Contemporary Socialism Part 6

1st. _Value._ Marx holds that all capital--all industrial advances except wages--is absolutely unproductive of value, and therefore not ent.i.tled to the acknowledgment known as interest. The original value of all such capital--the purchase price of the materials, together with a certain allowance made for tear and wear of machinery--is carried forward into the value of the product, and preserved in it, and even that could not be done except by labour. The old value is preserved by labour, and all new value is conferred by it, and therefore interest is a consideration entirely out of the question. It is obvious to object that labour by itself is as unproductive as capital by itself, but Marx would reply that while labour and capital are equally indispensable to produce new commodities, it is labour alone that produces new value, for value is only so much labour preserved, it is merely a register of so many hours of work. His whole argument thus turns upon his doctrine of the nature of value, and that doctrine must therefore be closely attended to.

What, then, is value? Marx considers that most errors on this subject have arisen from confusing value with utility on the one hand or with price on the other, and he regards his discrimination of value from these two ideas as his most important contribution to political economy.

He takes his start from the distinction current since the days of Adam Smith between value in use and value in exchange, and of course agrees with Smith in making the value of a commodity in exchange to be independent of its value in use. Water had great value in use and none in exchange, and diamonds had great value in exchange and little in use.

Value in use is therefore not value strictly so called, it is utility; but strictly speaking value in exchange, according to Marx, is not value either, but only the form under which in our state of society value manifests itself. There was no exchange in primitive society when every family produced things to supply its own wants, and there would be no exchange in a communism, for in an exchange the transacting parties stand to one another equally as private proprietors of the goods they barter. And where there was no exchange there could of course be no exchange value. No doubt there was value for all that in primitive times, and there would be value under a communism, though it would manifest itself in a different form. But as we live in an exchanging society, where everything is made for the purpose of being exchanged, it is in exchange alone that we have any experience of value, and it is only from an examination of the phenomena of exchange that we can learn its nature.

What, then, is value in exchange? It is the ratio in which one kind of useful commodity exchanges against another kind of useful commodity.

This ratio, says Marx, does not in the least depend on the usefulness of the respective commodities, or their capacity of gratifying any particular want. For, first, that is a matter of quality, whereas value is a ratio between quant.i.ties; and second, two different kinds of utility cannot be compared, for they have no common measure; but value, being a ratio, implies comparison, and comparison implies a common measure. A fiddle charms the musical taste, a loaf satisfies hunger, but who can calculate how much musical gratification is equivalent to so much satisfaction of hunger. The loaf and the fiddle may be compared in value, but not by means of their several uses. Third, there are many commodities which are useful and yet have no value in exchange: air, for example, water, and, he adds, virgin soil. In seeking what in the exchange the value depends on, we must therefore leave the utility of the commodities exchanged entirely out of account; and if we do so, there is only one other attribute they all possess in common, and it must be on that attribute that their value rests. That attribute is that they are all products of labour. While we looked to the utility of commodities, they were infinite in their variety, but now they are all reduced to one sober characteristic they are so many different quant.i.ties of the same material, labour. Diversity vanishes; there are no longer tables and chairs and houses, there is only this much and that much and the next amount of preserved human labour. And this labour itself is not discriminated. It is not joiner work, mason work, or weaver work; it is merely human labour in the abstract, incorporated, absorbed, congealed in exchangeable commodities. In an exchange commodities are quant.i.ties of labour jelly, and they exchange in the ratio of the amount of labour they have taken in.

Value, then, is quant.i.ty of abstract labour, and now what is quant.i.ty of labour? How is it to be ascertained? Labour is the exertion or use of man's natural powers of labour, and the quant.i.ty of labour is measured by the duration of the exertion. Quant.i.ty of labour is thus reduced to time of labour, and is measured by hours and days and weeks. Marx accordingly defines value to be an immanent relation of a commodity to time of labour, and the secret of exchange is that "a day's labour of given length always turns out a product of the same value." Value is thus something inherent in commodities before they are brought to market, and is independent of the circ.u.mstances of the market.

Marx has no sooner reduced value to the single uniform element of time of labour, and excluded from its const.i.tution all considerations of utility and the state of the market, than he reintroduces those considerations under a disguised form. In the first place, if a day's labour of given length always produces the same value, it is obvious to ask whether then an indolent and unskilful tailor who takes a week to make a coat has produced as much value as the more expert hand who turns out six in this time, or, with the help of a machine, perhaps twenty?

Marx answers, Certainly not, for the time of labour which determines value is not the time actually taken, but the time required in existing social conditions to produce that particular kind of commodity--the time taken by labour of average efficiency, using the means which the age affords--in short, what he calls the socially necessary time of labour.

Value is an immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour.

Marx's standard is thus, after all, not one of quant.i.ty of labour pure and simple; it takes into account, besides, the average productive power of labour in different branches of industry. "The value of a commodity,"

says he, "changes directly as the quant.i.ty, and inversely as the productive power, of the labour which realizes itself in that commodity." Before we know the value of a commodity we must therefore know not only the quant.i.ty of labour that has gone into it, but the productive power of that labour. We gather the quant.i.ty from the duration of exertion, but how is average productive power to be ascertained? By simply ascertaining the total product of all the labour engaged in a particular trade, and then striking the average for each labourer. Diamonds occur rarely in the crust of the earth, and therefore many seekers spend days and weeks without finding one. Hits and misses must be taken together; the productive power of the diamond seeker is low; or, in other words, the time of labour socially necessary to procure a diamond is high, and its value corresponds. In a good year the same labour will produce twice as much wheat as in a bad; its productive power is greater; the time socially necessary to produce wheat is less, and the price of the bushel falls. The value of a commodity is therefore influenced by its comparative abundance, whether that be due to nature, or to machinery, or to personal skill.

But, in the next place, if value is simply so much labour, it would seem to follow, on the one hand, that nothing could have value which cost no labour, and, on the other, that nothing could be devoid of value which cost labour. Marx's method of dealing with these two objections deserves close attention, because it is here that the fundamental fallacy of his argument is brought most clearly out. He answers the first of them by drawing a distinction between _value_ and _price_, which he and his followers count of the highest consequence. Things which cost no labour may have a _price_, but they have no _value_, and, as we have seen, he mentions among such things conscience and virgin soil. No labour has touched those things; they have no immanent relation to socially necessary time of labour; they have not, and cannot have, any value, as Marx understands value. But then, he says, they command a price. Virgin soil is actually sold in the market; it may procure things that have value though it has none itself. Now, this distinction between value and price has no bearing on the matter at all, for the simple reason that, as Marx himself admits, price is only a particular form of value. Price, he says, is "the money form of value"; it is value expressed in money; it is the exchange value of a commodity for money. To say that uncultivated land may have a price but not a value is, on Marx's own showing, to say that it has an exchange value which can be definitely measured in money, and has yet no value. But he has started from the phenomena of exchange; he has told us that exchange value is the only form in which we experience value now; and he thus arrives at a theory of value which will not explain the facts. If he argued that a thing had value, but no exchange value, his position might be false, but he says that a thing may have exchange value but no value, and so his position is contradictory. Moreover, he describes money accurately enough as a measure of value, and says that it could not serve this function except it were itself valuable, _i.e._, unless it possessed the quality that makes all objects commensurable, the quality of being a product of labour. Yet here we find him admitting that virgin soil, which, _ex hypothesi_, does not possess that quality, and ought therefore to be incommensurable with anything that possesses it, is yet measured with money every day. Such are some of the absurdities to which Marx is reduced by refusing to admit that utility can confer value independently of labour.

Let us see now how he deals with the other objection. If labour is just value-forming substance, and if value is just preserved labour, then nothing which has cost labour should be dest.i.tute of value. But Marx frankly admits that there are such things which have yet got no value; and they have no value, he explains, because they have no utility.

"Nothing can have value without being useful. If it is useless, the work contained in it is useless, and therefore has no value." He goes further; he says that a thing may be both useful and the product of labour and yet have no value. "He who by the produce of his labour satisfies wants of his own produces utility but not value. To produce a ware, _i.e._, a thing which has not merely value in use, but value in exchange, he must produce something which is not only useful to himself, but useful to others," _i.e._, socially useful. A product of labour which is useless to the producer and everybody else has no value of any sort; a product of labour which, while useful to the producer, is useless to any one else, has no exchange value. It satisfies no want of others. This would seem to cover the case of over-production, when commodities lose their value for a time because n.o.body wants them.

La.s.salle explained this depreciation of value by saying that the time of labour socially necessary to produce the articles in question had diminished. Marx explains it by saying that the labour is less socially useful or not socially useful at all. And why is the labour not socially useful? Simply because the product is not so. The social utility or inutility of the labour is a mere inference from the social utility or inutility of the product, and it is therefore the latter consideration that influences value. Marx tries in vain to exclude the influence of that consideration, or to explain it as a mere subsidiary qualification of labour. Labour and social utility both enter equally into the const.i.tution of value, and Marx's radical error lies in defining value in terms of labour only, ignoring utility.

For what, after all, is value? Is Marx's definition of it in the least correct? No. Value is not an inherent relation (whatever that may mean) of a commodity to labour; it is essentially a social estimate of the relative importance of commodities to the society that forms the estimate. It is not an immanent property of an object at all; it is a social opinion expressed upon an object in comparison with others. This social opinion is at present collected in an informal but effective way, through a certain subtle tact acquired in the market, by dealers representing groups of customers on the one hand, and manufacturers representing groups of producers on the other; and it may be said to be p.r.o.nounced in the verdict of exchange, _i.e._, according to Mill's definition of value, in the quant.i.ty of one commodity given in exchange for a given quant.i.ty of another. Now, on what does this social estimate of the relative importance of commodities turn? In other words, by what is value and difference in value determined? Value is const.i.tuted in every object by its possession of two characteristics: 1st, that it is socially useful; 2nd, that it costs some labour or trouble to procure it. No commodity lacks value which possesses both of these characteristics; and no commodity has value which lacks either of them.

Now there are two kinds of commodities. Some may be produced to an indefinite amount by means of labour, and since all who desire them can obtain them at any time for the labour they cost, their social desirableness, their social utility, has no influence on their value, which, therefore, always stands in the ratio of their cost of production alone. Other cla.s.ses of commodities cannot be in this way indefinitely multiplied by labour; their quant.i.ty is strictly limited by natural or other causes; those who desire them cannot get them for the mere labour of producing them; and the value of commodities of this sort will consequently always stand in excess of their relative cost of production, and will be really determined by their relative social utility. In fact, so far from the labour required for their production being any guide to their value, it is their value that will determine the amount of labour which will be ventured in their production. A single word may be added in explanation of the conception of social utility. Of course a commodity which is of no use to any one but its owner has no economic value, unless it happens to get lost, and, in any case, it is of no consequence in the present question. The social utility of a commodity is its capacity to satisfy the wants of others than the possessor, and it turns on two considerations: 1st, the importance of the want the commodity satisfies, and, 2nd, the number of persons who share the want. All commodities which derive a value from their rarity or their special excellence belong to this latter cla.s.s, and the vice of Marx's theory of value is simply this, that he takes a law which is true of the first cla.s.s of commodities only to be true of all cla.s.ses of them.

2. _Wages._ Having concluded by the vicious argument now explained that all value is the creation of the personal labour of the workman--is but the registered duration of exertion of his labouring powers--Marx next proceeds to show that, as things at present exist, the value of these labouring powers themselves is fixed not by what they create but by what is necessary to create or at least renovate them. The rate of wages, economists have taught, is determined by the cost of the production of labouring powers, and that is identical with the cost of maintaining the labourer in working vigour. Marx accepts the usual explanations of the elasticity of this standard of cost of subsistence. It includes, of course, the maintenance of the labourer's family as well as his own, because he will die some day, and the permanent reproduction of powers of labour requires the birth of fresh hands to succeed him. It must also cover the expenses of training and apprenticeship, and Marx would probably agree to add, though he does not actually do so, a superannuation allowance for old age. It contains, too, a variable historical element, differs with climate and country, and is, in fact, just the customary standard of living among free labourers of the time and place. The value of a commodity is the time of labour required to deliver it in _normal goodness_, and to preserve the powers of labour in normal goodness a definite quant.i.ty of provisions and comforts is necessary according to time, country, and customs. The part of the labouring day required to produce this definite quant.i.ty of provisions and comforts for the use of the day may be called the _necessary time of labour_--the time during which the workman produces what is necessary for keeping him in existence--and the value created in this season may be called _necessary value_. But the workman's physical powers may hold on labouring longer than this, and the rest of his working day may accordingly be called _surplus time of labour_, and the value created in it _surplus value_. This surplus value may be created or increased in two ways: either by reducing or cheapening the labourer's subsistence, _i.e._, by shortening the term of necessary labour; or by prolonging the length of the working day, _i.e._, by increasing the term of surplus labour. There are limits indeed within which this kind of action must stop. The quant.i.ty of means of life cannot be reduced below the minimum that is physically indispensable to sustain the labourer for the day, and the term of labour cannot be stretched beyond the labourer's capacity of physical endurance. But within these limits may be played an important _role_, and the secret of surplus value lies in the simple plan of giving the labourer as little as he is able to live on, and working him as long as he is able to stand. A labourer works 12 hours a day because he cannot work longer and work permanently and well, and he gets three shillings a day of wages, because three shillings will buy him the necessities he requires. In six hours' labour he will create three shillings' worth of value, and he works the other six hours for nothing, creating three shillings' worth of surplus value for the master who advances him his wages. It is from these causes that we come on the present system of things to the singular result that powers of labour which create six shillings a day are themselves worth only three shillings a day. This absurd conclusion, says Marx, could never have held ground for an hour, had it not been hid and disguised by the practice of paying wages in money. This makes it seem as if the labourer were paid for the whole day when he is only paid for the half. Under the old system of feudal servitude there were no such disguises. The labourer wrought for his master one day, and for himself the other five, and there was no make-believe as if he were working for himself all the time. But the wages system gives to surplus labour that is really unpaid the false appearance of being paid. That is the mystery of iniquity of the whole system, the source of all prevailing legal conceptions of the relation of employer and employed, and of all the illusions about industrial freedom. The wages system is the lever of the labourer's exploitation, because it enables the capitalist to appropriate the entire surplus value created by the labourer--_i.e._, the value he creates over and above what is necessary to recruit his labouring powers withal.

Now surplus value, as we have seen, is of two kinds, absolute and relative. Absolute surplus value is got by lengthening the term of surplus labour; relative surplus value by shortening the term of necessary labour, which is chiefly done by inventions that cheapen the necessaries of life. The consideration of the first of these points leads Marx into a discussion of the normal length of the day of labour; and the consideration of the second into a discussion of the effects of inventions and machinery on the condition of the working cla.s.ses. We shall follow him on these points in their order.

3. _Normal day of labour._ There is a normal length of the day of labour, and it ought to be ascertained and fixed by law. Some bounds are set to it by nature. There is a minimum length, for example, beneath which it cannot fall; that minimal limit is the time required to create an equivalent to the labourer's living; but as under the capitalistic system the capitalist has also to be supported out of it, it can never be actually shortened to this minimum. There is also a maximum length above which it cannot rise, and this upper limit is fixed by two sorts of considerations, one physical, the other moral. 1st. _Physical limits._ These are set by the physical endurance of the labourer. The day of labour cannot be protracted beyond the term within which the labourer can go on from day to day in normal working condition to the end of his normal labouring career. This is always looked to with respect to a horse. He cannot be wrought more than eight hours a day regularly without injury. 2nd. _Moral limits._ The labourer needs time (which the horse does not, or he would perhaps get it) for political, intellectual, and social wants, according to the degree required by society at the time. Between the maximum and minimum limit there is, however, considerable play-room, and therefore we find labouring days prevailing of very different length, 8 hours, 10, 12, 14, 16, and even 18 hours. There is no principle in the existing industrial economy which fixes the length of the day; it must be fixed by law on a sound view of the requirements of the case. Marx pitches upon 8 hours as the best limit, because it affords a security for the permanent physical efficiency of the labourer, and gives him leisure for satisfying those intellectual and social wants which are becoming every day more largely imperative. He makes no use of the reason often urged for the 8 hours day, that the increased intelligence it would tend to cultivate in the working cla.s.s would in many ways conduce to such an increase of production as would justify the shorter term of work. But he is very strong for the necessity of having it fixed by law, and points out that even then employers will need to be carefully watched or they will find ways and means of extending the day in spite of the law. When the day was fixed in England at 10 hours in some branches of industry, some masters gained an extra quarter or half-hour by taking five minutes off each meal time, and the profit made in these five minutes was often very considerable. He mentions a manufacturer who said to him, "If you allow me ten minutes extra time every day, you put 1,000 a year into my pocket," and he says that is a good demonstration of the origin of surplus value, for how much of this 1,000 would be given to the man whose extra ten minutes' labour had made it? Marx enters very fully into the history of English factory legislation, acknowledges the great benefit it has conferred both upon the labouring cla.s.s and the manufacturers, and says that since the Act of 1850 the cotton industry has become the model industry of the country. As might be expected, he thinks the gradual course taken by English legislation on the subject much inferior, as a matter of principle, to the more revolutionary method taken by France in 1848, when a twelve hours Act was introduced simultaneously as a matter of principle for every trade in the whole country; but he admits that the results were more permanent in England.

4. _Effects of machinery, and the growth of fixed capital on the working cla.s.ses._ The whole progress of industrial improvements is a history of fresh creations of relative surplus value, and always for the benefit of the capitalist who advances the money. Everything that economizes labour or that adds positively to its productivity, contracts the labourer's own part of the working day and prolongs the master's. Division and subdivision of labour, combination, co-operation, organization, inventions, machinery, are all "on the one hand elements of historical progress and development in the economic civilization of society, but on the other are all means of civilized and refined exploitation of the labourer." They not only increase social wealth at his expense, but in many cases they do him positive injury. These improvements have cost capitalists nothing, though capitalists derive the whole advantage from them. Subdivision, combination, organization, are simply natural resources of social labour, and natural resources of any kind are not produced by the capitalist. Inventions, again, are the work of science, and science costs the capitalist nothing. Labour, a.s.sociation, science--these are the sources of the increase; capital is nowhere, yet it sits and seizes the whole. Machinery, of course, is capital, but then Marx will not admit that it creates any value, and contends that it merely transfers to the product the value it loses by tear and wear in the process of production. The general effect of industrial improvements, according to Marx, is--1st, to reduce wages; 2nd, to prolong the day of labour; 3rd, to overwork one-half of the working cla.s.s; 4th, to throw the rest out of employ; and, 5th, to concentrate the whole surplus return in the hands of a few capitalists who make their gains by exploiting the labourers, and increase them by exploiting one another. This last point we need not further explain, and the third and fourth we shall unfold under the separate heads of Piecework and Relative Over-population. The remaining two I shall take up now, and state Marx's views about a little more fully.

(_a_). Industrial improvements tend to reduce wages. They do so, says Marx, through first mutilating the labourer intellectually and corporeally. As a result of subdivision of labour, workmen are rapidly becoming mere one-sided specialists. Headwork is being separated more and more from handwork in the labourer's occupation, and this differentiation of function leads to a hierarchy of wages which affords great opportunity for exploiting the labourer. Muscular power is more easily dispensed with than formerly, and so the cheaper labour of women and children is largely superseding the dearer labour of men. If this goes on much further, the manufacturer will get the labour of a whole family for the wages he used to pay to its head alone, and the labourer will be converted into a slave-dealer who sells his wife and children instead of his own labour. That this kind of slavery will find no sort of resistance from either master or labourer, is to Marx's mind placed beyond doubt by the fact that though the labour of children under 13 years of age is restricted in English factories, advertis.e.m.e.nts appear in public prints for "children that can pa.s.s for 13."

(_b_). Industrial improvements tend to lengthen the day of labour.

Machinery can go on for ever, and it is the interest of the capitalist to make it do so. He finds, moreover, a ready and specious pretext in the greater lightness of the work as compared with hand labour, for keeping the labourer employed beyond the normal limits of human endurance. Capitalists always complain that long hours are a necessity in consequence of the increasing extent of fixed capital which cannot otherwise be made to pay. But this is a mistake on their part, says Marx. For, according to the factory inspector's reports, shortening the day of labour to 10 hours has increased production and not diminished it, and the explanation is that the men can work harder while they are at it, if the duration of their labour is shortened. Shortening the day of labour has not only increased production, but actually increased wages. Mr. Redgrave, in his Report for 1860, says that during the period 1839-1859 wages rose in the branches of industry that adopted the ten hours' principle, and fell in trades where men wrought 14 and 15 hours a day. Small wages and long hours are always found to go together, because the same causes which enable the employer to reduce wages enable him to lengthen the labouring day.

5. _Piecework._ Industrial improvements tend, Marx maintains, to overwork, to undue intensification of labour, for machinery can go at almost any rate all day and all night, and labourers are compelled by various expedients to work up to it. Among these expedients none is more strongly condemned by Marx than piecework, as encouraging over-exertion and overtime. He says that though known so early as the 14th century, piecework only came into vogue with the large system of production, to which he thinks it the most suitable form of payment. He states (though this is not quite accurate) that it is the only form of payment in use in workshops that are under the factory acts, because in these workshops the day of labour cannot be lengthened, and the capitalist has no other way open to him of exploiting the labourer but by increasing the intensity of the labour. He ridicules the idea of a writer who thought "the system of piecework marked an epoch in the history of the working man, because it stood halfway between the position of a mere wage labourer depending on the will of the capitalist and the position of the co-operative artisan who in the not distant future promises to combine the artisan and the capitalist in his own person." Better far, he holds, for the labourer to stick to day's wages, for he can be much more easily and extensively exploited by the piece system. He contends that experience has proved this in trades like the compositors and ship carpenters, in which both systems of payment are in operation side by side, and he cites from the factory inspectors' reports of 1860 the case of a factory employing 400 hands, 200 paid by the piece and 200 by the day. The piece hands had an interest in working overtime, and the day hands were obliged to follow suit without receiving a farthing extra for the additional hour or half-hour. This might be stopped by further legislation, but then Marx holds that the system of piece payment is so p.r.o.ne to abuse that when one door of exploitation shuts another only opens, and legislation will always remain ineffectual. Every peculiarity of the system furnishes opportunity either for reducing wages or increasing work. On the piece system the worth of labour is determined by the worth of the work it does, and unless the work possess average excellence the stipulated price is withheld. There is thus always a specious pretext ready to the employer's hand for making deductions from wages on the ground that the work done did not come up to the stipulated standard. Then again, it furnishes the employer with a definite measure for the intensity of labour. He judges from the results of piecework how much time it generally takes to produce a particular piece, and labourers who do not possess the average productivity are turned off on the ground that they are unable to do a minimum day's work. Even those who are kept on get lower average wages than they would on the day system. The superior workman earns indeed better pay working by the piece, but the general body do not. The superior workman can afford to take a smaller price per piece than the others, because he turns out a greater number of pieces in the same time, and the employer fixes, from the case of the superior workman, a standard of payment which is injurious to the rest. In the end a change from day's wages to piece wages will thus be found to have merely resulted in the average labourer working harder for the same money. Marx, however, admits that when a definite scale of prices has been in long use and has become fixed as a custom, there are so many difficulties to its reduction that employers are obliged, when they seek to reduce it, to resort to violent methods of transforming it into time wages again. He gives an example of this from the strike of the Coventry ribbon-weavers in 1860, in resistance to a transformation of this kind.

These are only some of the evils Marx lays at the door of piecework; he has many more charges. From rendering the superintendence of labour unnecessary, it leads to abuses like the sub-contracts known in this country as "the sweating system," or what is a variety of the same, to contracts of the employer with his manager, whereby the latter becomes responsible for the whole work, and employs and pays the men. From making it the pecuniary interest of the labourer to work overtime, piecework induces him to overstrain his powers, and both to transgress the legal or normal limits of the day of labour, and to raise or exceed the normal degree of the intensity of labour. Marx, quoting from Dunning, says that it was customary in the engineering trade in London for employers to engage a foreman of exceptional physical powers, and pay him an extra salary per quarter to keep the men up to his own pace; an expedient which, he adds, is actually recommended to farmers by Morton in his "Agricultural Encyclopaedia." He attributes to piecework, especially in its operation on women and children, the degeneration of the labouring cla.s.s in the potteries, which is shown in the Report of the Commission on the Employment of Children. But while Marx thus objects to piecework because it leads to overwork, he objects to it also because it leads to underwork. It enables employers to engage more hands than they require, when they entertain perhaps only an imaginary expectation of work, for they know they run no risk, since paying by the piece they pay only for what is done. The men are thus imperfectly employed and insufficiently paid.

6. _Relative Over-population._ One of the worst features of modern industrial development is the vast number of labourers whom it constantly leaves out of employ. This Marx calls relative over-population. Of absolute over-population he has no fear. He is not a Malthusian. He holds that there is no population law applicable to all countries and times alike. Social organisms differ from one another as do animals and plants; they have different laws and conditions. Every country and age has its own law of population. A constant and increasing over-population is a characteristic of the present age; it is a necessary consequence of the existing method of carrying on industry; but it is nothing in the nature of an absolute over-growth; it is only, to Marx's thinking, a relative superfluity. There is plenty of work for all, more than plenty. If those who have employment were not allowed to be overwrought, and if work were to-morrow to be limited to its due amount for every one according to age and s.e.x, the existing working population would be quite insufficient to carry on the national production to its present extent. Even in England, where the technical means of saving labour are enormous, this could not be done except by converting most of our present "unproductive" labourers into productive.

There is therefore, Marx conceives, no reason why any one should be out of work; but at present, what with the introduction of new machinery, the industrial cycles, the commercial crises, the changes of fashion, the transitions of every kind, we have always, besides the industrial army in actual service, a vast industrial reserve who are either entirely out of employment or very inadequately employed. This relative over-population is an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic management of industry, which first compels one-half of the labouring community to do the work of all, and then makes use of the redundancy of labour so created to compel the working half to take less pay. Low wages spring from the excessive compet.i.tion among labourers caused by this relative over-population. "Rises and falls in the rate of wages are universally regulated by extensions and contractions in the industrial reserve army which correspond with changes in the industrial cycle. They are not determined by changes in the absolute number of the labouring population, but through changes in the relative distribution of the working cla.s.s into active army and reserve army--through increase or decrease in the relative numbers of the surplus population--through the degree in which it is at one time absorbed and at another dismissed."

The fluctuations in the rate of wages are thus traced to expansions or contractions of capital, and not to variation in the state of population. Marx ridicules the theory of these fluctuations given by political economists, that high wages lead to their own fall by encouraging marriages, and so in the end increasing the supply of labour, and that low wages lead to their own rise by discouraging marriages and reducing the supply of labour. That, says Marx, is very fine, but before high wages could have produced a redundant population (which would take eighteen years to grow up), wages would, with modern industrial cycles, have been up, down, and up again through ordinary fluctuations of trade.

Relative over-population is of three kinds: current, latent, and stagnant. Current over-population is what comes from incidental causes, the ordinary changes that take place in the every-day course of industry. A trade is slack this season and brisk the next, has perhaps its own seasons, like house-painting in spring, posting in summer. Or one trade may from temporary reasons be busy, while others are depressed. In the last half year of 1860 there were 90,000 labourers in London out of employment, and yet the factory inspectors report that at that very time much machinery was standing idle for want of hands. This comes from the labourer being mutilated--that is, specialized--under modern subdivision of labour, and fit for only a single narrow craft.

Another current cause of over-population is that under the stress of modern labour the workman is old before his years, and while still in middle life becomes unfit for full work, and pa.s.ses into the reserve.

Marx says this is the real reason for the prevalence of early marriages among the working cla.s.s. They are generally condemned for being improvident, but they are really resorted to from considerations of providence, for working men foresee that they will be prematurely disabled for work, and desire, when that day comes, to have grown-up children about them who shall be able to support them. Other current causes are new inventions and new fashions, which always throw numbers out of work. Latent over-population is what springs from causes whose operation is long and slow. The best example of it is the case of the agricultural labourers. They are being gradually superseded by machinery, and as they lose work in the country they gather to the towns to swell the reserve army there. A great part of the farm servants are always in this process of transition, a few here, and a few there, and a few everywhere. The constancy of this flow indicates a latent over-population in the rural districts, and that is the cause of the low wages of agricultural labourers. By stagnant over-population Marx means that which is shown in certain branches of industry, where none of the workmen are thrown back entirely into the reserve, but none get full regular employment.

CHAPTER V.

THE FEDERALISM OF CARL MARLO.

Marlo and Rodbertus are sometimes spoken of as the precursors of German socialism. This, however, is a mistake. The socialism which now exists appeared in Germany among the Young Hegelians forty years ago, before the writings of either of these economists were published, and their writings have had very little influence on the present movement.

Rodbertus, it is true, communicated a decided impulse to La.s.salle, both by his published letter to Von Kirchmann in 1853, and by personal correspondence subsequently. He was a landed proprietor of strongly liberal opinions, who was appointed Minister of Agriculture in Prussia in 1848, but after a brief period of office retired to his estates, and devoted himself to economic and historical study. He took a very decided view of the defects of the existing industrial system, and held in particular that, in accordance with Ricardo's law of necessary wages, the labourer's income could never rise permanently above the level of supplying him with a bare subsistence, and consequently that, while his labour was always increasing in productivity, through mechanical inventions and other means, the share which he obtained of the product was always decreasing. What was required was simply to get this tendency counteracted, and to devise arrangements by which the labourer's share in the product might increase proportionally with the product itself, for otherwise the whole working population would be left behind by the general advancement of society. The remedy, he conceives, must lie in the line of a fresh contraction of the sphere of private property. That sphere had been again and again contracted in the interests of personal development, and it must be so once more. And the contraction that was now necessary was to leave nothing whatever in the nature of private property except income. This proposal is substantially identical with the scheme of the socialists; it is just the nationalization of all permanent stock; but then he holds that it could not be satisfactorily carried out in less than five hundred years. Rodbertus's writings have never been widely known, but they attracted some attention among the German working cla.s.s, and he was invited, along with La.s.salle and Lothar Bucher, to address the Working Men's Congress in Leipzig in 1863. He promised to come and speak on the law of necessary wages, but the Congress was never held in consequence of the action of La.s.salle in precipitating his own movement, and from that movement Rodbertus held entirely aloof. He agreed with La.s.salle's complaints against the present order of things, but he disapproved of his plan of reform. He did not think the scheme of founding productive a.s.sociations on State credit either feasible or desirable, and he would still retain the system of wages, though with certain improvements introduced by law. He thought, moreover, that La.s.salle erred gravely in making the socialists a political party, and that they should have remained a purely economic one. Besides, he looked on it as mere folly to expect, with La.s.salle, the accomplishment in thirty years of changes which, as we have seen, he believed five centuries little enough time to evolve.

Rodbertus may thus be said to have had some relations with the present movement, but Marlo stands completely apart from it: and his large and important work, "Untersuchungen uber die Organization der Arbeit, oder System der Weltokonomie," published at Ka.s.sel in 1850-5--though original, learned, and lucid--remained so absolutely unknown that none of the lexicons mention his name, and even an economist like Schaeffle--who was the first to draw public attention to it, and has evidently been considerably influenced by it himself--had never read it till he was writing his own work on socialism (1870). But though Marlo cannot be said to have contributed in any respect to the present socialistic movement, his work deserves attentive consideration as a plea for fundamental social reform, advanced by a detached and independent thinker, who has given years of patient study to the phenomena of modern economic life, and holds them to indicate the presence of a deep-seated and widespread social disease. Carl Marlo is the _nom de plume_ of a German professor of chemistry named Winkelblech, and he gives us in the preface to his second volume a touching account of how he came to apply himself to social questions. In 1843 he made a tour of investigation through Northern Europe in connection with a technological work he was engaged in writing, and visited among other places the blue factory of Modum, in Norway, where he remained some days, charmed with the scenery, which he thought equal to that of the finest valleys of the Alps. One morning he went up to a neighbouring height, whence he could see the whole valley, and was calmly enjoying the view when a German artisan came to ask him to undertake some commission to friends in the fatherland. They engaged in conversation.

The artisan went over his experiences, and repeated all the privations he and his fellows had to endure. His tale of sorrow, so alien apparently to the ravishing beauty around, made a profound impression on Winkelblech, and altered the purpose and work of his life. "What is the reason," he asked himself, "that the paradise before my eyes conceals so much misery? Is nature the source of all this suffering, or is it man that is to blame for it? I had before, like so many men of science, looked, while in workshops, only on the forges and the machinery, not on the men--on the products of human industry, and not on the producers, and I was quite a stranger to this great empire of misery that lies at the foundation of our boasted civilization. The touching words of the artisan made me feel the nullity of my scientific work and life in its whole extent, and from that moment I resolved to make the sufferings of our race, with their causes and remedies, the subject of my studies." He pursued these studies with the greatest industry for several years, and found the extent of men's sufferings to be greatly beyond his expectation. Poverty prevailed everywhere--among labourers and among employers, too--with peoples of the highest industrial development, and with peoples of the lowest--in luxurious cities, and in the huts of villagers--in the rich plains of Lombardy, no less than the sterile wilds of Scandinavia. He arrived at the conclusion that the causes of all this lay not in nature, but in the fact that human inst.i.tutions rested on false economic foundations, and he held the only possible remedy to consist in improving these inst.i.tutions. He became convinced that technical perfection of production, however great, would never be able to extinguish poverty or lead to the diffusion of general comfort, and that civilization was now come to a stage in its development at which further progress depended entirely on the advancement of political economy. Political economy was, therefore, for our time the most important of all sciences, and Winkelblech now determined to give himself thoroughly to its study. Hitherto he had not done so. "During the progress of my investigations," he says, "the doctrines of economists, as well as the theories of socialists, remained almost unknown to me except in name, for I intentionally abstained from seeking any knowledge of either, in order that I might keep myself as free as possible from extraneous influences. It was only after I arrived at the results described that I set myself to a study of economic literature, and came to perceive that the substance of my thoughts, though many of them were not new, and stood in need of correction, departed completely from the accepted principles of the science." He reached the conclusion that there prevailed everywhere the symptoms of a universal social disease, and that political economy was the only physician that could cure it; but that the prevailing system of economy was quite incompetent for that task, and that a new system was urgently and indispensably required. To set forth such a system is the aim of his book. He derides Proudhon's idea of social reforms coming of themselves without design, and argues strongly that no reform worthy the name can ever be expected except as the fruit of economic researches. He agrees with the Socialists in so far as they seek to devise a new economic system, but he thinks they make a defective diagnosis of the disease, and propose an utterly inadequate remedy. He counts them entirely mistaken in attributing all existing evils to the unequal distribution of wealth, a deficiency of production being, in his opinion, a much more important source of misery than any error of distribution. In fact, his fundamental objection to the existing distribution is that it is not the distribution which conduces to the highest production, or to the most fruitful use of the natural resources at the command of society. He differs from the German socialists in always looking at the question from the standpoint of society in general, rather than from that of the proletariat alone, and he maintains that a new organization of labour is even more necessary for the interest of the capitalists than for that of the labourers, because he believes the present system will infallibly lead, unless amended, to the overthrow of the capitalist cla.s.s, and the introduction of communism. His point of view is moreover purely economic and scientific, entirely free from all partizan admixture, and while he declares himself to be a zealous member of the republican party, he says that he purposely abstains from intervention in politics because he regards the political question as one of very minor rank, and holds that, with sound social arrangements, people could live more happily under the Russian autocracy than, with unsound ones, they could do under the French republic. The organization of labour is, in his opinion, something quite independent of the form of the State, and its final aim ought to be to produce the amount of wealth necessary to diffuse universal comfort among the whole population without robbing the middle cla.s.ses. These characteristics sufficiently separate him from the socialist democrats of the present day.

His book was published gradually in parts, sometimes after long intervals, between 1848 and 1856, and it was finally interrupted by his death in 1865. A second edition appeared in 1885, containing some additions from his ma.n.u.scripts, but the work remains incomplete. It was to have consisted of three parts; 1st, a historical part, containing an exposition and estimate of the various economic systems; 2nd, an elementary or doctrinal part, containing an exposition of the principles of economic science; and, 3rd, a practical part, explaining his plan for the organization of labour. The first two parts are all we possess; the third, and most important, never appeared, which must be regretted by all who recognise the evidences of original power and singular candour that the other parts present.

Marlo's account of the social problem is that it arises from the fact that our present industrial organization is not in correspondence with the idea of right which is recognised by the public opinion of the time.

That idea of right is the Christian one, which takes its stand on the dignity of manhood, and declares that all men, simply because they are men, have equal rights to the greatest possible happiness. Up till the French Revolution, the idea of right that prevailed was the heathen one, which might be called the divine right of the stronger. The weak might be made a slave without wrong. He might be treated as a thing and not as a person or an equal, who had the same right with his master or his feudal superior to the greatest possible enjoyment. Nature belonged to the conqueror, and his dominion was transmitted by privilege. Inequality of right was therefore the characteristic of this period; Marlo calls it monopolism. But at the French Revolution the Christian idea of right rose to its due ascendancy over opinion, and the sentiments of love and justice began to a.s.sume a control over public arrangements. Do as you would be done by, became a rule for politics as well as for private life, and the weak were supported against the strong. Equality of right was the mark of the new period; Marlo calls it panpolism. This idea could not be realized before the present day, because it had never before taken possession of the public mind, but it has done this now so thoroughly that it cannot be expected to rest till it has realized itself in every direction in all the practical applications of which it is susceptible. The final arbiter of inst.i.tutions is always the conception of right prevailing at the time; contemporary industrial arrangements are out of harmony with the contemporary conception of right; and stability cannot be looked for until this disturbance is completely adjusted.

Now the first attempts that society made to effect this adjustment were not unnaturally attended with imperfection. In the warmth of their recoil from the evils of monopolism, men ran into extreme and distorted embodiments of the opposite principle, and they ran contrary ways. These contrary ways are Liberalism and Communism. Liberalism fixed its attention mainly on the artificial restrictions, the privileges, the services, the legal bonds by which monopoly and inequality were kept up, and it thought a perfect state of society would be brought about if only every chain were snapped and every fetter stripped away. It conceived the road to the greatest possible happiness for every man was the greatest possible freedom; it idolized the principle of abstract liberty, and it fancied if evil did not disappear, it was always because something still remained that needed emanc.i.p.ation. Communism, on the other hand, kept its eyes on the inequalities of monopolistic society; imagined the true road to the greatest possible happiness was the greatest possible equality; that all ills would vanish as soon as things were levelled enough; in short, it idolized the principle of abstract equality. Modern Liberalism and modern Communism are therefore of equal birth; they have the same historical origin in the triumph of the principle of equality of right in 1789; they are only different modes of attempting to reduce that principle to practice; and Liberalism happens to be the more widely disseminated of the two, not because it represents that principle better, but merely because being more purely negative than the other, it was easier of introduction, and so got the start of Communism in the struggle of existence. According to Marlo, they are both equally bad representatives of the principle, and their chief good lies in their mutual criticism, by means of which they prepare the way for the true system, the system of Federalism, which will be presently explained. The history of revolution, he says, begins in the victory of Liberalism and Communism together over Monopolism; it proceeds by the conflict of the victors with one another, and it ends in the final triumph of Federalism over both.

Marlo next criticises the two systems of Liberalism and Communism with considerable acuteness. Both the one and the other are utopias; they are absorbed in realizing an abstract principle, and they, as a matter of fact, produce exactly the opposite of what they aim at. Communism seeks to reach the greatest possible happiness by introducing first the greatest possible equality. But what is equality? Is it equality when each man gets a coat of the same size, or is it not rather when each man gets a coat that fits him? Some communists would accept the former alternative. They would measure off the same length to the dwarf and the giant, to the ploughman and the judge, to the family of three and the family of thirteen. But this would be clearly not equality, but only inequality of a more vicious and vexatious kind. Most communists, however, prefer the second alternative, and a.s.sign to every man according to his needs, to every man the coat that fits him. But then we must first have the cloth, and that is only got by labour, and every labourer ought if possible to produce his own coat. The motive to labour, however, is weakened on the communistic system; and if those who work less are to be treated exactly like those who work more, then that would be no abolition of monopoly, but merely the invention of a new monopoly, the monopoly of indolence and incapacity. The skilful and industrious would be exploited by the stupid and lazy. Besides, production would for the same reason, insufficient inducement to labour, be diminished, progress would be stopped, and therefore the average of human happiness would decline. Communism thus conducts to the opposite of everything it seeks. It seeks equality, it ends in inequality; it seeks the abolition of monopoly, it creates a new monopoly; it seeks to increase happiness, it actually diminishes it. It is a pure utopia, and why? Because it misunderstands its own principle. Equality does not mean giving equal things to every man; it means merely affording the greatest possible playroom for the development of every personality, and that is exactly the principle of freedom. The greatest possible equality and the greatest possible freedom can only be realized together; they must spring out of the same conditions, and a system of right which shall adjust these conditions is just what is now wanted.

Liberalism is a failure from like causes. It seeks to realize happiness by freedom; it realizes neither. For it mistakes the nature of freedom, as the Communists mistake the nature of equality. It takes freedom to be the power of doing what one likes, instead of being the power of doing what is right. Its whole bent is to exempt as much as possible of life from authoritative restraint, and to give as much scope as exigencies will allow to the play of individuality. It is based on no positive conception of right whatever, and looks on the State as an alien whose interference is something exceptional, only justified on occasional grounds of public necessity or general utility. It fails to see that there are really no affairs in a community which are out of relation to the general wellbeing, and dest.i.tute of political significance. Nothing demonstrates the error of this better than the effects of the Liberal _regime_ itself. For half a century the industrial concerns of the people have been treated as matters of purely private interest, and this policy has resulted in a political as well as economical revolution.

Industrial freedom, which has produced capitalism in the economic field, has resulted in political life in the ascendancy of a new cla.s.s, a plutocracy, "the worst masters," said De Tocqueville, "the world has yet seen, though their reign will be short." The change which was effected by the legislation of the Revolution was not a development of a fourth estate, as is sometimes said; it was really nothing more than the creation of a money aristocracy, and the putting of them in the place of the old hereditary n.o.bility. The system of industrial right that happens to prevail, therefore, so far from being, as Liberals fancy, outside the sphere of political interest, is in truth the very element on which the distribution of political power, in the last a.n.a.lysis, depends. Nothing is more political than the social question. Liberals think slight of that question, but it is, says Marlo, the real question of the day, and it is neither more nor less than the question of the existence or abolition of Liberalism, the question of the maintenance or subversion of the principle of industrial freedom, the question of the ascendancy or overthrow of a money aristocracy. The fight of our age is a fight against a plutocracy bred of Liberalism. It is not, as some represent it, a struggle of labourers against employers; it is a joint struggle of labourers and lower _bourgeoisie_ against the higher _bourgeoisie_, a struggle of those who work and produce against those who luxuriate idly on the fruits of others' labour. As compared with this question, const.i.tutional questions are of very minor importance, for no matter whether the State be monarchy or republic, if the system of industrial right that prevails in it be the system of industrial freedom, the real power of the country will be in the hands of the capitalist cla.s.s. He who fails to see this, says Marlo, fails to understand the spirit of his time. It is always the national idea of right that governs both in social and political relations, and as long as the national idea of right is that of Liberalism, we shall continue to have capitalism and a plutocracy. It is the mind that builds the body up, and it is only when a new system of right has taken as complete possession of the national consciousness as Liberalism did in 1789, that the present social conflict will cease and a better order of things come in.

From want of such a system of right--from want even of seeing the necessity for it, Liberalism has defeated its own purpose. It sought to abolish monopoly; it has only subst.i.tuted for the old monopoly of birth the more grievous monopoly of wealth. It sought to establish freedom; it has only established plutocratic tyranny. It has erred because it took for freedom an abstraction of its own and tried to realize that, just as Communism erred by taking for equality an abstraction of its own and trying to realize that. The most perfect state of freedom is not reached when every man has the power of doing what he likes, any more than the most perfect state of equality is reached when every man has equal things with every other; but the greatest possible freedom is attained in a condition of society where every man has the greatest possible play-room for the development of his personality, and the greatest possible equality is attained in exactly the same state of things. Real freedom and real equality are in fact identical. Every right contains from the first a social element as well as an individual element, and it cannot be realized in the actual world without observing a due adjustment between these two elements. Such an adjustment can only be discovered by a critical examination of the economic const.i.tution of society, and must then be expressed in a distinct system of industrial right, which imposes on individual action its just limits. True liberty is liberty within these limits; and the true right of property is a right of property under the same conditions. The fundamental fault of Liberalism, the cause of its failure, is simply that it goes to work without a sound theory of right, or rather perhaps without any clear theory at all, and merely aims at letting every one do as he likes, with the understanding that the State can always be called in to correct accidents and excesses.

This defect is what Federalism claims to supply. It claims to be the only theory that abandons abstractions and keeps closely to the nature of things, and therefore to be the only theory that is able to realize even approximately the Christian principle of equality of right. The name furnishes no very precise clue to the conclusion it designates, and it has no reference to the federative form of State, for which Marlo expressly disavows having any partiality. He has chosen the word merely to indicate the fact that society is an organic confederation of many different kinds of a.s.sociations--families, churches, academies, mercantile companies, and so on; that a.s.sociation is not only a natural form, but the natural form in which man's activity tends to be carried on; and that in any sound system of industrial right this must be recognised by an extension of the collective form of property and the co-operative form of production. Communism, says Marlo, is mechanical, Liberalism is atomistic, but Federalism is organic. When he distinguishes his theory from communism, it must be remembered that it is from the communism which he has criticised, and which he would prefer to denominate Equalism; it is from the communism of Baboeuf, which would out of hand give every man according to his needs, and would consequently, through impairing the motives to industry, leave those needs themselves in the long run less satisfactorily provided for than they are now. But his system is nearly identical with the communism of the Young Hegelians of his own time--that is, with the German socialism of the present day--although he arrived at it in entire independence of their agitations, and builds it on deductions peculiar to himself. Like them, he asks for the compulsory transformation of land and the instruments of production from private property into collective property; like them, he asks for this on grounds of social justice, as the necessary mechanism for giving effect to positive rights that are set aside under the present system; and he says himself, "If you ask the question, how is the democratic social republic related to Federalism, the most suitable answer is, as the riddle to its solution."

He starts from the position that all men have equally the right to property. Not merely in the sense, which is commonly acknowledged, that they have the right to property if they have the opportunity of acquiring it; but in the further significance, that they have a right to the opportuni