A Critical Examination of Socialism

d that majorities are, if they would only realise it, capable of moulding society in any manner they please. As applied to matters of legislation and government, t

the majority with a definiteness, in respect of distribution of wealth, similar to that with which

of every book or manifesto published by them, and of every propagandist oration uttered by them at street-corners, namely, "All wealth is produced by labour, therefore to

versal justice. It stimulates the labourers to demand more than they receive already, and it stimulates to demand the more on the ground that they themselves have produc

ersuaded to believe that its attainment is practically possible. The other is this: that the possibilities of redistributing wealth depend on the causes by which wealth is produced. All wealth, says Marx, can practically be appropriated by the labourers. But why? Because the labourers themselves comprise in their own labour all the forces that produce it. If its production n

lth-production as it exists to-day. He begins by insisting on the fact that labour in the modern world is divided with such a general and such an increasing minuteness that each labour produces one kind of product only, of which he himself can consume but a small fraction, and often consumes nothing. His own product, therefore, has for him the character of wealth only because he is able to exchange it for commodities of other kinds; and the amount of wealth represented by it depends upon what the quantity of other assorted commodities, which he can get in exchange for it, is. What, then, is the common measure, in accordance with which, as a fact, one kind of commodity will exchange for any other, or any others? For his answer to this question Marx goes to the orthodox economists of his time-the recognised exponents of the system against which his own arguments w

in an increased yield of commodities. Thus a man who a couple of centuries ago could have only just kept himself alive by the products of his entire labour-day, can now keep himself alive by the products of half or a quarter of it. The products of the remainder of his labour-day are what Marx called a "surplus value," meaning by this phrase all

pose with the objection that the increased output of wealth is due, not to labour, but to the machinery, and that the labourer, as such, has consequently no claim on it. But to this objection Marx is ready with the following answer-that the machinery itself is nothing but past labour in disguise. It is past labour crystallised, or em

man or family, the divorce between the labourer and his implements was not easy to accomplish; but in proportion as these simple implements were developed into the aggregated mechanisms of the factory, each of which aggregates was used in common by hundreds and even by thousands of labourers, the link between the implement and the user was broken by an automatic process; for a single organised mechanism used by a thousand men could not, in the nature of things, be owned by each

employés of a single mill-owner, who have no choice but to work within the walls of that mill or starve; and the possessing class at large has become like the owner of such a single mill, who, holding the keys of life and death in his hands, is able to impose on the mill-workers almost any terms he pleases as the price of admission to his premises and to the privilege of using his machinery; and the price which such an owner, so situated, will exact (such was the co

ass which survived was disappearing day by day. Wages, meanwhile, were regulated by an iron law. Under the system of capitalism it was an absolute impossibility that they could rise. As he put it, in language which has since become proverbial, "The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class is being crushed out," and the time, he continued, was in sight already-it would arrive, according to him, before the end of the nineteenth century-when nothing would be left but a handful of idle and preposterous millionaires on the one hand, and a mass of miserable ragamuffins who provided all the millions on the other, having for themselves onl

t on it. I have only mentioned it here because of the further light which it throws on what alone, in this discussion, concerns us-namely, the Marxian theory of labour as the sol

e mère"-and which is still its foundation for the great majority of socialists, we will now examine in detail, and, considering how complex ar

d; and when once we have realised with precision on what, in the modern world, the actual efficiency of the productive process depends, we shall see that the analysis of Marx bears about the same relation to the economic