A Critical Examination of Socialism. W. H. Mallock
produce all the good things of life; and you know, or you ought to know, that by so simple a process as that of casting your ballot intelligently you will be able"—to do what? The writer explains himself in language which, except for a difference in his statistics, is almost a verbal repetition of that of his English predecessors. He specifies two sums, one representing the income which each working-man in America would receive were the entire wealth of the country divided equally among the manual labourers; the other representing the income which, on an average, he actually receives as wages; and the writer tells every working man that, by "merely casting his ballot intelligently," he can secure for himself the whole difference between the larger sum and the less.[5]
But the fact that the Marxian doctrine of the all-productivity of labour, and the consequent economic nullity of all other forms of effort, still supplies the main ideas by which popular socialism is vitalised, is shown perhaps even more distinctly by the popular hopes and demands which result from this doctrine indirectly than it is by the direct reassertion of the formal doctrine itself. One of the members of the Parliamentary Labour party in England celebrated his success at the polls by a letter to the Times, proclaiming that socialism was a moral quite as much as an economic movement, and that an object which to socialists was dearer even than the seizure of the riches of the rich, was the achievement of "economic freedom," or, in other words, the "emancipation of labour," or, in other words again, the abolition of the system which he described as "wagedom." I merely mention the particular letter in question in order to remind the reader of these familiar phrases, which are current in every country where the theory of socialism has spread itself.
Now, what does all this talk about the emancipation of labour mean? It can only mean one or other of two things: either that the economic prosperity of every nation in the future will depend on the emancipation of every average mind from the guidance of any minds that are in any way superior to itself, or are able to enhance the productivity of an average pair of hands—a proposition so ludicrous that nobody would consciously assent to it; or else it means a continued assent to the theory which fails to correlate labour with directive ability at all, and so never raises the question of whether the latter is necessary or no.
What, then, becomes of that chorus of vehement protestations, with which my critics in America were all so eager to overwhelm me, to the effect that socialists to-day recognise as clearly as I do that "common manual labour," as Mr. Hillquit puts it, "is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations," apart from the "organisation and control" of the minds most competent to direct it? That the more intellectual socialists of to-day do recognise this fact—some with greater and some with less distinctness—is the very point on which I am anxious to insist. We shall have abundant opportunities for considering it later on. For the moment, however, I pause to ask them the following question. Recognising, as they do, and eagerly proclaiming as they do, whenever they address themselves to those who are capable of serious dispute with them, that the original theory of socialism, which was the creed of such bodies as the International, is absolutely false in itself, and in many of the expectations which it stimulates, why do not they set themselves, whenever they address the multitude, to expose and repudiate a fallacy in which they no longer believe? Do they do this? Do they make an attempt to do this? On the contrary, as a rule, though there are doubtless many honourable exceptions, they endeavour to hide from the multitude their intellectual change of front altogether; and, instead of insisting that the undirected labour of the many is, in the modern world, impotent to produce anything, they continue to speak of it as though it produced everything, and as though no class other than the labouring fulfilled any economic function or had any right to exist.[6]
Let me give the reader an example, which is curiously apt here. It is taken from Mr. Hillquit's own attack on myself, which filled the front sheet of a newspaper, and was distributed to the public at the door of one of the buildings in which I spoke. Of the short passages, amounting to some twenty lines out of six hundred, in which alone he condescended to detailed argument, the first is that in which, as we have already seen, he declares that all socialists know, without any instruction on my part, that common manual labour, unless it is directed by ability, is "impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations." But having made this admission with much blowing of trumpets, he immediately drops it, and instead of developing its consequences, he diverts the attention of his readers from it by a long series of irrelevancies; nor does he return to the question of directive ability at all till he is nearing the end of his discourse, when he suddenly takes it up again, declaring that he will meet and refute me on ground which I myself have chosen, and show that wealth—at all events in the commercial sense—is still produced by manual labour alone. He refers to my selection of the case of a printed book, as illustrating, in the manner explained in an earlier chapter, the part which directive ability plays in modern production. The economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author imposes on this labour through his manuscript—the author's mind being typical of directive ability generally. And what has Mr. Hillquit—the intellectual Ajax of the socialists—got to say about this? "Whether a book," he says, "is a work of genius or mere rubbish will largely affect its literary or artistic value; but it will have very little bearing on its economic or commercial value." This, he goes on to argue, will, despite all my objections, be found to depend on ordinary manual labour, of which the labour of the hands of the compositors is that which concerns us most. Nothing, according to him, can be more evident than this. "For the market price," he says, "of a wretched detective story, of the same length as Hamlet, and printed in the same way, will be exactly the same as that of a copy of Hamlet itself."
Now, if we consider Mr. Hillquit as a purely literary critic, we can but admire his subtlety in discovering that the literary value of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish; but when he descends from pure criticism to economics, it is difficult, unless we suppose him to have taken leave of his senses, to imagine that he can himself believe in the medley of nonsense propounded by him. For what he is here doing—or more probably pretending to do—is to confuse the cost of producing an edition of a book with the commercial value of that edition when produced. The labour in question no doubt determines the price at which the printed paper can be sold at a profit, or without loss; but the number of copies which the public will be willing to buy, or, in other words, the value of the edition commercially, depends on qualities resident in the mind of the author, which render the book attractive to but few readers, or to many. Whether these qualities amount to genius in the higher sense of the word, or to nothing more than a knack of titillating the curiosity of the vulgar, does not affect the question. In either case—and this is the sole important fact—they are qualities of the author's mind, and of the author's mind alone; and the labour of the compositors conduces to the production of a pile of volumes which is of large, of little, or of no value commercially, not according to the dexterity with which this labour is performed, but according to the manner in which the author's mind directs it.
Than any human being who is capable of perceiving that the literary quality of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish, should seriously suppose that the saleable value of editions—whether they are editions of a popular novel, or of a treatise on the conchology of Kamchatka, is proportionate to the number of letters in them arranged in parallel lines—for Mr. Hillquit's argument means neither more nor less than this—is, let me repeat, incredible. What, then, is the explanation of his indulging in a performance of this degrading kind? The explanation is that he, like so many of his colleagues, though recognising personally that labour among "modern nations" depends for its higher productivity on the picked men who direct it, cannot bring himself to renounce, when he is making his appeal to the masses, the old doctrine that they are the sole producers; and accordingly having started with the ostentatious admission that directive ability is as essential to production as labour is, he endeavours by his verbal jugglery with the case of a printed book to convey the impression that labour produces all values after all; and he actually manages to wind up with a repetition of the old Marxian moral that the profits of ability mean nothing but labour