Socialism: A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles Part 12

This that we call the capitalist epoch has grown out of the geographical discoveries and the mechanical inventions of the past three hundred years or so, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its chief characteristic, from an economic point of view, is that of production for sale instead of direct use as in earlier stages of social development. Of course, barter and sale are much older than this epoch which we are discussing. In all ages men have exchanged their surplus products for other things more desirable to them, either directly by barter or through some medium of exchange. In the very nature of things, however, such exchange as this must have been incidental to the life of the people engaging in it, and not its princ.i.p.al aim. Under such conditions of society wealth consists in the possession of useful things. The naked savage, so long as he possessed plenty of weapons, and could get an abundance of fish or game, was, from the viewpoint of the society in which he lived, a wealthy man. In other words, the wealth of pre-capitalist society consisted in the possession of use-values, and not of exchange-values. Robinson Crusoe, for whom the possibility of exchange did not exist, was, from this pre-capitalist viewpoint, a very wealthy man.

In our present society, production is carried on primarily for exchange, for sale. The first and essential characteristic feature of wealth in this stage of social development is that it takes the form of acc.u.mulated exchange-values, or commodities. Men are accounted rich or poor according to the exchange-values they can command, and not according to the use-values they can command. To use a favorite example, the man who owns a ton of potatoes is far richer in simple use-values than the man whose only possession is a sack of diamonds, but, because in present society a sack of diamonds will exchange for an almost infinite quant.i.ty of potatoes, the owner of the diamonds is much wealthier than the owner of the potatoes. The criterion of wealth in capitalist society is exchangeable value as opposed to use-value, the criterion of wealth in primitive society. The unit of wealth is therefore a commodity, and we must begin our investigation with it. If we can a.n.a.lyze the nature of a commodity so that we can understand how and why it is produced, and how and why it is exchanged, we shall be able to understand the principle governing the production and exchange of wealth in this and every other society where similar conditions prevail, where, that is to say, the unit of wealth is a commodity, and wealth consists in an acc.u.mulation of commodities.

V

The visit to America, in 1907, of a distinguished English critic of Socialism, Mr. W. H. Mallock, had the effect of thrusting into prominence a common misconception of Marxian Socialism, and it is highly significant that, except in the Socialist press, none of the numerous comments which the series of university lectures delivered by that gentleman occasioned, called attention to the fact that they were based throughout upon a misstatement of the Marxian position. Briefly, Mr.

Mallock insisted that Marx believed and taught that all wealth is produced by manual labor, and that, therefore, it ought to belong to the manual workers. In order that there may be no misstatement of our amiable critic's position, it will be best to quote his own words. He says, in Lecture I: "The practical outcome of the scientific economics of Marx is summed up in the formula which is the watchword of popular Socialism. 'All wealth is due to labor; therefore all wealth ought to go to the laborer'--a doctrine in itself not novel, but presented by Marx as the outcome of an elaborate system of economics"[156] (page 6). The careful reader will notice that Mr. Mallock does not profess to give the exact words of Marx, nor refer to any particular pa.s.sage, but says that the formula quoted by him is the "practical outcome" of the economic system of Marx, "presented by Marx" as such. But to quote again: "Wealth, says Marx, not only ought to be, but actually can be distributed amongst a certain cla.s.s of persons, namely, the laborers....

Because these laborers comprise in the acts of labor everything that is involved in the production of it" (page 7). Again: " ... Marx makes of his doctrine that labor alone produces all economic wealth" (page 7).

Also: " ... that theory of production which the genius of Karl Marx invested with a semblance, at all events, of sober, scientific truth, and which ascribes all wealth to that _ordinary manual labor which brings the sweat to the brow of the ordinary laboring man_" (page 12).[157] All the foregoing pa.s.sages are taken from a single lecture, the first of the series. We will take only a few from the others: " ...

the doctrine of Marx that all productive effort is absolutely equal in productivity" (Lecture III, page 46); "Marx based the ethics of distribution on what purported to be an a.n.a.lysis of production" (Lecture IV, page 61); " ... Count Tolstoy, ... like Socialists of the school of Marx, declares that ordinary manual labor is the source of all wealth"

(Lecture IV, page 76). "One is the attempt of Marx and his school, which represents ordinary manual labor as the sole producer of wealth"

(Lecture IV, page 81); " ... the Marxian doctrine ... that manual labor is the sole producer of wealth" (Lecture V, page 115). It would be easy to add many other quotations very similar to these, but it is unnecessary. From the quotations given we can gather Mr. Mallock's conception of what Marx taught regarding the source of wealth.

It will be seen that Mr. Mallock alleges: (1) That Marx believed and taught that all wealth is produced by ordinary manual labor; (2) that he held, as a consequence, that all wealth ought to belong to the manual laborers, thus basing an ethic of distribution upon production; (3) that he taught that all productive effort is absolutely equal in productive value, in other words, that ten hours' work of one kind is economically as valuable as ten hours' of any other kind, so long as the labor is productive.

It is not easy to command the necessary self-restraint to reply with dignity to such wholesale misrepresentation as this. There is not the slightest scintilla of a foundation in fact for any one of the three statements. Not a single pa.s.sage can be quoted from Marx which justifies any one of them. As we shall see, Marx specifically repudiated each one of them, a great deal more forcefully than Mr. Mallock does. That such misrepresentations of Marx should have been permitted to pa.s.s unchallenged in so many of our great colleges and universities is to our national shame. We will briefly consider the teaching of Marx under each of the three heads.

First, the source of wealth. It is true that such phrases as "Labor is the source of all wealth" are constantly met with in the popular literature of Socialism, but so far as that is the case it is not due to the teaching of Marx, but rather in spite of it. In the writings of the early Ricardian Socialists these phrases abound, but nowhere in all the writings of Marx will such a statement be found. For many years the opening sentence in the Programme of the German party contained the phrase "Labor is the source of all wealth and of all culture," _but it was adopted in spite of the protest of Marx_. The Gotha Programme was adopted in 1875. A draft was submitted to Marx and he wrote of it that it was "utterly condemnable and demoralizing to the party." Of the pa.s.sage in question, he wrote: "Labor is _not_ the source of all wealth.

Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and of such, to be sure, is material wealth composed) as is labor, which itself is but the expression of a natural force, of human labor-power."[158] That the clause was adopted was a bitter disappointment to Marx, and was due to the insistence of the followers of Ferdinand La.s.salle. To say that Marx held labor to be the sole source of wealth is to misrepresent his whole teaching.[159]

But while the La.s.sallians, and before them the Ricardians, used the _phrase_, it is evident that they a.s.sumed the inclusion of what Marx calls "Nature." They know very well that labor, mere exertion of physical strength, could produce nothing. If, for instance, a man were to spend all his strength trying to lift the pyramids, alone and unaided by mechanical power, it is quite evident to the meanest intellect that his exertions would not produce a single atom of wealth. It is equally obvious that if we take any use-value, whether it be an exchange-value or not being immaterial, we cannot eliminate from it the substance of which it is composed. Take, for example, the canoe of a savage, which is a simple use-value, and a meerschaum pipe, which is a commodity. In the canoe we have part of the trunk of a tree taken from the primeval forest, one of Nature's products. But without the labor of the savage it would never have become a canoe. It would have remained simply part of the trunk of a tree, and would not have acquired the use-value it has as a canoe. But it is likewise true that without the tree the canoe could not have existed. So with our meerschaum pipe. It is not simply a use-value: it is also an article of commerce, an exchange-value, a commodity. Its elements are, the silicate mineral which Nature provided and the form which human labor has given it. We can apply this test to every form of wealth, whether simple use-values or commodities, and we shall find that, in Mill's phrase, wealth is produced by the application of human labor to _appropriate natural objects_.

This brings us to the second point in Mr. Mallock's criticism, namely, that Marx held that only "ordinary manual labor" is capable of producing wealth, and that, therefore, all wealth ought to go to the manual laborers. One looks in vain for a single pa.s.sage in all the writings of Marx which will justify this criticism. It may be conceded at once that if Marx taught anything of the kind, the defect in Marxian theory is fatal. But it must be proven that the defect exists--and the _onus probandi_ rests upon Mr. Mallock. One need not be a trained economist or a learned philosopher to see how absurd such a theory must be. Suppose we take, for example, a man working in a factory, at a great machine, making screws. We go to that man and say: "Every screw here is made by manual labor alone. The machine does not count; the brains of the inventors of the machine have nothing to do with the making of screws."

Our laborer might be illiterate and unable to read a single page of political economy with understanding, but he would know that our statement was foolish and untrue. Or, suppose we take the machine itself and say to the laborer: "That great machine with all its levers and wheels and springs working in such beautiful harmony was made entirely by manual workers, such as molders, blacksmiths, and machinists; no brain workers had anything to do with the making of it; the labor of the inventors, and of the men who drew the plans and supervised the making, had nothing to do with the production of the machine"--our laborer would rightly conclude that we were either fools or seeking to mock him as one.

Curiously enough, notwithstanding the frequent reiteration of this criticism of Marx by Mr. Mallock, he himself, in an unguarded moment, provides the answer by which Marx is vindicated! Thus, speaking of the great cla.s.sical economists, Adam Smith, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, he points out that they included "all forms of living industrial effort, from those of a Watt or an Edison down to those of a man who tars a fence, grouped together under the common name of labor" (Lecture I, page 16). And again: "At present the orthodox economists and the socialistic economists alike give us _all human effort_[160] tied up, as it were, in a sack, and ticketed 'human labor'" (Lecture I, page 18). Now, if the Socialist includes in his definition of labor "all human effort," it stands to reason that he does not mean only "ordinary manual labor" when he uses the term. Thus Mallock answers Mallock and vindicates Marx!

Of course, Marx, like all the great economists, includes in his concept of labor every kind of productive effort, mental as well as physical, as Mr. Mallock, to the utter destruction of his disingenuous criticism, unconsciously--we must suppose--admitted. Take, for example, this definition: "By labor power or capacity for labor is to be understood the aggregate of those _mental and physical_ capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises when he produces a use-value of any description."[161] As against this luminous and precise definition, it is but fair to quote that of Mr. Mallock himself. He defines labor as "the faculties of an individual _applied to his own labor_"[162]--a meaningless jumble of words. The fifty-seven letters contained in that sentence would mean just as much if put in a bag, well shaken, and put on paper just as they happened to fall from the bag.

Marx never argued that the producers of wealth had a _right_ to the wealth produced. The "right of labor to the whole of its produce" was, it is true, the keynote of the theories of the Ricardian Socialists. An echo of the doctrine appeared in the Gotha Programme of the German Socialists to which reference has already been made, and in the popular agitation of Socialism in this and other countries it is echoed more or less frequently. Just in proportion as the ethical argument for Socialism is advanced, and appeals made to the sense of justice, the rich idler is condemned and an ethic of distribution based upon production becomes an important feature of the propaganda. But Marx nowhere indulges in this kind of argument. Not in a single line of "Capital," or his minor economic treatises, can any hint of the doctrine be found. He invariably scoffed at the "ethical distribution" idea. In the judgment of the present writer, this is at once his great strength and weakness, but that is beside the point of this discussion. Suffice it to say, though it involves some reiteration, that Marx never took the position that Socialism _ought_ to take the place of capitalism, because the producers of wealth _ought_ to get the whole of the wealth they produce. His position was rather that Socialism _must_ come, simply because capitalism _could not_ last.

Finally, we come to the charge that Marx taught that "all productive effort is absolutely equal in productivity." Incredible as it may seem, it is nevertheless a fact that everything Marx has to say upon the subject is directly opposed to this notion, and that, as we shall see later on, his famous theory of value is not only not dependent upon a belief in the equal productivity of all productive effort, but would be completely shattered by it. Not only Marx, but also Mill, Ricardo, and Smith, his great predecessors, recognized the fact that all labor is not equally productive. Of course, it requires no special genius to demonstrate this. That a poor mechanic with antiquated tools will produce less in a given number of hours than an expert mechanic with good tools, for example, is too obvious for comment. The Marx a.s.sailed by Mr. Mallock, and numerous critics like him, is a myth. The real Marx they do not touch--hence the futility of their work. The Marx they attack is a man of straw, not the immortal thinker. Endowed

"With just enough of learning to misquote,"

their a.s.saults are vain.

VI

Having thus disposed of some of the more prevalent criticisms of Marx as an economist, we are ready for a definite, consecutive statement of the economic theory of modern Socialism. First, however, a word as to the term "scientific" as commonly applied to Marxian Socialism. Even some of the friendliest of Socialist critics have contended that the use of the term is pretentious, bombastic, and altogether unjustified. From a certain narrow point of view, this appears to be an unimportant matter, and the vigor with which Socialists defend their use of the term seems exceedingly foolish, and accountable for only as a result of enthusiastic fetish worship--the fetish, of course, being Marx.

Such a view is very crude and superficial. It cannot be doubted that the Socialism represented by Marx and the modern political Socialist movement is radically different from the earlier Socialism with which the names of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Owen, and a host of other builders of "cloud palaces for an ideal humanity," are a.s.sociated. The need of some word to distinguish between the two is obvious, and the only question remaining is whether or not the word "scientific" is the most suitable and accurate one to make that distinction clear; whether the words "scientific" and "utopian" express with reasonable accuracy the nature of the difference. Here the followers of Marx feel that they have an impregnable position. The method of Marx is scientific. From the first sentence of his great work to the last, the method pursued is that of a painstaking scientist. It would be just as reasonable to complain of the use of the word "scientific" in connection with the work of Darwin and his followers, to distinguish it from the guesswork of Anaximander, as to cavil at the distinction made between the Socialism of Marx and Engels and their followers, and that of visionaries like Owen and Saint-Simon.

Doubtless both Marx and Engels lapsed occasionally into Utopianism. We see instances of this in the illusions Marx entertained regarding the Crimean War bringing about the European Social Revolution; in the theory of the increasing misery of the proletariat; in Engels' confident prediction, in 1845, that a Socialist revolution was imminent and inevitable; and in the prediction of both that an economic cataclysm must create the conditions for a sudden and complete revolution in society. These, I say, are Utopian ideas, evidences that the founders of scientific Socialism were tinctured with the older ideas of the Utopists, and even more with their spirit. But when we speak of "Marxism," what mental picture does the word suggest, what intellectual concept is the word a name for? Is it these forecasts and guesses, and the exact mode of realizing the Socialist ideal which Marx laid down, or is it the great principle of social evolution determined by economic development? Is it his nave and simple description of the process of capitalist concentration, in which no hint appears of the circuitous windings that carried the actual process into unforeseen channels, or the broad fact that the concentration has taken place and that monopoly has come out of compet.i.tion? Is it his statement of the extent to which labor is exploited, or the _fact_ of the exploitation? If we are to judge Marx by the essential things, rather than by the incidental and non-essential things, then we must admit his claim to be reckoned with the great scientific sociologists and economists.

After all, what const.i.tutes scientific method? Is it not the recognition of the law of causation, putting exact knowledge of facts above tradition or sentiment; acc.u.mulating facts patiently until sufficient have been gathered to make possible the formulation of generalizations and laws enabling us to connect the present with the past, and in some measure to foretell the outcome of the present, as Marx foretold the culmination of compet.i.tion in monopoly? Is it not to see past, present, and future as one whole, a growth, a constant process, so that instead of vainly fashioning plans for millennial Utopias, we seek in the facts of to-day the stream of tendencies, and so learn the direction of the immediate flow of progress? If this is a true concept of scientific method, and the scientific spirit, then Karl Marx was a scientist, and modern Socialism is aptly named Scientific Socialism.

FOOTNOTES:

[137] An English edition of this work, translated by H. Quelch, was published in 1900 under the t.i.tle _The Poverty of Philosophy_.

[138] Cf. F. Engels, Preface to _La Misere de la Philosophie_, English translation, _The Poverty of Philosophy_, page iv.

[139] _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour_, by Anton Menger, 1899.

[140] Edward Bernstein, _Ferdinand La.s.salle as a Social Reformer_, page ix.

[141] _Criticism of the Gotha Programme_, from the posthumous papers of Karl Marx.

[142] It should perhaps be pointed out here, to avoid misunderstanding, that Ricardo hedged this doctrine about with important qualifications--not always observed by his followers--till it no longer remained the simple proposition stated above. See Dr. A. C. Whitaker's _History and Criticism of the Labour Theory of Value in English Political Economy_, page 57, for a suggestive treatment of this point.

[143] _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour._

[144] Cf. _Capital_, Vol. I, page 644, and Vol. II, page 19, Kerr edition.

[145] Cf., for instance, _The Wealth of Nations_, Vol. I, Chapter VI.

[146] Introduction to Menger's _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour_.

[147] _The Life of Francis Place_, by Graham Wallas, M.A., London, 1898, page 268.

[148] For this brief sketch of the works of these Ricardian Socialist writers I have drawn freely upon Menger's _The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour_, and Professor Foxwell's Introduction thereto.

[149] _Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs_, by Wilhelm Liebknecht, translated by E. Untermann, 1901, page 32.

[150] Much of this work has been collated and edited by Marx's daughter, the late Mrs. Eleanor Marx-Aveling, and her husband, Dr. Edward Aveling, and published in two volumes, _The Eastern Question_ and _Revolution and Counter-Revolution_.

[151] The note is quoted by Liebknecht, _Memoirs of Marx_, page 177, and in the Introduction to _Revolution and Counter-Revolution_, by the editor, Eleanor Marx-Aveling.

[152] _Political Economy_, page 115.

[153] Luigi Cossa, _Guide to the Study of Political Economy_, English translation, 1880.

[154] _The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty_, edited by Charles Henry Hull, Vol. I, page 244.

[155] The italics are mine.--J. S.

[156] All quotations from Mr. Mallock are taken from the volume containing the text of his lectures, ent.i.tled _Socialism_, published by The National Civic Federation, New York, 1907.

[157] The italics are mine.--J. S.

[158] _Letter on the Gotha Programme_, by Karl Marx, published in the collection of the posthumous writings of Marx and Engels, edited by Mehring, 1902. See a translation of the letter by Dr. Harriet E.

Lothrop, _International Socialist Review_, May, 1908.