A Critical Examination of Socialism. W. H. Mallock
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