A Critical Examination of Socialism

THE IMPLEME

dual, to which Marx, Ricardo, and Mill alike give the name of "labour"; they are of two kinds. And this, indeed, the earlier economists recognised, as we may see by Mill's casual admission that the progress of industrial effort depends before all things on thought and the advance of knowledge. But t

ne kind but two, and if the word "labour" is, in nine cases out of ten, employed with the definite intention of designating only one of them, it is impossible to reason about the industrial process intelligibly, so long as we apply

ich has been, of recent years, applied by many of the more thoughtful socialists themselves to certain activities of a mental and moral kind, which their conception of labour cannot be made to include, but which they are beginning to recognise as playing some part in production. We must remember, however, that we are using it in a strictly te

in that process which produces wealth to-day, and how it makes the amount produced, relatively to the number of the producers, so incompa

t; and we shall find that the conception of it which dominated the thought of Marx, and that which dominates the thought of the orthodox school of econo

with it; and it is called "fixed" on account of its comparative permanence. By circulating capital is meant, as Adam Smith puts it, any stock of those consumable commodities which, produced by the aid of machine

lared it to be, a crystallisation of labour, but a crystallisation of the ability by which labour has been directed; but this revised explanation tells us nothing of

Wage-capital, although in practice it disguises itself under the form of money, is essentially a stock of goods which are the daily necessaries of life, but which, instead of being sold to the public, like the goods of the store-keeper, at a profit, are distributed by their possessor among a spe

t are exercised, adds to the value of the results which this labour would have produced otherwise. Thus in wage-capital we have the capital of the modern world in what dynamically is its primary

al is provided, how will it first be used? It will be used in the form of wages, or articles of daily consumption, which will be distributed among a certain number of mechanics and other labourers, on condition that they set about fashioning, in certain prescribed groups, so much metal into so many prescribed shapes-some of them shaping it into wheels, some into knives and rollers, some into sieves, rods, cranks, cams, and eccentrics, in accordance with patterns which have never been followed previously; an

roducts which are essential to the life of the labourer; and it is a monopoly of these, not in the invidious sense that the monopolists retain them for their own personal consumption, as they do in the case of rare wines and fabrics, which can, from the nature of

r the modern system, it constitutes the reins by which the exceptional ability of a few guides the labour, skilled or unskilled, of the many. It is the means by which the commonest labourer, who hardly knows the rule of three, is made to work as thoug

n short, crystallised intellect, knowledge, imagination, and executive capacity, of kinds which hardly exist in a dozen minds out of a million; and labour conduces to the production of such astonishing structures only because it submits itself to the guidance of these intellectual leaders. And the same is the case with modern production generally. Thoug

the two following chapters by recent admissions on the part of socialists themselves, the more thoughtful of whom have now virtually abandoned the earlier theoretica

TNO

inted out that, in a technical sense, the same effort may be either an effort of labour or ability, according to its application. Thus, if a singer sings to an audience, his effort is technically "labour," because it ends with the single task; but if he sings so as to produce a gramophone record, his effort is an act of "ability," for he influences the products of other men, by whom the records are multiplied. The second objection was expressed by one of my critics thus: "I say that all productive effort is labour.... I dare you to tell a

y 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 c