour, must seek for an explanation of this increase in some other fact
than skill.
And without transgressing the limits which the theory of Marx imposes on
us, such a further fact is very easy to find. Adam Smith opens his
_Wealth of Nations_ with a discussion of it. The chief cause, he says,
which in all progressive countries increases the productive power of the
individual labourer, is not the development among a few of
potentialities which are above the average, but a more effective
development of potentialities common to all, in consequence of labour
being divided, so that each man devotes his life to the doing of some
one thing. Thus if ten ordinary men were to engage in the business of
pin-making, each making every part of every pin for himself, each man
would probably complete but one pin in a day. But if each man makes one
part, and nothing else but that, thus repeating incessantly a single
series of motions, each will acquire the knack of working with such
rapidity that the ten together will make daily, not ten pins, but some
thousands. Here we have labour divided by its different applications,
but not requiring different degrees of capacity. We have the average
labour of the average man still. And here we have a fact which, unlike
the fact of skill--a thing in its nature confined to the few
only--affords a real explanation, up to a certain point, of how ordinary
labour as a whole, without ceasing to be ordinary labour, may rise from
a lower to a higher grade of efficiency.
But such simple divisions of labour as those which are here in question
fail, for a reason which will be specified in another moment, to carry
us far in the history of industrial progress. They do but bring us to
the starting-point of production as it exists to-day. The efficiency of
productive effort has made all its most astounding advances since the
precise time at which the _Wealth of Nations_ was written; and these
advances we shall find that it is quite impossible to explain merely by
a further division of average and equal labour. Such a further division
has no doubt been an element of the process; but it is an explanation
which itself requires explaining. Even in Adam Smith's time two other
factors were at work, which have ever since been growing in magnitude
and importance; and the secret of modern production lies, we shall find,
in these. I call them two, but fundamentally there is only one, for
that which is most obvious, and of which I shall speak first, is
explainable only as the direct result of the second. This, the most
obvious factor, is the modern development of machinery. The other is the
growing application of exceptional mental powers, not to the _manual
labour of the men by whom these powers are possessed_, but to the
_process of directing and co-ordinating the divided labours of others_.
Now, as to machinery, Marx and his followers, as we have seen, maintain
that it represents nothing but the average labour of the past; and so
long as it exists only in its smaller and simpler forms, the devising
and constructing of which are not referable to any faculties which we
are able to distinguish from those of the average labourer, we have
further seen that the theory of Marx holds good. Labour produces alike
both the finished goods and its implements. But in proportion as
machines or other contrivances, such as vessels, grow in size or
complexity, and embody, as they do in their more modern developments,
ingenuity of the highest and knowledge of the most abstruse kinds, the
situation changes; and we are able to identify certain faculties as
essential to the ultimate result, which affect the work of the
labourers, but which do not emanate from themselves. Any three men of
average strength and intelligence might make a potter's wheel together,
or build a small boat together, as they frequently do now, their
several tasks being interchangeable, or assigned to each of them by easy
mutual agreement. The business of directing labour has not separated
itself from the actual business of labouring. Each man knows the object
of what he does, and can co-ordinate that object with the object of what
is done by his fellows. But when the ultimate result is something so
vast and complicated that a thousand men instead of three have to
co-operate in the production of it, when a million pieces of metal, some
large and some minute, have to be cast, filed, turned, rolled, or bent,
so that finally they may all coalesce into a single mechanical organism,
no one labourer sees further than the task which he performs himself. He
cannot adjust his work to that of another man, who is probably working a
quarter of a mile away from him, and he has in most cases no idea
whatever of how the two pieces of work are related to each other. Each
labourer has simply to perform his work in accordance with directions
which emanate from some mind other than his own, and the whole practical
value of what the labourers do depends on the quality of the directions
which are thus given to each.
In other words, in proportion as the industrial process is enhanced in
productivity by the concentration on it of the higher faculties of
mankind, there is an increasing fission of this process as a whole into
two kinds of activity represented by two different groups. We have no
longer _merely_--although we have this _still_--an increasing division
of labour; but we have the labourers of all kinds and grades separating
themselves into one group on the one hand, and the men who direct their
labour, as a separate group, on the other hand.
The function of the directive faculties, as applied thus to the
operations of modern labour, can perhaps be most easily illustrated by
the case of a printed book. Let us take two editions of ten thousand
copies each, similarly printed, and priced at six shillings a copy; the
one being an edition of a book so dull that but twenty copies can be
sold of it, the other of a book so interesting that the public buys the
whole ten thousand. Now, apart from its negligible value as so many tons
of waste paper, each pile of books represents economic wealth only in
proportion to the quantity of it for which the vendors can find
purchasers. Hence we have in the present case two piles of printed paper
which, regarded as paper patterned with printer's ink, are similar, but
one of which is wealth to the extent of three thousand pounds, while the
other is wealth to the extent of no more than six pounds. And to what is
the difference between these two values due? It obviously cannot be due
to the manual labour of the compositors, for this, both in kind and
quantity, is in each case the same. It is due to the special directions
under which the labour of the compositors is performed. But these
directions do not emanate from the men by whose hands the types are
arranged in a given order.
They come from the author, who conveys them to the compositors through
his manuscript; which manuscript, considered under its economic aspect,
is neither more nor less than a series of minute orders, which modify
from second to second every movement of the compositors' hands, and
determine the subsequent results of every impress of the type on paper;
one mind thus, by directing the labour of others, imparting the quality
of much wealth or of little or of none, to every one of the ten thousand
copies of which the edition is composed.
Similarly when a man invents, and brings into practical use, some new
and successful apparatus such, let us say, as the telephone, the same
situation repeats itself. The new apparatus is an addition to the
world's wealth, not because so many scraps of wood, brass, nickel,
vulcanite, and such and such lengths of wire are shaped, stretched, and
connected with sufficient manual dexterity--for the highest dexterity is
very often employed in the making of contrivances which turn out to be
futile--but because each of its parts is fashioned in obedience to
certain designs with which this dexterity, as such, has nothing at all
to do. The apparatus is successful, and an addition to the world's
wealth, because the designs of the inventor, just like the author's
manuscript, constitute a multitude of injunctions proceeding from a
master-mind, which is not the mind of those by whose hands they are
carried into execution.
And with the direction of labour generally, whether in the production of
machinery or the use of the machinery in the production of goods for the
public, the case is again the same. We have manual labour of a given
kind and quality, which assists in producing what is wanted or not
wanted--what is so much wealth or simply so much refuse, in accordance
with the manner in which all this labour is directed by faculties
specifically different from those exercised by the manual labourers
themselves.
And now we are in a position to sum up in a brief and decisive formula
what the difference between the sets of faculties thus contrasted is. It
is not essentially a difference between lower and higher, for some forms
of labour, such as that of the great painter, may be morally higher than
some forms of direction. The difference is one not of degree, but of
kind, and includes two different psycho-physical processes. Labour, from
the most ordinary up to the rarest kind, _is the mind or the brain of
one man affecting that man's own hands_, and the single task on which
his hands happen to be engaged. The directive faculties are _the mind or
the brain of one man simultaneously affecting the hands of any number of
other men_, and through their hands the simultaneous tasks of all of
them, no matter how various these tasks may be.
CHAPTER IV
THE ERRORS OF MARX, CONTINUED.
CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF ABILITY
The human activities and faculties, then, which are involved in the
production of modern wealth, are not, as Marx says--and as the orthodox
economists said, whom he rightly calls his masters, and as their
followers still say--of one kind--namely, those embodied in the
individual task-work of the individual, to which Marx, Ricardo, and Mill
alike give the name of "labour"; they are of two kinds. And this,
indeed, the earlier economists recognised, as we may see by Mill's
casual admission that the progress of industrial effort depends before
all things on thought and the advance of knowledge. But they recognised
the fact in a general way only. How thought and knowledge affected the
industrial process they made no attempt to explain, otherwise than by
comprehending them on occasion under the common name of labour, which
they assigned throughout most of their arguments to manual task-work
only.
Now, it is doubtless true that, as a mere matter of verbal propriety,
this general sense may be given to the word "labour," if we please; but
if in discussing the efforts which produce wealth we admit that these
efforts are not of one kind but two, and if the word "labour" is, in
nine cases out of ten, employed with the definite intention of
designating only one of them, it is impossible to reason about the
industrial process intelligibly, so long as we apply also the same name
to the other. We might as well use the word "man"--as with reference to
some problems we are perfectly right in doing--to designate both men and
women, and then attempt to discuss the relations between the two sexes.
For the directive faculties, so essentially distinct from those to which
universal custom has allocated the name of labour, it is difficult to
find a name equally convenient and satisfying. In default of a better, I
have, on former occasions, applied to it the name of Ability; and this
will serve our purpose here--especially as it is a name which has been,
of recent years, applied by many of the more thoughtful socialists
themselves to certain activities of a mental and moral kind, which their
conception of labour cannot be made to include, but which they are
beginning to recognise as playing some part in production. We must
remember, however, that we are using it in a strictly technical sense,
which will in some respects be narrower than the ordinary, and in some
more comprehensive. It will exclude all kinds of cleverness unapplied
to economic production; and will include many powers, in so far as such
production is affected by them, to the expression of whose scope and
character it may sometimes appear inadequate.[1]
And now when we have come thus far, a quite new question arises. We have
seen how ability is, by its direction of labour, the chief agency in
that process which produces wealth to-day, and how it makes the amount
produced, relatively to the number of the producers, so incomparably
greater than it ever was under any previous system. We have now to
consider the means by which this faculty of direction is exercised.
In order to understand this, we must turn our attention again to
capital, as something distinct and detached from the human efforts that
have produced it; and we shall find that the conception of it which
dominated the thought of Marx, and that which dominates the thought of
the orthodox school of economists, either excludes altogether, or fails
to reveal the nature of, that particular force and function of it which,
in the modern world, are fundamental.
Capital is divided traditionally into two kinds, technically called
"fixed" and "circulating." By fixed capital, which is what Marx had
mainly in view, is meant machinery, and the works and structures
connected with it; and it is called "fixed" on account of its
comparative permanence. By circulating capital is meant, as Adam Smith
puts it, any stock of those consumable commodities which, produced by
the aid of machinery, the merchant or the store-keeper buys in order to
sell them at a profit; and it is called "circulating" because the
commodities which are sold to-day are replaced by new ones of an
equivalent kind to-morrow.
Now, as to fixed capital, or the endlessly elaborated machinery of the
modern world, we have seen already that this is, in its distinctive
features, not, as Marx declared it to be, a crystallisation of labour,
but a crystallisation of the ability by which labour has been directed;
but this revised explanation tells us nothing of the means by which the
direction is accomplished. Still less is any light thrown on the
question by the nature of circulating capital, as Adam Smith understands
it.
The kind of capital which alone concerns us here is a kind which
resembles circulating capital in respect of its material form, and is
often indeed in this respect identical with it; but it differs from
circulating capital in respect of the use made of it. Such capital we
may call wage-capital. Wage-capital, although in practice it disguises
itself under the form of money, is essentially a stock of goods which
are the daily necessaries of life, but which, instead of being sold to
the public, like the goods of the store-keeper, at a profit, are
distributed by their possessor among a special group of labourers on
conditions. The first of these is naturally that the labourers do work
of some sort. The second condition, and the one that concerns us here,
is that, besides doing work of some sort, each labourer shall do the
work which the distributer of the goods prescribes to him.
Here we have before us the means by which, in the modern world, the
ability of the few directs the labour of the many; and, in proportion to
the quality and intensity of the directive powers that are exercised,
adds to the value of the results which this labour would have produced
otherwise. Thus in wage-capital we have the capital of the modern world
in what dynamically is its primary and parent form--a kind of capital
which improved machinery is always tending to augment, but of whose use
the machinery itself, its renewal, and its continued improvement, are
the consequences.
That such is the case might be illustrated by any number of familiar
examples. A man invents a new machine having some useful purpose--let us
say the production of some new kind of manure, which will double the
fertility of every field in the country. In order to put this machine on
the market, and make it a fact instead of a mere conception, the first
thing necessary is, as every human being knows, that the inventor shall
possess, or acquire, the control of capital. And what is the next step?
When the capital is provided, how will it first be used? It will be used
in the form of wages, or articles of daily consumption, which will be
distributed among a certain number of mechanics and other labourers, on
condition that they set about fashioning, in certain prescribed groups,
so much metal into so many prescribed shapes--some of them shaping it
into wheels, some into knives and rollers, some into sieves, rods,
cranks, cams, and eccentrics, in accordance with patterns which have
never been followed previously; and of all these individual operations
the new machine, as a practical implement, is the result. The machine is
new, and it is an addition to the wealth-producing powers of the world,
not because it embodies so much labour, but because it embodies so much
labour directed in a new way; and it is only by means of the conditions
which the possession of wage-capital enables the inventor or his
partners to impose upon every one of the labourers that the machine, as
a practical implement, comes into existence at all.
Hence we see that Marx was at once right and wrong when he said that
modern capitalism is, in its essence, monopoly. It is monopoly; but it
is not primarily, as Marx thought, a passive monopoly of improved
instruments of production. It is primarily a monopoly of products which
are essential to the life of the labourer; and it is a monopoly of
these, not in the invidious sense that the monopolists retain them for
their own personal consumption, as they do in the case of rare wines and
fabrics, which can, from the nature of the case, be enjoyed by a few
only. It is a monopoly of them in the sense that the monopolists have
such a control over their distribution as enables them to control the
purely technical actions of those persons who ultimately own and consume
the whole of them.[2]
Modern capital, then, I repeat, is primarily wage-capital, such capital
as modern machinery being the direct result of its application; and
wage-capital is productive, not in virtue of any quality inherent in
itself, but merely because as a fact, under the modern system, it
constitutes the reins by which the exceptional ability of a few guides
the labour, skilled or unskilled, of the many. It is the means by which
the commonest labourer, who hardly knows the rule of three, is made to
work as though he were master of the abstruest branches of mathematics;
by which the artisan who only has a smattering--if he has as much as
that--of mechanics, metallurgy, chemistry, is made to work as though all
the sciences had been assimilated by his single brain.
Let any one consider, for example, one of the great steel bridges which
now throw their single spans over waters such as the Firth of Forth.
These structures are crystallised labour, doubtless, but they are, in
their distinctive features, not crystallised labour as such. They are
crystallised mechanics, crystallised chemistry, crystallised
mathematics--in short, crystallised intellect, knowledge, imagination,
and executive capacity, of kinds which hardly exist in a dozen minds out
of a million; and labour conduces to the production of such astonishing
structures only because it submits itself to the guidance of these
intellectual leaders. And the same is the case with modern production
generally. Though labour is essential to the production of wealth even
in the smallest quantities, the distinguishing productivity of industry
in the modern world depends not on the labour, but on the ability with
which the labour is directed; and in the modern world the primary
function of capital is that of providing ability with its necessary
instrument of direction.
No unprejudiced person, who is capable of coherent thought, can, when
the matter is thus plainly stated, possibly deny this. That it cannot be
denied will be shown in the two following chapters by recent admissions
on the part of socialists themselves, the more thoughtful of whom have
now virtually abandoned the earlier theoretical framework of socialism
altogether, and are trying to substitute a new one, with which we will
deal later, and which will indeed prove the main subject of our
inquiry.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] When I insisted on this distinction between "labour" and "ability"
in America, innumerable critics met me with two objections. One of
these, as stated by a writer who confessed himself otherwise in entire
agreement with me, was this: "It is impossible, as Mr. Mallock attempts
to do, to draw a hard-and-fast line between mental effort and muscular."
No such attempt is made. As I pointed out in one of my speeches, many
kinds of "labour" (_e.g._ that of the great painter) exhibit higher
mentality than do many kinds of ability. Further, I pointed out that, in
a technical sense, the same effort may be either an effort of labour or
ability, according to its application. Thus, if a singer sings to an
audience, his effort is technically "labour," because it ends with the
single task; but if he sings so as to produce a gramophone record, his
effort is an act of "ability," for he influences the products of other
men, by whom the records are multiplied. The second objection was
expressed by one of my critics thus: "I say that all productive effort
is labour.... I dare you to tell any one of these genii that they are
not labourers." Another critic said: "Just as 'land' in economics means
all the forces of nature, so does 'labour' mean all the forces of man.
Why, then, speak of ability?" These criticisms are purely verbal. If we
like to take "labour" as a collective name for all forms of human
effort, we can of course do so; but in that case we must find other
differential names for the different forces of effort individually. To
give them all the same name is not to explain them. It is to tie them
all up in a parcel.
[2] If this fact requires any further exemplification, we can find one
on a large scale in the pages of Marx himself. According to him the
first appreciable capitalistic movement--the first leaping of the modern
system in the womb--took place in the English cloth trade about four
hundred years ago. Now, if capitalism were merely, as according to Marx
it is, a passive monopoly by some men of implements which have been
produced by others, the pioneers of capitalism in the reign of Henry
VIII. would have got into their possession all the hand-looms then in
use; they would have taken their toll in kind from all whom they allowed
to use them; and there the matter would have ended. The looms of to-day
would be the looms of four hundred years ago. The passive ownership of
machines does nothing to improve their construction. If a gang of
ignorant thieves could steal all the watches in America, and then let
them out to the public at so much a month or year, this would not
convert the three-dollar watches into chronometers. And how little mere
labour, or the experience gained by labour, tends to improve the
implements which the labourer uses is shown by the fact that the looms
which wove Anne Boleyn's petticoats were practically the same as the
looms which wove those of Semiramis.
CHAPTER V
REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY
In saying that, up to the point which our argument has thus far reached,
the more thoughtful among the socialists to-day concede and even assert
its truth, I have evidence in view of a very opposite kind. When I
delivered, as I did recently, a series of addresses on socialism to
various meetings in America, I approached the subject in the manner in
which I have approached it here. I began with the process of production
pure and simple, and I showed how crude and childish, as applied to
production in modern times, was the analysis of Marx and all the earlier
socialists. I showed, as I have shown here, that, the amount of labour
being given, the quantity and quality of wealth that will result from
its exercise depend on the ability with which by means of wage-capital
this labour is directed.
The two addresses in which these points were elaborated had no sooner
been delivered than, from all parts of the country, through newspapers
and private letters, and sometimes by word of mouth, socialists of
various types addressed themselves to the business of replying to me.
These replies, whatever may have been their differences otherwise, all
took the form of a declaration that I was only wasting my time in
exposing the doctrine that labour is the sole producer of wealth, and in
laying such stress on the part played by directive ability; for no
serious socialist of the present day any longer believed the one, or
failed to recognise the other. Thus one of my critics told me that what
I ought to do was "to discuss the principles of socialism as understood
and accepted by the intelligent disciples, and not the worn-out and
discredited theories of Marx." Another was good enough to tell me that I
had "cleverly accomplished the task of exposing the errors of Marx, both
of premise and of logic"; but the leaders of socialistic thought "in its
later developments" had, he proceeded to say, long ago outgrown these. A
third wrote me a letter bristling with all kinds of challenges, and
asked me if I thought, for example, that socialists were such fools as
not to recognise that the talents of an inventor like Mr. Edison
increased the productivity of labour by the new direction which they
gave to it. I might multiply similar quotations, but one more will be
enough here. It is taken from a long article directed against myself by
Mr. Hillquit--a writer to whom my special attention was called as by far
the most accomplished exponent, among the militant socialists of
America, of socialism in its most logical and most highly developed
form. "It requires," said Mr. Hillquit, "no special genius to
demonstrate that all labour is not alike, nor equally productive. It is
still more obvious that common manual labour is impotent to produce the
wealth of modern nations--that organisation, direction, and control are
essential to productive work in the field of modern production, and are
just as much a factor in it as mere physical effort."[3]
But we need not confine ourselves to my own late critics in America. The
general history of socialism as a reasoned theory is practically the
same in one country as in another. The intellectual socialists in
England, among whom Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Sidney Webb are prominent,
express themselves in even plainer terms with regard to the part which
directive ability, as opposed to labour, plays in the modern world.
"Ability," says Mr. Shaw, employing the very word, is often the factor
which determines whether a given industry shall make a loss of five per
cent. or else a profit of twenty; and Mr. Webb, as we shall have
occasion to see presently, carries the argument further, and states it
in greater detail.
Why, then, it may be asked, should a critic of contemporary socialism
think it worth while to expose with so much minuteness a fallacy which
intellectual socialists now all agree in repudiating, and to insist with
such emphasis on facts which they profess to recognise as self-evident?
To this question there are two answers.
One of these I indicated at the close of our opening chapter; and this
at the cost of what in logic is a mere digression, it will be desirable,
for practical purposes, to state it with greater fulness.
Admissions and assertions, such as those which I have just now quoted,
do, no doubt, represent a definite intellectual advance which has taken
place in the theory of socialism, among those who are its most
thoughtful exponents, and in a certain sense its leaders. They represent
what these leaders think and say among themselves, and what they put
forward when disputing with opponents who are competent to criticise
them. But what they do not represent is socialism as still preached to
the populace, or the doctrine which is still vital for socialists as a
popular party. This is still, just as it was originally, the socialism
of Marx in an absolutely unamended form. It is the doctrine that the
manual efforts of the vast multitude of labourers, directed only by the
minds of the individual labourers themselves, produce all the wealth of
the world; that the holding of any of this wealth by any other class
whatever stands for nothing but a system of legalised plunder; and that
the labourers need only inaugurate a legislation of a new kind in order
to secure and enjoy what always was by rights their own. Let me
illustrate this assertion by two examples, one supplied to us by
England, the other by America.
In England the body which calls itself the Social Democratic Federation,
and represents at this moment socialism of the more popular kind, began
its campaign with a manifesto which was headed with the familiar words,
"All wealth is due to labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is
due." This text or motto was followed by certain figures, with regard to
the total income of Great Britain, and the manner in which it is at
present distributed. Labour was represented as getting less than
one-fourth of the whole, and the labourers were informed that if they
would but "educate themselves, agitate, and organise," the remaining
three-fourths would automatically pass into their possession. This
document, it is true, was issued some twenty years ago;[4] but that the
form which socialism takes, when addressed to the masses of the
population, has not appreciably altered from that day to this, will be
made sufficiently clear by the following pertinent fact. Shortly after
my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active
disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a
challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most
important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and
republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these--and it
was signalised by an accompanying advertisement as fundamental--bore the
impressive title of, "Why the Working Man should be a Socialist," and
the answer to this question is given in the writer's opening words. "You
know," he says, addressing any labourer and the street-worker, "or you
ought to know, that you alone produce all the good things of life; and
you know, or you ought to know, that by so simple a process as that of
casting your ballot intelligently you will be able"--to do what? The
writer explains himself in language which, except for a difference in
his statistics, is almost a verbal repetition of that of his English
predecessors. He specifies two sums, one representing the income which
each working-man in America would receive were the entire wealth of the
country divided equally among the manual labourers; the other
representing the income which, on an average, he actually receives as
wages; and the writer tells every working man that, by "merely casting
his ballot intelligently," he can secure for himself the whole
difference between the larger sum and the less.[5]
But the fact that the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of
labour, and the consequent economic nullity of all other forms of
effort, still supplies the main ideas by which popular socialism is
vitalised, is shown perhaps even more distinctly by the popular hopes
and demands which result from this doctrine indirectly than it is by the
direct reassertion of the formal doctrine itself. One of the members of
the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the
polls by a letter to the _Times_, proclaiming that socialism was a
moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to
socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich,
was the achievement of "economic freedom," or, in other words, the
"emancipation of labour," or, in other words again, the abolition of the
system which he described as "wagedom." I merely mention the particular
letter in question in order to remind the reader of these familiar
phrases, which are current in every country where the theory of
socialism has spread itself.
Now, what does all this talk about the emancipation of labour mean? It
can only mean one or other of two things: either that the economic
prosperity of every nation in the future will depend on the emancipation
of every average mind from the guidance of any minds that are in any way
superior to itself, or are able to enhance the productivity of an
average pair of hands--a proposition so ludicrous that nobody would
consciously assent to it; or else it means a continued assent to the
theory which fails to correlate labour with directive ability at all,
and so never raises the question of whether the latter is necessary or
no.
What, then, becomes of that chorus of vehement protestations, with which
my critics in America were all so eager to overwhelm me, to the effect
that socialists to-day recognise as clearly as I do that "common manual
labour," as Mr. Hillquit puts it, "is impotent to produce the wealth of
modern nations," apart from the "organisation and control" of the minds
most competent to direct it? That the more intellectual socialists of
to-day do recognise this fact--some with greater and some with less
distinctness--is the very point on which I am anxious to insist. We
shall have abundant opportunities for considering it later on. For the
moment, however, I pause to ask them the following question.
Recognising, as they do, and eagerly proclaiming as they do, whenever
they address themselves to those who are capable of serious dispute with
them, that the original theory of socialism, which was the creed of such
bodies as the International, is absolutely false in itself, and in many
of the expectations which it stimulates, why do not they set themselves,
whenever they address the multitude, to expose and repudiate a fallacy
in which they no longer believe? Do they do this? Do they make an
attempt to do this? On the contrary, as a rule, though there are
doubtless many honourable exceptions, they endeavour to hide from the
multitude their intellectual change of front altogether; and, instead of
insisting that the undirected labour of the many is, in the modern
world, impotent to produce anything, they continue to speak of it as
though it produced everything, and as though no class other than the
labouring fulfilled any economic function or had any right to exist.[6]
Let me give the reader an example, which is curiously apt here. It is
taken from Mr. Hillquit's own attack on myself, which filled the front
sheet of a newspaper, and was distributed to the public at the door of
one of the buildings in which I spoke. Of the short passages, amounting
to some twenty lines out of six hundred, in which alone he condescended
to detailed argument, the first is that in which, as we have already
seen, he declares that all socialists know, without any instruction on
my part, that common manual labour, unless it is directed by ability, is
"impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations." But having made this
admission with much blowing of trumpets, he immediately drops it, and
instead of developing its consequences, he diverts the attention of his
readers from it by a long series of irrelevancies; nor does he return to
the question of directive ability at all till he is nearing the end of
his discourse, when he suddenly takes it up again, declaring that he
will meet and refute me on ground which I myself have chosen, and show
that wealth--at all events in the commercial sense--is still produced by
manual labour alone. He refers to my selection of the case of a printed
book, as illustrating, in the manner explained in an earlier chapter,
the part which directive ability plays in modern production. The
economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader
will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of
compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author
imposes on this labour through his manuscript--the author's mind being
typical of directive ability generally. And what has Mr. Hillquit--the
intellectual Ajax of the socialists--got to say about this? "Whether a
book," he says, "is a work of genius or mere rubbish will largely affect
its literary or artistic value; but it will have very little bearing on
its economic or commercial value." This, he goes on to argue, will,
despite all my objections, be found to depend on ordinary manual labour,
of which the labour of the hands of the compositors is that which
concerns us most. Nothing, according to him, can be more evident than
this. "For the market price," he says, "of a wretched detective story,
of the same length as Hamlet, and printed in the same way, will be
exactly the same as that of a copy of Hamlet itself."
Now, if we consider Mr. Hillquit as a purely literary critic, we can but
admire his subtlety in discovering that the literary value of a book is
largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish; but when
he descends from pure criticism to economics, it is difficult, unless we
suppose him to have taken leave of his senses, to imagine that he can
himself believe in the medley of nonsense propounded by him. For what
he is here doing--or more probably pretending to do--is to confuse the
cost of producing an edition of a book with the commercial value of that
edition when produced. The labour in question no doubt determines the
price at which the printed paper can be sold at a profit, or without
loss; but the number of copies which the public will be willing to buy,
or, in other words, the value of the edition commercially, depends on
qualities resident in the mind of the author, which render the book
attractive to but few readers, or to many. Whether these qualities
amount to genius in the higher sense of the word, or to nothing more
than a knack of titillating the curiosity of the vulgar, does not affect
the question. In either case--and this is the sole important fact--they
are qualities of the author's mind, and of the author's mind alone; and
the labour of the compositors conduces to the production of a pile of
volumes which is of large, of little, or of no value commercially, not
according to the dexterity with which this labour is performed, but
according to the manner in which the author's mind directs it.
Than any human being who is capable of perceiving that the literary
quality of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not
being rubbish, should seriously suppose that the saleable value of
editions--whether they are editions of a popular novel, or of a treatise
on the conchology of Kamchatka, is proportionate to the number of
letters in them arranged in parallel lines--for Mr. Hillquit's argument
means neither more nor less than this--is, let me repeat, incredible.
What, then, is the explanation of his indulging in a performance of this
degrading kind? The explanation is that he, like so many of his
colleagues, though recognising personally that labour among "modern
nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who
direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his
appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers;
and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that
directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he
endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to
convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he
actually manages to wind up with a repetition of the old Marxian moral
that the profits of ability mean nothing but labour which has not been
paid for.[7]
One of my reasons, then, for beginning the present examination of
socialism with exposing the fallacy of principles which the intellectual
socialists of to-day are so eager to proclaim that they have long since
abandoned, is the fact that these principles are still the principles of
the multitude; that for practical purposes they are those which most
urgently require refutation; and that the intellectual socialists who
have doubtless repudiated them personally, not only do not attempt to
discredit them in the eyes of the ignorant, but themselves continue to
appeal to them as instruments of popular agitation.
My other reason for following the course in question is that the theory
of socialism in its higher and more recent forms, which recognises
directive intellect in addition to manual effort as one of the forces
essential to the production of modern wealth, cannot be understood and
estimated in any profitable way, without a previous examination of those
earlier doctrines and ideas, some of which it still retains, while it
modifies and rejects others.
And now let us take up again the thread of our main argument. We laid
this down early in the present chapter, having emphasised the fact that,
the intellectual socialists of to-day agree, on their own admission,
with one proposition at all events which has been elucidated in this
volume--namely, that labour alone, as one of their spokesmen puts it,
"is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," the faculties and
the functions of the minority by whom labour is directed and organised
being no less essential to the result than the labour of the majority
itself. In the following chapter we shall see that this agreement
extends yet further.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Mr. Hillquit--a lawyer, who has adopted the business of propagating
socialism in America--is unknown in England; but his name, not long ago,
was to be found in the English papers, as that of one of the
representatives sent from America to a recent Socialistic Congress in
Europe. Amongst the socialists of the United States he holds a position
analogous to that enjoyed by Mr. Shaw, Mr. Webb, and Mr. Ramsey
Macdonald in England.
[4] Whilst this work was in the press a "Catechism," lately published in
England, for use of children, was sent me. It was proposed to use this
Catechism on Sundays in the London County Council Schools. The first
economic "lesson" in it begins thus: "Who creates all wealth? The
working-class. Who are the workers? Men who work for wages." All who are
not wage-workers are declared in this catechism to be absolutely idle
and not productive.
[5] The writer of this leaflet, Mr. Wilshire, has subsequently declared
in his published criticisms of myself, that I impute to socialists what
no socialists really say, and contends that, when he thus speaks of
"working-men" and "labourers," he includes all men who contribute
anything to the productive forces of a country--inventors like Mr.
Edison, and millionaire captains of industry, in so far as they are
active agents, and not mere recipients of interest. But that such is not
the meaning which he conveys, or desires to convey, to those to whom his
leaflet addresses itself, is plainly shown by his statistics, if by
nothing else; for the share of the national income, which goes, as he
asserts, to "labour," is avowedly the amount which, according to his
estimate, is paid to-day in America, as weekly wages to the mass of
manual labourers. To say that labour _in its more extended sense_ is the
producer of all wealth, is a mere meaningless platitude. It is to say
that there would be no wealth without effort of some kind. Does Mr.
Wilshire seriously wish us to believe that he is telling Mr. Edison that
"if he will only cast his ballot intelligently" he will be able to
treble his income at the expense of richer men?
[6] This applies to England no less than to America. Whenever any one of
the more educated amongst the socialistic agitators is taxed with
maintaining the popular doctrines of socialism with regard to labour, he
at once repudiates them, and accuses his opponents of imputing to him
and his fellows childish fallacies which no one in his senses would
maintain; but the propagation of these fallacies amongst the more
ignorant sections of the population continues just the same.
[7] According to Mr. Hillquit, Dickens, for example, made his whole
fortune by robbing his compositors.
CHAPTER VI
REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS, CONTINUED.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF CAPITAL AS THE IMPLEMENT OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY.
THEIR NEW POSITION, AND THEIR NEW THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES
The reader will remember how, having first elucidated the part which
exceptional mental faculties, concentrated on the direction of labour,
and here called ability, play in modern production, I proceeded to
the question of the means by which this direction is accomplished,
and showed that these were supplied by the possession of
wage-capital--capitalism thus representing no mere passive monopoly, but
a system of reins which are attached to innumerable horses, and are
useless except as vehicles of the skill with which the coachmen handle
them. We shall find that by implication, if not always by direct
admission, the intellectual socialists of to-day are in virtual but
unacknowledged agreement with this further portion of the present
argument also.
In order to demonstrate that such is the case, let me briefly call
attention to a point on which we shall have to dwell at much greater
length presently--namely, that these socialists, though they reject the
theory of production on which morally and intellectually the earlier
socialism based itself, persist in making promises to the labourers
precisely of the same kind as those with which the earlier socialism
first whetted their appetites. In especial besides promising them
indefinitely augmented wealth, they continue to promise them also some
sort of _economic emancipation_; and many of these socialists, in
explicit accord with their predecessors, declare that what they mean by
emancipation is the entire abolition of the wage-system.
Prominent among this number are Mr. Sidney Webb and his colleagues, who
are certainly the best educated group of socialistic thinkers in
England. Mr. Webb, in particular, is a man of conspicuous talent, and
few writers can afford a more favourable illustration than he does of
the lines along which the socialistic theory of society is compelled, by
the exigencies of logical thought, to develop itself. Now, in proposing
to abolish the wage-system, Mr. Webb and his fellow-theorists do not do
so without specifying a definite substitute; and when we come to
consider what their substitute is, we shall find that it implies, on
their part, a full recognition of the function which wage-capital, as
the instrument of ability, performs in modern production.
Now, the reader must observe that, in indicating the nature of the
function in question--namely, that of providing a means by which the
process of direction may be accomplished--and in showing how under the
existing system wage-capital is what actually performs it, I never for a
moment implied that wage-capital was the only means by which the same
result might be accomplished. Indeed, if we look back into the past
history of mankind, we shall find that there are two systems other than
that of wages, by which the conformity of labour to the requisite
directions of ability, not only might be, but actually has been secured.
One of these is the corvée system prevalent in the Middle Ages. The
other system is that of slavery. Under the corvée system, peasants were
the proprietors of the plots of ground on which they lived, and were
thus able to maintain themselves by working at their own discretion; but
they were compelled by their tenure to place a certain part of their
time at the disposal of their feudal superior, and to work according to
his orders. If only a number of otherwise independent peasants could be
forced to give enough of their time to the proprietor of a factory
to-day, the entire use of wage-capital would in his case be gone. The
same thing is true of slavery. Like the peasant proprietor, who gives
part of his time to his overlord, the slave is provided with the
necessaries of life independently of his obedience to the detailed
orders of his master. His master feeds him just as he would feed an
animal; the industrial obedience is insured by the subsequent
application of force.
These two coercive systems are the only alternatives to the wage-system
that have ever been found workable in the past history of the world. We
will now consider the system which some of the most thoughtful
socialists of to-day are proposing as a substitute for it in the
hoped-for socialistic future. The school of English socialists, of which
Mr. Webb is the best-known member, have given to the world a volume
called _Fabian Essays_. This volume was republished in America, and to
the American edition a special preface was prefixed with a view to
emphasising the essentials of a socialistic conception of society, and
bringing the details of the socialistic theory up to date. In this
preface it is stated, with regard to the apportionment of material
wealth generally, that "the only truly socialistic scheme" is one which
"will absolutely abolish all economic distinctions, and prevent the
possibility of their ever again arising." And how would it accomplish
this end? "By making," says the writer, "an equal provision for all an
indefeasible condition of citizenship, without any regard whatever to
the relative specific services of the different citizens. The rendering
of such services on the other hand," the writer goes on, "instead of
being left to the option of the citizen, with the alternative of
starvation (as is the case under the wage-system) would be secured
under one uniform law of civic duty, precisely like other forms of
taxation or military service."
Such, then, is the system which is put forward by educated socialists
to-day as the only means of escape from the existing system of wages.
And an escape from the wage-system--and one not theoretically
impracticable--it no doubt is; but an escape into what? It is an escape
into one of those systems which I have just now mentioned. That is to
say, it is an escape into economic slavery. For the very essence of the
position of the slave, as contrasted with the wage-paid labourer, is, so
far as the direction of his industrial actions is concerned, that he has
not to work as he is bidden in order to gain a livelihood, but that, his
livelihood being assured him no matter how he behaves himself, he is
obliged to work as he is bidden in order to avoid the lash, or some
other form of equally effective punishment.[8]
Now, I am not attempting here to find any fault with socialism on the
ground that it would, on the admission of some of its most thoughtful
exponents, be obliged to re-establish slavery as the price of
emancipation from "wagedom." I have commented on this fact solely with
the view to showing that the nature of the alternative to the
wage-system thus proposed indicates a full recognition, on the part of
those proposing it, of the nature and necessity of the functions which
the wage-system performs at present--namely, that of supplying the means
by which the ablest minds in the community secure from the mass of the
citizens the punctual performance of the industrial tasks required of
them. I am not even insisting that such a slave-system as Mr. Webb
contemplates is logically essential to the theory of intellectual
socialism at all. On the contrary, as may be seen from a letter
addressed to myself by a member of a socialistic body at Chicago, many
socialists, as to this matter, are opposed to Mr. Webb altogether.
Socialists, says my correspondent, speaking for himself and his
associates, have no objection whatever to the system of "wagedom" as
such; nor do they wish to see the direction of labour "enforced by the
power of the law." They recognise, he says, quoting my own words, that
production under socialism, just as under the present system, will be
efficient in proportion as labour is directed by the best minds "which
can enhance the productivity of an average pair of hands." They object
to the wage-system only in so far as it is a means by "which the
employing class can make a profit out of the labourers"; and the only
change which in this respect socialists desire to introduce is to
transfer the business of wage-paying from the private capitalist to the
state--the state which will have no "private interests to serve," and
consequently no temptation to appropriate any profits for itself.
Socialists, he continues, subject to this proviso, would leave the
wage-system just as it is now. The state would pay those who worked, and
in accordance with the work they did; but the idle or refractory it
would "leave to starve to death, if they so elected, unless somebody
wished to keep them alive, as happens at the present time."
The difference between socialists with regard to this question, however,
does nothing in itself to discredit the socialistic theory as a whole.
It has merely the effect of providing us with two sets of witnesses
instead of one to the truth of a common principle, which is recognised
by both equally. One set declares that the ability of the most competent
men must direct the labours of the majority by means of an appeal to
their fears; the other declares that the same result must be
accomplished, as it is at the present time, by an appeal to their choice
and prudence. In either case it is admitted that the separate manual
tasks performed by the majority of the citizens must be directed and
co-ordinated by the most competent minds somehow; and that the process
of direction must have some system at the back of it, by means of which
the orders issued to each labourer can be enforced--this system being
either a continuation of that which is in existence now, or another
which would to most people be in many ways more distasteful.
The socialists of to-day, in admitting that such is the case, have at
last placed themselves in a line with the sober realities of life, and
in doing so have assimilated their own analysis of production to the
analysis set forth in the beginning of the present volume.
Apart from the fact that, according to their constructive programme,
private capitalism would be abolished, and the sole capitalist would be
the state, the socialistic system of production, as they have now come
to conceive of it, would, in respect of the vital forces involved, be
merely the existing system continued under another name, with a
directing minority composed of exceptional men on the one hand, and a
majority composed of directed men on the other. But in the minds of many
socialistic thinkers the simplicity of the situation is obscured by the
vagueness of the ideas which they associate with the phrase "the state."
For them these ideas are like a fog, into which private capitalism
disappears, and in which the forces represented by it lose all definite
character. The state, however, is in reality nothing but a collection of
individuals; and if the state, besides being a political body, is to
become the sole industrial capitalist also, state capitalism, just like
private capitalism, will succeed or fail in proportion to the talents of
those to whom capital is intrusted as a means of directing the
labourers.
If, then, in any capitalistic country, such as Great Britain or America,
the business of production could become socialised to-morrow, the best
that could possibly happen would be the transformation of the present
employers into so many state officials, who industrially would be the
state itself. The only difference would be that they would have lost all
personal interest in the pecuniary results of the talents which they
would still be expected to exercise.[9]
Now, if such a transformation of circumstances could be suddenly
effected to-morrow, without any corresponding change in the dispositions
of these men themselves, there is theoretically no reason for supposing
that the process of production might not continue to be as efficient as
it is now, so long as this precise situation lasted. But it could not
last. It would be transitory in its very nature. The present generation
of industrial directors would die, and in order that the efficiency of
the state as the director of labour might be maintained, other men would
have to be discovered who were possessed of equal ability in the first
place, and who in the second could be trusted or compelled to use it
unremittingly to the utmost, in the absence of the main motive which has
actuated such men hitherto.
Apart from the problems involved in these two requirements, neither the
theory of production which is put forward, nor the productive system
which is advocated, by the intellectual socialists of to-day, contains
anything with which theoretically the most uncompromising of their
opponents could quarrel. It is on these two problems that everything
will be found to turn--one being the problem of how, under the
conditions which socialism would introduce, the ablest men could be
discovered, and invested according to their efficiency with the
requisite industrial authority; the other being the problem of how,
under the same conditions, it would be possible to secure from such men
that full exertion of their talents, on which the material prosperity of
the entire community would depend.
For socialists these two problems may be said to be practically new. So
long as socialism based itself on the Marxian theory of production, the
selection, and the subsequent conduct of the men who would compose the
industrial state presented no appreciable difficulties. For the state
would, according to this theory, be in no sense the director of the
labourers; it would merely be their humble servant. It would be like an
old woman who sat all day long in a barn, counting, sorting, and making
up into equal shares the different products brought in to her by her
sons, who worked out of her sight in a dozen different fields; or,
to quote the words of one of my late socialistic correspondents,
the functions of the industrial state would be "simply
industrial-clerical." The industrial state would consist of clerks and
shop-boys, the former of whom added up accounts, while the latter
weighed, sorted, and handed out goods over a counter. If the industrial
state were to be nothing more than this, the selection of an adequate
personnel would doubtless present no difficulties. But as soon as the
socialistic theory recognises that the industrial state, instead of
being the mere receiver and dispenser of products produced by labour,
would represent the intellectual forces by which every process of labour
is directed, the problems of how the individuals who compose the state
are to be chosen, and of how the continuous exertion of their highest
faculties is to be secured, become the fundamental problems which
socialists are called upon to consider.
If we assume that under the régime of socialism a nation could always
secure, as the official directors of its labour, the men whose ability
would enable them to direct it to the best advantage, and could force
these men to exert their exceptional faculties to the utmost, the
exaction of obedience to their orders from the common labouring
citizens, let me say once more, would present no theoretical difficulty.
But the task of securing the requisite ability itself is of a wholly
different kind. Let us consider why.
Any one armed with an adequate implement of authority, whether the
control of the means of subsistence or the power of inflicting
punishment, can secure, within limits, from any ordinary man the
punctual performance of any ordinary manual task, and the performance of
it in a prescribed way; but he is able to do this for the following
reasons only: So far as ordinary labour is concerned, any one man, by
simply observing another, can tell with approximate accuracy what the
other man can do--whether he can trundle a wheel-barrow, hit a nail on
the head, file a casting, or lay brick on brick. Further, the director
of labour knows the precise nature of the result which he requires in
each case that the individual labourer shall accomplish. Hence he can
exact from each labourer conformity to the injunctions laid on him, in
respect both of the general character and the particular application of
his efforts. But in respect of the faculties distinctive of those
exceptional men by whom alone ordinary labour can be directed to the
best advantage, both these conditions are wanting. It is impossible to
tell that any man of ability possesses any exceptional faculties for
directing labour at all, unless he himself chooses to show them; and,
indeed, until circumstances supply him with some motive for showing
them, he may very well not be aware that he possesses such faculties
himself. Moreover, even if he gives the world some reason to suspect
their existence, the world at large will not know what he can do with
them, and will consequently be unable to impose on him any definite
task. A pressgang could have forced Columbus to labour as a common
seaman; but not all the population of Europe could have forced him to
discover a world beyond the Atlantic; for the mass of his
contemporaries, until his enterprise proved successful, obstinately
refused to believe that there was such a world to discover.
The men, therefore, on the exercise of whose directive ability the
productive efficiency of a modern nation depends, would occupy, with
regard to any nation organised on socialistic principles, a position
fundamentally different from that of the ordinary labourer. The exercise
of their distinctive powers, unlike those of the labourer, could never
be secured by coercion; because neither the nation at large, nor any
body of representatives, could possibly know that these powers existed
until the possessors of them chose to reveal the secret. They could not
be made to reveal it. They could only be induced to do so; and they
could only be induced to do so by a society which was so constituted as
to offer for an exceptional performance some exceptional reward, just as
a reward is offered for evidence against an unknown murderer. The reward
at present offered them is the possession of some exceptional share of
the wealth to the production of which their efforts have exceptionally
contributed; and, hence, since it is the object of all socialistic
schemes to render the achievement of such a reward impossible, we shall
find that the ultimate problem for socialists of the modern school is
how to discover another which in practice will be equally efficacious.
But though this is the ultimate problem, it is very far from being the
only one which the theory of socialism in its modern form raises.
Directive ability, which is a compound of many faculties, varies greatly
in degree and kind. Its value, if tested by the results of its actual
application to labour, would in some cases be immense, in other cases
very small, and in others it would be a minus quantity. Thus, even if we
suppose that the exercise of it is so far its own reward that all who
believe themselves to possess it--and these are a very large
number--will, for the mere pleasure of exercising it, be eager to gain
the positions which will make its exercise possible, the problem would
remain of how to discriminate those who would, as industrial directors,
achieve the greatest successes, from those who would bring about nothing
but relative or absolute failure. This problem of how, under a régime of
socialism, ability could be so tested that the practical means of
direction could be granted to or withheld from it, according to its
actual efficiency, is the problem which we will consider first; for
though of secondary importance as compared with the problem of motive,
it is in more immediate connection with the details of daily business.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The economic condition of the great mass of the population, which
this "up-to-date" socialist contemplates, is precisely analogous to that
of the Helots in Sparta, whose subsistence was secured independently of
their specific services, whilst their services to the directing class
were wrung from them by a system of iron discipline.
[9] While these pages were in the hands of the printers, a work was
published by an American socialist, in which it is asserted that the
socialisation of America would consist at first of this precise
process--namely, the conversion of all the existing active employers and
directors of labour into the salaried servants of some state department.
CHAPTER VII
PROXIMATE DIFFICULTIES. ABLE MEN AS A CORPORATION OF STATE OFFICIALS
For the moment, then, we will waive the problem of motive altogether; we
will assume that a society which denied to its able men any pecuniary
reward proportionate to the magnitude of its products could provide them
with a motive of some kind--we need not inquire what--which would prompt
them still to exert themselves as eagerly as they do now; and we will
merely consider how, a multitude of such men being given, the most
efficient of them could be constantly selected as the official directors
of labour, and the rest, in proportion to their inefficiency, be either
dismissed or excluded. In order to realise the difficulties which, in
this respect, socialism would have to face, let us consider the manner
in which the problem is solved now.
Under the system of private capitalism it solves itself by an automatic
process. In order that any man may direct the labour of other men, he
must, under that system, be the possessor or controller of so much
wage-capital. Now this capital--this implement of direction--in
proportion as it is employed, disappears, and is reproduced only by a
subsequent sale of the products resulting from the labour in the
direction of which it has been expended. Thus a man, we will say,
invents a new engine for motor-cars, and devotes to the production of
twenty engines of the kind all the capital which he possesses--namely,
two thousand guineas. Apart from the raw material out of which the
engines are to be constructed, his whole expenditure will consist in
paying wages to certain labourers, on condition that they work up this
metal in a manner which he prescribes to them. For the raw metal he
pays, we will say, a hundred pounds, or the odd shillings of the
guineas. He pays to twenty labourers a hundred pounds apiece as wages;
and the result is twenty engines. If the engines are successful, and if
the public will give him a hundred and fifty guineas for each of them,
the man has got his entire capital back again, with a thousand guineas
added to it, and can continue his direction of labour by means of wages,
on the same lines, and on a much more extended scale. But if the
engines, when tried, develop some inherent defect, and he consequently
can sell none of them, he may still, perhaps, get back the price of the
raw metal--a petty sum, insufficient for his own needs--but his whole
wage-capital will be gone, and with it his power of directing any
further labour in the future. In other words, under the system of
private capitalism, if labour has been directed by any man in an
unsuccessful way, the resulting products being such that nobody cares to
buy them, or in exact proportion as this result is approached, the man's
implement of direction passes out of his hands altogether; and the
simple fact of his having directed labour ill deprives him of the means
of directing or of misdirecting it again.
But under a system of state socialism the situation would be wholly
changed. Private capitalism is, in this respect, self-acting, and acts
with absolute accuracy, because wage-capital being divided into a
multitude of independent reservoirs, its waste at any one point brings
about its own remedy. Each reservoir is like a mill-pond which
automatically begins to dry up whenever its contents are employed in
actuating a useless mill; and the man who has wasted his water is able
to waste no more. But the moment the divisions between the reservoirs
are broken down, and the separate capitals contained in them become, as
would be the case under socialism, fused together like the waters of a
single lake, the director of labour who so misused any portion of this
fluid stock that the products of labour, as directed by him, failed to
replace the wages, would not thereby be incapacitated from continuing
his misdirections further; for the wage-capital dissipated by his
incompetence could, under these conditions, always be replaced, and its
loss more or less concealed, by fresh supplies which had a really
different origin. It was only in consequence of conditions resembling
these that the London County Council was enabled to continue for so long
its service of Thames steamboats, in spite of the fact that the labour
thus employed failed to reproduce, by the functions which it performed
for the public, more than a fraction of capital which was necessarily
consumed in its maintenance. Had labour been thus misdirected by any
private capitalist, his misdirection of it would have soon been checked
by his loss of the means of continuing it; but the County Council, with
the purse of the community at its back, was able, by taxing the
industrial successes of others, to refinance and prolong its own
industrial failure.
Socialists wholly overlook the importance of these considerations. Many
of them, for example, in the case of the London County Council's
steamboats, defended that enterprise in spite of its financial failure,
on the ground that the steamboats were a convenience to certain
travellers at all events, who in all probability were persons of modest
means, while the loss would be made good out of the pockets of the
ratepayers who were presumably rich. But even if this argument were
plausible as applied to a state of society in which the incomes of some
men were greater than those of others, it would be absolutely
inapplicable to conditions such as those desired by socialists, under
which the incomes of all would be fractions, approximately equal, of a
common stock to the production of which all contributed. For it must
surely be apparent to even the meanest intelligence that whatever
diminished the aggregate amount to be divided would diminish the
fraction of it which falls to the share of each; and it ought to be
equally apparent, though to many people it is not, that the labour of
any labourer which is directed in such a way that the men consume more
articles of utility than they produce, or fail to produce as many as
they would do if directed better, has this precise effect of diminishing
the divisible total, by making it either less than it has been or less
than it would be otherwise.[10]
Thus, in cases such as that of the London County Council's steamboats,
the efficiency of labour is so lessened by incompetent direction that
the labourers employed can only perform for society one-half of the
services which society must perform for them. For every hour which they
spend in conveying ten men on the river, twenty men must work to provide
them with food and clothing. So long as fortunes are unequal, and depend
on individual effort and enterprise, such losses may be localised and
obscured in a hundred different ways; but the moment all fortunes, as
they would be under the régime of socialism, were reduced to specific
fractions of the aggregate product of the community, any decline in the
efficiency of the labour of any single group would result in a
diminution of the income of every member of all the others. Wherever ten
men were employed to do what might have been done by nine, the
contribution to the general stock would be less by ten per cent. than it
might have been. If ten men were employed in making chairs, which might
have been made by nine had their labour been better directed, the
community would lose the cushions which in that case would have been
made by the tenth. And what holds good of labour in respect of its
productive efficiency holds good of it also in respect of the character
of the goods produced. If ten men were employed in producing forty
loaves when all that could be eaten was twenty, not only would the
remaining twenty be wasted, but the community would lose the butter
which might have been made instead of them. The importance, therefore,
to the community as a whole of having every branch of its labour
directed by those men, and by those men only, whose ability would raise
it to the highest pitch of efficiency, and cause it to produce only such
goods and such quantities of them as would satisfy from moment to moment
the needs and tastes of the population, would, under a régime of
socialism, be even more general and immediate than it is at the present
day; and yet at the same time, for reasons to which we will now return,
the difficulty of securing the requisite ability would be increased.
It is impossible to illustrate in detail the situation which would thus
arise; for the state, as sole capitalist and sole director of labour, is
an institution which imaginably might take various forms; and
socialists, in this case exhibiting a commendable prudence, have
refrained from committing themselves to any detailed programme. The
socialistic state, however, having to perform a double
function--namely, that of political governor and universal director of
industry--would necessarily be divided into two distinct bodies. One of
these, consisting of statesmen and legislators, would, we may assume, be
elected by the votes of the people. But the other, consisting of
industrial experts--the inventors, the chemists, the electricians, the
naval engineers, the organisers of labour--might conceivably be in the
first or the second of the two following positions: They might either be
left free, as they are under the existing system, to do severally the
best they can, according to their own lights, in estimating what goods
or services the population wants, and in satisfying these wants with
such increasing economy that new goods and services might be continually
added to the old. They might be left free to promote or dismiss
subordinates, to fill up vacancies, and take new men into partnership,
very much as the heads of private firms do now. Or else they might be
liable, in greater or less degree, to removal or supersession, and
interference with their technical operations, on the part of the
political body, whose members, while representing the general ideas of
the community, would presumably not be experts in the direction of its
particular industries.
Now, let us suppose first that the official directors of labour are left
practically free to follow their own devices. The situation which will
arise may be illustrated by the following imaginary case: The nation,
let us say, requires two sister ships. They are built in different
yards, under two different directors, and a thousand labourers are
employed in the construction of each; but while the labourers who work
under one director take a year to complete their task, those who work
under the other complete theirs within ten months. This would mean for
the community that, through the inferiority of the former of these two
officials, two months' labour of the national shipwrights had been lost;
and the public interest would require that the industrial regiment
commanded by him should as quickly as possible pass out of his control
into that of an official who could render it more efficient than he. And
under the existing system this, as we have seen already, is precisely
what sooner or later would be brought about automatically. The
inefficient director, in proportion to his relative inefficiency, loses
his customers, and can direct labour no longer, or is obliged to direct
it on a very much reduced scale. But if each director of labour owed, as
he would do under socialism, his means of directing it, not to the
results of his individual efficiency, but to a single common
source--namely, to the collective capital of the country or the forcible
authority of the law--there is nothing in the fact that one constructor
of ships wastes labour in constructing them which another constructor
would have saved, to prevent him from continuing in his post, or even to
insure that he will vacate it in favour of an abler man, whether an
official rival or otherwise, as soon as such a man is available.
There is also this further fact to be noted. Although we are assuming
that the socialistic directors of labour will exert their talents to the
utmost without requiring the stimulus of a proportionate reward in
money, we must necessarily assume that they will value their posts for
some reason or other just as much as they would do were the largest
emoluments attached to them. Consequently we may, condescending to
vulgar language, say, as a certainty, that they will do their very best
to stick to them. All these official persons, as contrasted with the
labouring public, will occupy positions of similar and desirable
privilege; and while their latent rivalry among themselves will be
hampered in the manner just indicated, they will none of them be
inclined to welcome any further rivalry from without. If the least
efficient of our two naval constructors could not be forced by the fact
of his relative inefficiency to hand over all or any portion of his
authority to the other, and would certainly not be likely to do so of
his own free will, it is still less likely that either would be willing
to make such a sacrifice in favour of a man outside the privileged
ranks, who desired an opportunity of demonstrating his practical
superiority to both.
Under a system, in short, like that which we are now contemplating, the
ability of the ablest directors might, in each branch of industry, raise
the efficiency of the labour directed by themselves to as high a pitch
as that to which it could be raised by the competition of to-day. But
the successes of the ablest men would have no tendency to
self-extension. The ablest men would do better than the less able, but
would have no tendency to displace them; and the ablest and the least
able members of the industrial oligarchy alike would instinctively
oppose, and would also be in a position to check, the practical
development of any competition from without.
That this is no fanciful estimate can be shown by an appeal to facts. We
may take as an example the case of the British post-office. The
inefficient transmission of letters some twenty years ago in London
provoked an effort to supplement it by a service of private messengers.
The post-office authorities were instantly up in arms, ready to nip this
enterprise in the bud, and forcibly prevent any other human being from
doing what they were still, to all appearance, determined not to do
themselves.[11] Then, as a grudging concession, permission to transmit
letters with a promptitude which the post-office still declined to
emulate was accorded to a company on condition that for each letter
carrier the post-office should be paid as it would have been had it
carried the letter itself; and thus there was established at last the
institution of the Boy Messengers.
Similar examples are afforded by the conduct of the state in France,
where the manufacture of tobacco and matches are both of them state
monopolies. To say that the tobacco produced by the French state is
unsmokable, and that the matches produced by it will not light a candle,
would no doubt be an exaggeration; but they are both inferior to the
products which private enterprise could, if left to itself, produce at
the same price. And private enterprise is, indeed, not wholly
suppressed. Excellent tobacco and matches, both of private manufacture,
are allowed to be sold in France; but the producers of both are
artificially handicapped by having to pay to the state, on every box or
every pound sold, either the whole or part of the profit which the state
itself would have made by selling an equal quantity of its own inferior
articles.
The very fact, indeed, that the state, as a producer, or a renderer of
public services, such as letter-carrying, has thus to protect itself
against the competition of private enterprise, is sufficient evidence of
the difficulties which a state organisation encounters in securing
industrial ability which shall be constantly of the highest kind, and
also of its inevitable tendency to hamper, if not to stifle, the
development and the practical activity of superior ability elsewhere.
And if these difficulties and this tendency are appreciable in
state-directed industries now, when the area of direction is small and
strictly limited, the reader may easily imagine how incalculably more
formidable they would become if extended, as socialism would extend
them, to the activities of the entire community.
We have thus far been considering the position of the directors of
socialised industry on the assumption that they would be free to follow
the dictates of their own several intelligences, without any technical
interference from officials of any other kind. Let us now consider the
alternative which, in any socialistic society, would most closely
coincide with fact. This is the assumption that the official directors
of labour would not be technical autocrats, but would be subject to the
control of their brother officials, the statesmen, who represented the
great mass of the people.
Now, no doubt the intervention of a body of this kind might obviate some
of the difficulties on which we have just been dwelling. It might lead
to the removal of some directors of labour who were not only relatively
inefficient, but were positively and notoriously mischievous; but it
would introduce difficulties greater than those it obviated. For while
the industrial officials would, in exact proportion to their efficiency,
embody the special expertness peculiar to a gifted few, the political
officials, in proportion as they represented their electorate, would
embody the preponderating opinions and the general intelligence of the
many. The political officials, therefore, could, from the very nature
of the case, never represent any ideas or condition of knowledge which
appreciably transcended or conflicted with those of the least
intelligent; and the logical result would be that no industrial
improvements could in a socialistic community be initiated by the
highest intelligence, if they went beyond what could be apprehended and
consciously approved of by the lowest.
And here again, though our estimate is only general and speculative--for
it deals with a state of things which at present has no existence--we
can turn to historical facts for illustrations of its substantial truth.
For example, if in the days of Columbus all the capital of Europe and
the control of its entire labour had been vested in a government which
represented the all but universal opinion of all the western nations,
the discovery of America would have obviously been beyond the limits of
possibility. It was rendered possible only because Columbus secured two
patrons who, resembling in this respect far-seeing investors of to-day,
dared to be original, and provided him with the necessary ships and
control over the necessary labour. Or let us take the case of the iron
industry of the modern world. This industry, in its vast modern
developments, depends entirely on the discovery made in England of a
method by which iron might be smelted with coal in place of wood. The
completed discovery was due to a succession of solitary men, beginning
with Dud Dudley in the reign of James I., and ending a century later
with Darby of Coalbrookdale. Practically these heroic men had all their
contemporaries against them. Public opinion attacked them through
private persecution and violence. The apathy and vacillation of
governments left them without defence; and had governments then
represented public opinion completely, and had also controlled all
labour and capital, the discovery in question, which was retarded for
three generations, would in all probability have never been made at all.
Arkwright's experience with regard to his spinning-frame was similar.
His epoch-making invention was in danger of being altogether lost,
because the general opinion of the capitalists of his day was against
it; and if all capital had been vested in a representative state, to the
exclusion of the far-seeing individuals who eventually came to his
assistance, its loss would have been almost certain. The successful
development of the automobile did not take place till yesterday--and
why? A steam-driven vehicle ran in Cornwall before the end of the
eighteenth century; but the state and public opinion both condemned it
as dangerous; and all further progress in the matter was checked for
more than twenty years. Then again private enterprise asserted itself,
but only to suffer precisely the same fate. Steam-driven omnibuses plied
between Paddington and Westminster. Steam-driven stage-coaches plied on
the Bath road. But the state and public opinion were again in obstinate
opposition; these vehicles were crushed out of existence by the
imposition of monstrous tolls; and progress was checked a second time
and for a longer period still. An instance yet more modern is that
supplied by the electric lighting of London. The electric lighting of
London was retarded for ten years solely by the attitude which the state
assumed towards private enterprise.
It is needless to multiply illustrations of this kind further; for my
object is not to show that the state, as it exists at present, is
necessarily inimical to private enterprise as a whole. It is not, for it
has not the power to be. But the fact that even now, when its powers are
so strictly limited and its points of direct contact with industrial
enterprise are so few, tendencies of the kind develop themselves with
such marked practical consequences is enough to show the reality and
magnitude of the evils which would ensue if a body, which reflected on
the one hand the opinions of the average many, and on the other the
individual ability of a few, specially privileged and pledged to their
own methods, were the sole controller of all manual labour whatsoever,
the virtual owner of all the implements which exist at present, the sole
determiner of the forms which such implements shall assume in the
future, and also of the kinds and quantities of the consumable goods
which the implements and the labourers together shall from day to day
produce.
But the nature and scope of the effects which would be incident to any
general absorption, such as that contemplated by socialists, of
productive enterprise by the state, will be yet more clearly seen if we
turn to a kind of production on which I have dwelt already, as affording
the simplest and most luminous example possible of the respective parts
played in the modern world by ordinary manual labour and the exceptional
ability which directs it. This is the case of books, or of other printed
publications. Many years ago the English radical Charles Bradlaugh urged
in a debate with a then prominent socialist that under socialism no
literary expression of free thought would be practicable, and I cannot
do more than accentuate his lucid and unanswerable arguments. The state,
being controller of all the implements of production, a private press
would be as illegal as the dies used by a forger. Nobody could issue a
book, a newspaper, or even a leaflet, unless the use of a state press
were allowed him by the state authorities, together with the disposal of
the labour of the requisite number of compositors. Now, it is clear that
the state could not bind itself to put presses and compositors at the
service of every one of its citizens who was anxious to see himself in
print. There would have to be selection and rejection of some drastic
kind. The state would have to act as universal publisher's reader. What
would happen under these circumstances to purely imaginative literature
we need not here inquire; but when the question was one of expressing
controversial opinions as to science, religion, morals, and especially
social politics, what would happen is evident. The state would be able
to refuse, and it could not do otherwise than refuse, to print anything
which expressed opinions out of harmony with those which were
predominant among its own members. In so far as these members reflected
the opinions of the majority, they would never publish an attack on
errors which they themselves accepted as vital truths. In so far as they
owed their positions to certain real or supposed superiorities they
would never publish any criticism of their own methods by men whom they
would necessarily regard as mischievous and mistaken inferiors. In
short, whether the state acted in this matter as the ultra-superior
person, or as the ultra-popular person, the result would be just the
same. The focalised prejudices of the majority, or the privileged
self-confidence of a certain select minority, would deprive independent
thought in any other quarter of any means of expressing itself either by
book or journal, and by thus depriving it of its voice would place it at
an artificial disadvantage more effectual as a means of repression than
the dungeons of the Inquisition itself. It would be checked as
completely as the higher criticism of the Bible would have been if the
only printer in the whole world were the Pope and the only publishing
business were managed by the College of Cardinals.
And what, under a régime of socialism, would be true of human thought,
a-seeking to embody itself in printed books or newspapers, would be
equally true of it as applied to the methods of industry, and seeking to
embody itself in multiplied or improved commodities.
Such, then, are the disadvantages which socialism, as contrasted with
the existing system, would introduce in connection with the problem of
how to detect, and how, having detected it, to invest with suitable
powers, the men whose ability is, at any given moment, calculated to
raise labour to the highest pitch of productiveness--how to give power
to these, and to take it away from others in exact proportion as their
talents, as exhibited in its practical results, fall short of the
maximum which is at the time obtainable.
This problem, as we have seen already, the existing system solves by its
machinery of private competition, and of independent capitals, which
automatically increase the powers of the ablest directors of labour, and
concurrently decrease or extinguish those of the less able. Socialism,
with its collective capital, and its able men reduced or elevated to the
rank of state officials, while not obviating, but on the contrary
emphasising the necessity for placing labour under the highest directive
ability, or, in other words, the necessity for competition among able
men, would dislocate the only machinery by which such competition can be
made effective; and, if it did not destroy the efficiency of the highest
ability altogether, would reduce this to a minimum, and confine it
within the narrowest limits.
In this chapter, however, we have been dealing with the machinery only.
We have been assuming the unabated activity of the powers by which the
machinery is to be driven. That is to say, we have been assuming that
every man who possesses, or imagines himself to possess, any exceptional
gift for directing labour--whether as an inventor, a man of science, an
organiser, or in any other capacity--would be no less eager, under the
circumstances with which socialism would surround him, to develop and
exert his faculties than he is at the present day. We will now pass on
to the question of how far this assumption is correct. The question of
machinery is secondary. It is a question of detail only; for if there is
no power in the background by which the machinery may be driven, it will
not make much difference in the result whether the machinery be bad or
good.
And here once more we shall find that the socialists of to-day agree
with us; and in passing on to the question now before us, we shall be
quitting a region of speculations which can be only of a general kind
(for they refer to social arrangements whose details are not definitely
specified), and we shall find ourselves confronted by a variety of ideas
and principles which, however confused they may be in the minds of those
who enunciate them, we shall have no difficulty ourselves in reducing to
logical order.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] That such is the case can be seen easily enough by imagining a
socialistic community consisting of twenty men, who require and consume
only one article, bread. Each man, to keep him alive, requires one loaf
daily; but to eat two would be a comfort to him, and to eat three would
be luxury. The community is divided into two groups of ten men each, one
man in each group directing the labour of the others. We will start with
supposing that these two directors are men of equal and also of the
highest ability, and that each of the groups, under these favourable
conditions, is enabled to produce daily an output of thirty loaves. The
total output of both in this case amounts to sixty, which equally
divided yields to everybody the luxurious number of three. Let us next
suppose that the director of one group dies, that his place is taken by
a man of inferior powers, and that this group, as a consequence of his
less efficient direction, instead of producing thirty loaves can produce
no more than ten. Now, although this falling off in production has
occurred in one group only, the loss which results from it is felt by
the entire community. The total output has sunk from sixty loaves to
forty; and the members of the group which retains its old efficiency, no
less than those of the group which has lost so much of it, have to be
content, with a dividend, not of three loaves, but two. Finally, let us
suppose that, owing to a continued deterioration in management, the ten
men of whom the first group is composed are able to produce daily, not
ten loaves, but only five. That is to say, the number of loaves which
they produce comes to no more than half of the minimum they are obliged
to eat. Here it is obvious that, unless one-half of the population is to
die, it can only be kept alive by being given a supply of loaves which,
in consequence of its own inefficiency, must be taken out of the mouths
of others.
[11] A similar drama enacted itself in London more than two centuries
ago. Private enterprise established a penny post. The state killed it,
and deprived the metropolis of this service for a hundred and fifty
years.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY.
SPECULATIVE ATTEMPTS TO MINIMISE IT
When socialism, says Mr. Sidney Webb, shall have abolished all other
monopolies, there will still remain to be dealt with the most formidable
monopoly of all--namely, "the natural monopoly of business ability," or
"the special ability and energy with which some persons are born." The
services of these monopolists, he sees and fully admits, would be as
essential to a socialistic as they are to any other community which
desires to prosper according to modern standards. He sees and admits
also that these exceptional men will not continuously exert or even
develop their talents unless society can supply them with some adequate
motive or stimulus. Accordingly, since he maintains that no scheme of
society would be socialistic in any practical sense which did not
completely, or at least approximately, eliminate the motive mainly
operative among such men at present--namely, that supplied by the
possibility of exceptional economic gain--he fairly faces the fact that
some motive of a different kind will have to be discovered by socialists
which shall take the place of this.
I mention Mr. Webb in particular merely because he represents the views
which all intellectual socialists are coming to hold likewise. This
specific problem of how to provide the natural monopolists of business
ability with all adequate motive to develop and exercise their talents
is engaging more and more the attention of the higher socialistic
thinkers; and if we take together the passages in their writings which
deal with it, it has by this time a voluminous literature of its own.
We shall find that the arguments brought forward by them in this
connection divide themselves broadly into two classes, one of which
deals with the problem of motive directly, while the other class aims at
preparing the way to its solution by showing in advance that its
difficulties are far less formidable than they appear to be. Without
insisting on the manner in which they are urged by individual writers,
we will take these two classes of argument in the logical order which
they assume when we consider their general character.
These preparatory arguments, with which we will accordingly begin, while
admitting that some men are undoubtedly more able than others, aim at
showing that the superiority of such men to their fellows is not so
great as it seems to be, and that any claims made by them to exceptional
reward on account of it consequently tend to reduce themselves to very
modest proportions.
These arguments possess a peculiar interest owing to the fact that they
have not originated with socialistic thinkers at all, but have been
drawn by them from the evolutionary philosophy of the nineteenth century
generally, in so far as it was applied to historical and sociological
questions. The dominant idea which distinguished this school of thought
was the insignificance of the individual as compared with society past
and present. Thus Herbert Spencer, who was its most systematic exponent,
opens his work on the _Study of Sociology_ with an elaborate attack on
what he calls "The Great Man Theory," according to which the explanation
of the main events of history is to be sought in the influence of
exceptional or great men--the men who, in vulgar language, are spoken of
as "historical characters." Such an explanation, said Spencer, is no
explanation at all. Great men, however great, are not isolated
phenomena. Whatever they may do as the "proximate initiators" of change,
they themselves "have their chief cause in the generations they have
descended from," and depend for the influence which is commonly
attributed to their actions, on "the multitudinous conditions" of the
generation to which they belong. Thus Laplace, he says, could not have
got far with his calculations if it had not been for the line of
mathematicians who went before him. Cæsar could not have got very far
with his conquests if a great military organisation had not been ready
to his hand; nor could Shakespeare have written his dramas if he had not
lived in a country already enriched with traditions and a highly
developed language.
But though it was Herbert Spencer who invested these arguments with
their most systematic form, and gave them their definite place in the
theory of evolution as a whole, they were widely diffused already among
his immediate predecessors, as we may see by the following passage taken
from an unlikely quarter. "It is," says Macaulay, in his _Essay on
Dryden_, anticipating the exact phraseology of Spencer, "the age that
makes the man, not the man that makes the age.... The inequalities of
the intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear
so small a proportion to the mass, that in calculating its great
revolutions they may safely be neglected." And Macaulay is merely
expressing a doctrine distinctive of his time--a doctrine which, to take
one further example, dominated in a notable way the entire thought of
Buckle. This doctrine, which, to a greater or less degree, merges the
organism in its environment, or the individual, however great, in
society, has been seized on by the more recent socialists just as the
theory of Ricardo, with regard to labour and value, was seized on by
Karl Marx, and has been adapted by them to their own purposes.
Thus Mr. Bellamy, whose book, _Looking Backward_, descriptive of a
socialistic Utopia, achieved a circulation beyond that of the most
popular novels, declares that "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of
the thousand of the produce of every man are the result of his social
inheritance and environment"; and Mr. Kidd, a socialist in sentiment if
not in definite theory, urges that the comparative insignificance, the
comparative commonness, and dependence for their efficiency on
contemporary social circumstances, of the talents which we are
accustomed to associate with the greatest inventions and discoveries, is
proved by the fact that some of the most important of these have been
made by persons who, "working quite independently, have arrived at like
results almost simultaneously. Thus rival and independent claims," he
proceeds, "have been made for the discovery of the differential
calculus, the invention of the steam-engine, the methods of spectrum
analysis, the telephone, the telegraph, as well as many other
discoveries." Further, to these arguments a yet more definite point has
been added by the contention that, as socialist writers put it,
"inventions and discoveries, when once made, become common property,"
the mass of mankind being cut off from the use of them only by patents
or other artificial restrictions.
The aim of socialists in pursuing this line of reasoning is obvious. It
is to demonstrate, or rather to suggest, that "the monopolists of
business ability," in spite of their comparative rarity and the
importance of the services performed by them, are far from being so
rare or so superior to the mass of their contemporaries as they seem to
be, that their achievements owe far more than appears on the surface to
the co-operation of the average members of society, and that
consequently a socialistic society could justly demand and practically
secure their services on far easier terms than those which they command
at present.
And to such a conclusion the principles of modern evolutionary
sociology, as unanimously interpreted by the philosophers of the
nineteenth century, may be fairly said to lend the entire weight of
their prestige. Let us, then, consider more carefully what these
principles are, with a view to understanding the true scope of their
significance. We shall find that, although undoubtedly true in
themselves, the scope of their significance has been very imperfectly
understood by the great thinkers to whose talents their elucidation has
been due; that these thinkers, in their eagerness to establish a new
truth, have at the same time introduced a new confusion; and that it is
from the confusion of a truth with a falsehood, rather than from the
truth itself, that the socialists of to-day have been here drawing their
inspiration.
The confusion in question arises from a failure to see that sociology is
concerned with two distinct sets of phenomena, or with one set regarded
from two absolutely distinct standpoints. Thus it is constantly said
that man, in the course of ages, has developed civilised societies and
the various arts of life--that, beginning as an animal only a little
higher than the monkey, he gradually became a builder of cities, a
master of the secrets of nature, a philosopher, a poet, a painter of
divine pictures. And from a certain point of view this language is
adequate. If what we desire to do is to estimate, as speculative
philosophers, the significance of the human race in relation to the
universe or its Author, by considering its origin on this planet, and
its subsequent fortunes hitherto, what interests us is man in the mass,
or societies, and not individuals. But if we are interested in any
problem of practical life--such, for example, as how to cure cancer, or
cut a navigable canal through a broad and mountainous isthmus, or
decorate a public building with a series of great frescoes--the central
point of interest is the individual and not society. How would a mother,
whose child was hovering between life and death, be comforted by the
information that man was a great physician? How would America be helped
in the construction of the Panama Canal by learning from sociologists
that man could remove mountains? How could great pictures be secured for
a public building by information to the effect that the greatest of all
great artists depended for their exceptional power on the aggregate of
conditions surrounding them, when ten millions of men whose surrounding
conditions were similar might be tried in succession without one being
found who rose in art above the level of vulgar mediocrity? It is not
that the generalisations of the evolutionary sociologists with regard
to man in the mass, or societies, are untrue philosophically.
Philosophically they are of the utmost moment. It is that they have no
bearing on the problems of contemporary life, and that they miss out the
one factor by which they are brought into connection with it.
Let us take, for example, the way in which Herbert Spencer illustrates
the general theorem of the evolutionary sociologists by the case of
Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's debt to his times. "Given a Shakespeare,"
he says, "and what dramas could he have written without the
multitudinous conditions of civilised life around him--without the
various traditions which, descending to him from the past, gave wealth
to his thought, and without the language which a hundred generations had
developed and enriched by use?" The answer to this question is to be
found in the counter-question that is provoked by it. Given the
conditions of civilised life, and the traditions of England and its
language, as they were under Queen Elizabeth, how could these have
produced the Shakespearian dramas unless England had possessed an
individual citizen whose psycho-physical organisation was equal to that
of Shakespeare? Similarly, it is true that Turner could not have painted
his sunsets if multitudinous atmospheric conditions had not given him
sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner's
contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind,
and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his
own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with
singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary
sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue
of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the
men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional
genius assimilates the data of his environment, and gives them back to
the world, recombined, refashioned, and reinterpreted.
And with regard to practical matters, and more especially the modern
production of wealth, the case is just the same. No one has illustrated
more luminously than Herbert Spencer himself the multitudinous character
of the knowledge which modern production necessitates; and no one has
insisted with more emphasis than he that one of the rarest faculties to
be met with among human beings is the faculty, as he expresses it, of
"apprehending assembled propositions in their totality." It would be
difficult to define better in equally brief language the intellectual
aspect of that composite mental equipment which distinguishes from
ordinary men the monopolists of business ability. It is precisely by
apprehending a multitude of assembled propositions in their
totality--mathematical, chemical, geological, geographical, and so
forth--by combining them for a definite purpose, and translating them
into a series of orders which organised labour can execute, that the
intellect of the able man gives efficiency to the industrial processes
of to-day. In addition, moreover, to his purely intellectual faculties,
he requires others which, in their higher developments, are no less
rare--namely, a quick discernment of popular wants as they arise or an
imagination which enables him to anticipate them, an instinctive insight
into character which enables him to choose best men as his subordinates,
promptitude to seize on opportunities, courage which is the soul of
promptitude, and finally a driving energy by which the whole of his
moral and intellectual mechanism is actuated. As for "the aggregate of
conditions out of which he has arisen," or the aggregate of conditions
which surround him, these are common to him and to every one of his
fellow-countrymen. They are a landscape which surrounds them all. But
aggregates of conditions could no more produce the results of which, as
Herbert Spencer admits, the able man is the proximate cause, unless the
able man existed and could be induced to cause them, than a landscape
could be photographed without a lens or a camera, or a great picture of
it painted in the absence of a great artist.
Herbert Spencer, indeed, partially perceives all this himself. That is
to say, he realises from time to time that the causal importance of the
great man varies according to the nature of the problems in connection
with which we consider him and that while he is, for purposes of
general speculation, merely a transmitter of forces beyond and greater
than himself, he is for practical purposes an ultimate cause or fact.
That such is the case is shown in a curiously vivid way by two
references to two great men in particular, which occur not far from each
other in Spencer's _Study of Sociology_. One is a reference to the last
Napoleon, the other is a reference to the first. He refers to the former
when he is emphasising his main proposition, that the importance of the
ruler, considered as an individual, is small, and almost entirely merged
in the conditions of society generally. "If you wish," he says, "to
understand the phenomena of social evolution, you will not do it should
you read yourself blind over the biographies of all the great rulers on
record, down to Frederick the greedy and Louis Napoleon the
treacherous." When he makes his reference to Louis Napoleon's ancestor,
he is pausing for a moment in the course of his philosophical argument
in order to indulge in a parenthetical denunciation of war. Of the
insane folly of war, he says, we can have no better example than that
provided by Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
hardly a country was free from "slaughter, suffering, and devastation."
For what, he goes on to ask, was the cause of such wide-spread horrors?
Simply, he answers, the presence of one abnormal individual, "in whom
the instincts of the savage were scarcely at all qualified by what we
call moral sentiments"; and "all this slaughter, suffering, and
devastation" were, he says, "gone through because one man had a restless
desire to be despot over all men." Here we see how Spencer, as a matter
of common-sense, instinctively assigns to great men absolutely
contrasted positions, according to the point of view from which he is
himself regarding them--that of the speculative thinker and that of the
practical politician, and of this fact we will take one example more. Of
his doctrine that the great man is merely a "proximate initiator," and
in no true sense the cause of what he seems to produce or do, he gives
us an elaborate illustration taken from modern industry--that is to say,
the invention of the _Times_ printing-press. This wonderful piece of
mechanism would, he says, have been wholly impossible if it had not been
for a series of discoveries and inventions that had gone before it; and
having specified a multitude of these, winds up with a repetition of his
moral that of each invention individually the true cause is not the
so-called inventor, but "the aggregate of conditions out of which he has
arisen." But when elsewhere, in his treatise on _Social Statics_,
Spencer is dealing with the existing laws of England, he violently
attacks these, in so far as they relate to patents, because they fail,
he says, to recognise as absolute a man's "property in his own ideas,"
or, in other words, "his inventions, which he has wrought, as it were,
out of the very substance of his own mind." Thus Spencer himself, at
times, as these passages clearly show, sees that while great men, when
considered philosophically, do little of what they appear to do, they
must for practical purposes be dealt with as though they did all; though
he nowhere recognises this distinction formally, or accords it a
definite place in his general sociological system.[12]
The absurdity of confounding speculative sociology with practical is
shown with equal clearness by Macaulay in the passage that was just now
quoted from him. "The inequalities of the intellect," he says, "like the
inequalities of the surface of the globe, bear so small a proportion to
the mass" that the sociologist may neglect the one just as safely as the
astronomer neglects the other. Now, this may be quite true if our
interest in human events is that of social astronomers who are watching
them from another planet. But because the inequalities of the earth are
nothing to the astronomer, it does not follow that they are nothing to
the engineer and the geographer. The Alps for the astronomer may be an
infinitesimal and negligible excrescence; but they were not this to
Hannibal or the makers of the Mont Cenis tunnel. What to the astronomer
are all the dykes of Holland? But they are everything to the Dutch
between a dead nation and a living one. And the same thing holds good of
the inequalities of the human intellect. For the social astronomer they
are nothing. For the practical man they are everything.
It is in the astonishing confusion between speculative and practical
truth which characterised the evolutionary sociologists of the
nineteenth century that the socialists of to-day are seeking for a new
support to their system. And now let us consider the way in which they
themselves have improved the occasion, and apply the moral which they
have drawn from such a singularly deceptive source. The three points
which they aim at emphasising are the smallness of the products which
the able man can really claim as his own, the consequent diminution of
his claims to any exceptional reward on account of them, and the fact
that even the highest ability, however rare it may be, is very much
commoner than it seems to be, and will, for this reason in addition to
those just mentioned, be obtainable in the future at a very much reduced
price.
Of these three points the last is the most definite. Let us take it
first; and let us take it as stated, not by a professed socialist, but
by an independent and highly educated thinker such as Mr. Kidd. Mr.
Kidd's argument is, as we have seen already, that the comparative
commonness of ability of the highest kind is shown by the fact that, of
the greatest inventions and discoveries, a number have been notoriously
made at almost the same time by a number of thinkers who have all worked
in isolation. This argument would not be worth discussing if it were not
used so constantly by a variety of serious writers. The fact on which it
bases itself is no doubt true enough; but what is the utmost that it
proves? That more men than one should reach at the same time the same
discovery independently is precisely what we should be led to expect,
when we consider what the character of scientific discovery is. The
facts of nature which form its subject-matter are in themselves as
independent of the men who discover them as an Alpine peak is of the men
who attempt to climb it. They are, indeed, precisely analogous to such a
peak which all discoverers are attempting to scale at once; and the fact
that three men make at once the same discovery does no more to show that
it could have been made by the majority of their fellow-workers, and
that it was in reality made not by themselves but by their generation,
than the fact that three men of exceptional nerve and endurance meet at
last on some previously virgin summit proves the feat to have been
accomplished less by these men themselves than by the mass of tourists
who thronged the hotel below and whose climbing exploits were limited to
an ascent by the Rigi Railway.
Other writers, however, try to reach Mr. Kidd's conclusion by a
somewhat different route. Whether the great man is or is not a more
common phenomenon than he seems to be, they maintain that his conquests
in the realms of invention and discovery, when once made, really "become
common property," of which all men could take advantage if it were not
for artificial monopolies. All men, therefore, though not equal as
discoverers, are practically equalised by whatever the discoverers
accomplish. Now, of the simpler inventions and discoveries, such as that
of fire for example, this is perfectly true; but it is true of these
only. As inventions and discoveries grow more and more complex, they no
more become common property, as soon as certain men have made them, than
encyclopædic knowledge becomes the property of every one who buys or
happens to inherit an edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. It is
perfectly true that the discovery of each new portion of knowledge
enables men to acquire it who might never have acquired it otherwise;
but as the acquisition of the details of knowledge becomes facilitated,
the number of details to be acquired increases at the same time; and the
increased ease of acquiring each is accompanied by an increased
difficulty in assimilating even those which are connected most closely
with each other. We may safely say that a knowledge of the simple rules
of arithmetic is common to all the members of the English University of
Cambridge; but out of some thousands of students only a few become great
mathematicians. And the same thing holds good of scientific knowledge
in general, and especially of such knowledge as applied to the purposes
of practical industry. Knowledge and inventions, once made, are like a
river which flows by everybody; but the water of the river becomes the
property of individuals only in proportion to the quantity of it which
their brains can, as it were, dip up; and the knowledge dipped up by the
small brains is no more equal to that dipped up by the large than a
tumbler of water is made equal to a hogshead by the fact that both
vessels have been filled from the same stream.
Let us now pass on to the argument which, differing essentially from the
preceding in that it does not aim at proving that the great men are
commoner than they seem to be, or their knowledge more diffused, insists
that of what the great men seem to do very little is really their
own--or that, as Mr. Bellamy puts it, in words which we have already
quoted, "nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand of their
produce is really the result of their social inheritance and
environment." Here, again, we have a statement, which from one point of
view is true. It is merely a specialised expression of the far more
general doctrine that the whole process of the universe, man included,
is one, and that all individual causes are only partial and proximate.
No man at any period could do the precise things that he does if the
country in which he lives had had a different past or present, any more
than he could do anything if it were not for his own previous life, for
the fact that he had been born, that his mind and body had matured, and
that he had acquired, as he went along, such and such knowledge and
experience. How could a man do anything unless he had some environment?
Unless he had some past, how could he exist at all? Mr. Bellamy and his
friends, when considering matters in this light, are not too extreme in
their conclusions. On the contrary, they are too modest. For men, if
they were really isolated from their social inheritance and environment,
could not only do but little; they could do absolutely nothing. The
admission, therefore, that for practical purposes they must be held to
do something at all events, is an admission wrung from our philosophers
by the exigencies of common-sense. As such, then, let us accept it; and
what will our conclusion be? It will be this: that whatever it may be
which the ordinary man produces, and in whatever sense he produces it,
the great man, in the same sense, produces a great deal more. The
difference between them in efficiency will be no more lessened by the
fact that both are standing on the pedestal of a common past, than the
difference in stature will be lessened between a dwarf and a giant
because they are both standing on the top of a New York skyscraper, or
because they have both been nourished on the same species of food.
But the practical absurdity of the whole set of arguments urged in a
contrary sense by Herbert Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the speculative
sociologists generally, is brought to its climax by those modern
exponents of socialism who attempt to invest them with a moral as well
as an industrial significance. Thus Mr. Webb, who himself frankly
recognises that the monopolists of business ability are industrially
more efficient than the great mass of their fellows, and that man for
man they produce incomparably more wealth, endeavours, by means of the
arguments which we have been just considering, to show that though they
produce it they have no moral right to keep it. The proposal, he says,
that, though men are vastly unequal in productivity, they should all of
them be awarded an equal share of the product--that if one man produces
only one shilling, while another man produces ninety-nine, the resulting
hundred should be halved and each of the men take fifty--this proposal
"has," he says, "an abstract justification, as the special energy and
ability with which some persons are born is an unearned increment due to
the effect of the struggle for existence upon their ancestors, and
consequently, having been produced by society, is as much due to society
as the unearned increment of rent."
Now, if this argument has any practical meaning at all, it can only mean
that the men who have been born with such special powers will, as soon
as they recognise what the origin of these powers is, realise that they
have, as individuals, no special claims on the results of them, and will
consequently become more willing than they are at the present time to
continue to produce the results, though they will not be allowed to
keep them. We will not insist, as we might do, on the curious want of
knowledge of human nature which the argument thus put forward by Mr.
Webb and other socialists betrays. It will be enough to point out that,
if it applies to the monopolists of business ability, it applies with
equal force to all other sorts of men whatever. If it is to society as a
whole that the able man owes his energy, his talents, and the products
of them, it is to society as a whole that the idle man owes his
idleness, the stupid man his stupidity, and the dishonest man his
dishonesty; and if the able man, who produces an exceptional amount of
wealth, can with justice claim no more than the average man who produces
little, the man who is so idle that he shirks producing anything may
with equal justice claim as much wealth as either. His constitutional
fault, and his constitutional disinclination to mend it, are both of
them due to society, and society, not he, must suffer.
If we attempted to organise a community in accordance with such a
conclusion as this, we should be getting rid of all connection between
conduct and the natural results of it, and divorcing action from motive
altogether. Such is the conclusion to which Mr. Webb's argument would
lead us; and the absurdity of the argument, as applied by him to moral
claims and merits, though more self-evident, is not any more complete
than the absurdity of similar arguments as applied to the individual
generally in respect of his productive powers, and the amount of
produce produced by them. The whole conception, in short, of the
individual as merged in the aggregate has no relation to practical life
whatever. For the practical man the individual is always a unit; and it
is only as a unit that it is possible practically to deal with him. We
may change him in some respects by changing his general conditions, as
we hope to do by legislation which aims at the diminution of
drunkenness; but a change in general conditions, if it diminished
drunkenness generally, would do so only because it affected at the same
time the isolated minds and organisms of a number of individual
drunkards.
And to do Mr. Webb and his brother socialists justice, they
unconsciously admit all this themselves; for, as soon as they set
themselves to discuss the motives of the able man in detail, they
altogether abandon the irrelevancies of speculative sociology with which
they manage at other times to bemuse themselves. That such is the case
we shall see in the following chapter. I will, however, anticipate what
we shall see there by mentioning that among the motives which are in the
socialistic future to replace, among able men, the desire of economic
gain, one of the chief is to be the desire of moral approbation. Unless
a man's actions, whether industrial or moral, are to be treated as his
own, instead of being attributed to his conditions, he would have as
little right to the praise which it is proposed to give him as he would
have to the dollars which it is proposed to take away.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] I first made this criticism of Spencer in my work _Aristocracy and
Evolution_. On that occasion Mr. Spencer wrote to me, complaining with
much vehemence that I had misrepresented him; and he repeated the
substance of his letter in a subsequent published essay. My criticism
dealt, and could have dealt only, not with what he meant, but what he
said; and certainly in his language--and, as I think, in his own
mind--there was a constant confusion between the two truths in question.
Apart, however, from what he considered to be my own misrepresentation
of himself, he declared that he entirely agreed with me; and that "great
men" must, for practical purposes, be regarded as the true causes of
such changes as they initiate.
CHAPTER IX
THE ULTIMATE DIFFICULTY, CONTINUED.
ABILITY AND INDIVIDUAL MOTIVE
The fact that the speculative arguments which we have just now been
discussing are not only irrelevant to the problem of the able man and
his motives, but are tacitly abandoned as being so by the very men who
have urged them, when they come to deal specifically with that problem
themselves, may suggest to some readers that so long a discussion of
them was superfluous. But though the socialists abandon them at the very
moment when, if ever, they ought to be susceptible of some definite
application, they abandon them quite unconsciously, and still continue
to attach to them some solemn importance. Such being the case, then, the
more futile these arguments are the stronger is the light thrown by them
on the peculiar intellectual weakness which distinguishes even the most
capable of those who think it worth their while to employ them. For this
reason, therefore, if for no other, our examination of them will have
proved useful, for it will have prepared us to encounter a weakness of
precisely the same kind in the reasonings of the socialists when they
deal with motive directly.
Let us once more state this direct problem of motive, as with perfect
accuracy, stated by the socialists themselves. Under existing conditions
the monopolists of business ability are mainly induced to add to the
national store of wealth by the prospect, whose fulfilment existing
conditions make possible, of retaining shares of it as their own which
are proportionate to the amounts produced by them. The question is,
therefore, whether, if this prospect is taken away from them, socialism
could provide another which men of this special type would find equally
stimulating. Is human nature in general, and the nature of the
monopolists in particular, sufficiently adaptable to admit of such a
change as this? The socialists answer that it is, and in making such an
assertion they declare that they have all the facts of scientific
sociology at the back of them. The unscientific thing is, they say, to
assume the contrary; and here, they proceed, we have the fundamental
error which renders most of the conclusions of the ordinary economists
valueless. Economic science, in its generally accepted form, bases all
its reasonings on the behaviour of the so-called "economic man"--that is
to say, a being from whom those who reason about him exclude all
operative desires except that of economic gain. But such a being, say
the socialists, is a mere abstraction. He has no counterpart among
living, loving, idealising, aspiring men. Real men are susceptible of
the desire of gain, no doubt; but this provides them only with one
motive out of many; and there are others which, as experience amply
shows us, are, when they are given unimpeded play, far stronger. I do
not know whether socialists have ever used the following parallel; but
if they have not it expresses their position better than they have
expressed it themselves. They argue virtually that, in respect of the
desire for exceptional gain, able men are comparable to victims of the
desire for alcohol. If alcohol is obtainable, such men will insist on
obtaining it. They will constantly fix their thoughts on it; no other
fluid will satisfy them. But if it is placed altogether beyond their
reach, they will be compelled by the force of circumstances to drink
lemonade, tea, or even plain water instead. In time they will come to
drink them with the same avidity; and their health and their powers of
enjoyment will be indefinitely improved in consequence. In the same way,
it is argued, the monopolists of business ability, though, so long as it
is possible for them to appropriate a considerable share of their
products, they will insist on getting this share, and will not exert
themselves otherwise, need only be placed under conditions which will
render such gain impossible, and at once they will find out that there
exist other inducements which will prove before long to be no less
efficacious.
Such is the general argument of the modern school of socialists; but
they do not leave it in this indeterminate form. They have, to their own
satisfaction, worked it out in detail, and claim that they are able to
demonstrate from the actual facts of human nature precisely what the
character of the new inducements will be.
It may be looked upon as evidence of the methodical and quasi-scientific
accuracy with which modern socialists have set themselves to discuss
this question of motive that the thought of all of them has moved along
the same lines, and that what all of them fix upon as a substitute for
the desire of exceptional pecuniary gain is one or other, or all, of a
few motives actually in operation, and notoriously effective in certain
spheres of activity.
These motives practically resolve themselves into four, which have been
classified as follows by Mr. Webb or one of his coadjutors:
"The mere pleasure of excelling," or the joy of the most powerful in
exercising their powers to the utmost.
"The joy in creative work," such as that which the artist feels in
producing a great work of art.
The satisfaction which ministering to others "brings to the instincts of
benevolence," such as that which is felt by those who give themselves to
the sick and helpless.
And, lastly, the desire for approval, or the homage which is called
"honour," the efficiency of which is shown by the conduct of the
soldier--often a man of very ordinary education and character--who will
risk death in order that he may be decorated with some intrinsically
worthless medal, which merely proclaims his valour or his unselfish
devotion to his country.
Now, that the motives here in question are motives of extraordinary
power, all history shows us. The most impressive things accomplished by
human nature have been due to them. But let us consider what these
things are. The first motive--namely, that supplied by the mere
"pleasure in excelling"--we need hardly consider by itself, for, in so
far as socialists can look upon its objects as legitimate, it is
included in the struggle for approbation or honour. We will merely
remark that the emphasis which the socialists lay on it is not very
consonant with the principles of those persons who propose to abolish
competition as the root of all social evils; and we will content
ourselves with examining in detail the three other motives only, and the
scope of their efficiency, as actual experience reveals it to us.
We shall find that the activities which these three motives stimulate
are confined, so far as experience is able to teach us anything, to the
following well-marked kinds, which have been already indicated: those of
the artist, of the speculative thinker, of the religious and
philanthropic enthusiast, and, lastly, those of the soldier. This list,
if understood in its full sense, is exhaustive.
Such being the case, then, the argument of the socialists is as follows:
Because a Fra Angelico will paint a Christ or a Virgin, because a Kant
will immolate all his years to philosophy, because a monk and a sister
of mercy will devote themselves to the victims of pestilence, because a
soldier in action will eagerly face death--all without hope of any
exceptional pecuniary reward--the monopolists of business ability, if
only such rewards are made impossible for them, will at once become
amenable to the motives of the soldier, the artist, the philosopher, the
inspired philanthropist, and the saint. This is the assertion of the
socialists when reduced to a precise form; and what we have to do is to
inquire whether this assertion is true. Does human nature, as history,
as psychology, and as physiology reveal it to us, give us any grounds,
in fact, for taking such an assertion seriously? Any one who has studied
human conduct historically, who has observed it in the life around him,
and examined scientifically the diversities of temperament and motive
that go with diversities of capacity, will dismiss such an assertion as
at once groundless and ludicrous.
Let us, to go into detail, take the case of the artist. What reason is
there to suppose that the impassioned emotion which stimulates the
adoring monk to lavish all his genius on an altar-piece will stimulate
another man to devise, and to organise the production of, some new kind
of liquid enamel for the decoration of cheap furniture?[13] Or let us
turn to an impulse closely allied to the artistic--namely, the desire
for speculative truth, as manifested in the lives of scientific and
philosophic thinkers. These men--such as Kant and Hegel, for
example--have been proverbially, and often ludicrously, indifferent to
the material details of their existence. Who can suppose that the
disinterested passion for truth, which had the effect of making these
men forget their dinners, will stimulate others to devote themselves to
the improvement of stoves and saucepans?
Yet again, let us consider the area of the industrial influence of the
motives originating in religious fervour or benevolence. The most
important illustration of this is to be found in the monastic orders.
The monastic orders constructed great buildings; they successfully
practised agriculture and other industria
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