A Critical Examination of Socialism. W. H. Mallock
not labourers." Another critic said: "Just as 'land' in economics means all the forces of nature, so does 'labour' mean all the forces of man. Why, then, speak of ability?" These criticisms are purely verbal. If we like to take "labour" as a collective name for all forms of human effort, we can of course do so; but in that case we must find other differential names for the different forces of effort individually. To give them all the same name is not to explain them. It is to tie them all up in a parcel.
[2] If this fact requires any further exemplification, we can find one on a large scale in the pages of Marx himself. According to him the first appreciable capitalistic movement—the first leaping of the modern system in the womb—took place in the English cloth trade about four hundred years ago. Now, if capitalism were merely, as according to Marx it is, a passive monopoly by some men of implements which have been produced by others, the pioneers of capitalism in the reign of Henry VIII. would have got into their possession all the hand-looms then in use; they would have taken their toll in kind from all whom they allowed to use them; and there the matter would have ended. The looms of to-day would be the looms of four hundred years ago. The passive ownership of machines does nothing to improve their construction. If a gang of ignorant thieves could steal all the watches in America, and then let them out to the public at so much a month or year, this would not convert the three-dollar watches into chronometers. And how little mere labour, or the experience gained by labour, tends to improve the implements which the labourer uses is shown by the fact that the looms which wove Anne Boleyn's petticoats were practically the same as the looms which wove those of Semiramis.
CHAPTER V
REPUDIATION OF MARX BY MODERN SOCIALISTS.
THEIR RECOGNITION OF DIRECTIVE ABILITY
In saying that, up to the point which our argument has thus far reached, the more thoughtful among the socialists to-day concede and even assert its truth, I have evidence in view of a very opposite kind. When I delivered, as I did recently, a series of addresses on socialism to various meetings in America, I approached the subject in the manner in which I have approached it here. I began with the process of production pure and simple, and I showed how crude and childish, as applied to production in modern times, was the analysis of Marx and all the earlier socialists. I showed, as I have shown here, that, the amount of labour being given, the quantity and quality of wealth that will result from its exercise depend on the ability with which by means of wage-capital this labour is directed.
The two addresses in which these points were elaborated had no sooner been delivered than, from all parts of the country, through newspapers and private letters, and sometimes by word of mouth, socialists of various types addressed themselves to the business of replying to me. These replies, whatever may have been their differences otherwise, all took the form of a declaration that I was only wasting my time in exposing the doctrine that labour is the sole producer of wealth, and in laying such stress on the part played by directive ability; for no serious socialist of the present day any longer believed the one, or failed to recognise the other. Thus one of my critics told me that what I ought to do was "to discuss the principles of socialism as understood and accepted by the intelligent disciples, and not the worn-out and discredited theories of Marx." Another was good enough to tell me that I had "cleverly accomplished the task of exposing the errors of Marx, both of premise and of logic"; but the leaders of socialistic thought "in its later developments" had, he proceeded to say, long ago outgrown these. A third wrote me a letter bristling with all kinds of challenges, and asked me if I thought, for example, that socialists were such fools as not to recognise that the talents of an inventor like Mr. Edison increased the productivity of labour by the new direction which they gave to it. I might multiply similar quotations, but one more will be enough here. It is taken from a long article directed against myself by Mr. Hillquit—a writer to whom my special attention was called as by far the most accomplished exponent, among the militant socialists of America, of socialism in its most logical and most highly developed form. "It requires," said Mr. Hillquit, "no special genius to demonstrate that all labour is not alike, nor equally productive. It is still more obvious that common manual labour is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations—that organisation, direction, and control are essential to productive work in the field of modern production, and are just as much a factor in it as mere physical effort."[3]
But we need not confine ourselves to my own late critics in America. The general history of socialism as a reasoned theory is practically the same in one country as in another. The intellectual socialists in England, among whom Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Sidney Webb are prominent, express themselves in even plainer terms with regard to the part which directive ability, as opposed to labour, plays in the modern world. "Ability," says Mr. Shaw, employing the very word, is often the factor which determines whether a given industry shall make a loss of five per cent. or else a profit of twenty; and Mr. Webb, as we shall have occasion to see presently, carries the argument further, and states it in greater detail.
Why, then, it may be asked, should a critic of contemporary socialism think it worth while to expose with so much minuteness a fallacy which intellectual socialists now all agree in repudiating, and to insist with such emphasis on facts which they profess to recognise as self-evident? To this question there are two answers.
One of these I indicated at the close of our opening chapter; and this at the cost of what in logic is a mere digression, it will be desirable, for practical purposes, to state it with greater fulness.
Admissions and assertions, such as those which I have just now quoted, do, no doubt, represent a definite intellectual advance which has taken place in the theory of socialism, among those who are its most thoughtful exponents, and in a certain sense its leaders. They represent what these leaders think and say among themselves, and what they put forward when disputing with opponents who are competent to criticise them. But what they do not represent is socialism as still preached to the populace, or the doctrine which is still vital for socialists as a popular party. This is still, just as it was originally, the socialism of Marx in an absolutely unamended form. It is the doctrine that the manual efforts of the vast multitude of labourers, directed only by the minds of the individual labourers themselves, produce all the wealth of the world; that the holding of any of this wealth by any other class whatever stands for nothing but a system of legalised plunder; and that the labourers need only inaugurate a legislation of a new kind in order to secure and enjoy what always was by rights their own. Let me illustrate this assertion by two examples, one supplied to us by England, the other by America.
In England the body which calls itself the Social Democratic Federation, and represents at this moment socialism of the more popular kind, began its campaign with a manifesto which was headed with the familiar words, "All wealth is due to labour; therefore to the labourer all wealth is due." This text or motto was followed by certain figures, with regard to the total income of Great Britain, and the manner in which it is at present distributed. Labour was represented as getting less than one-fourth of the whole, and the labourers were informed that if they would but "educate themselves, agitate, and organise," the remaining three-fourths would automatically pass into their possession. This document, it is true, was issued some twenty years ago;[4] but that the form which socialism takes, when addressed to the masses of the population, has not appreciably altered from that day to this, will be made sufficiently clear by the following pertinent fact. Shortly after my arrival in America, in the winter of 1907, the most active disseminator of socialistic literature in New York sent me, by way of a challenge, a new and very spruce volume, which contained the most important of his previous leaflets and articles, collected and republished, and claiming renewed attention. The first of these—and it was signalised by an accompanying advertisement as fundamental—bore the impressive title of, "Why the Working Man should be a Socialist," and the answer to this question is given in the writer's opening words. "You know," he says, addressing any labourer and the street-worker, "or