George Bernard Shaw, his life and works

by Archibald Henderson

In the heated discussions over Marx's economic theories which followed during the next few years, Shaw enjoyed an immense advantage in that nobody else in the Socialist movement had gone through this discipline, which required considerable perseverance and deep scientific conviction. It ended, as Shaw maintains, in his finding out Marx and Hyndman completely as economists. In Shaw's present view Marx was less an economist than a revolutionary Socialist, employing political economy as a weapon against his adversaries: to Marx, the economic theory of Ricardo was simply a “stick to beat the capitalist dog.” To Hyndman, doubt of any part of the “Bible of the working classes” was Socialist heresy: the whole issue resolved itself into the question whether Jevons was a Socialist or an anti-Socialist.[70] No doubt the influence which moved Shaw to devote himself to economic studies was his need of a weapon; but he did not stop to ask whether the steel came from a Socialist foundry or not. “The Marxian steel was always snapping in my hand,” he once remarked to me. “The Jevonian steel held and kept its edge, and fitted itself to every emergency. And then, just as one loves a good sword for its own sake, so one loves a sound theory for its own sake.” As a literary artist also, accustomed to express himself in terse and pointed phrase, Shaw was fired with determination to extricate the theory from its “damned shorthand” of mathematical symbols, and put it into human language.[71]

On the appearance of the English translation from the third German edition of Das Kapital, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, in 1887, Shaw reviewed it in three consecutive articles.[72] These articles of Shaw's show that in 1887 his conversion by Wicksteed was complete. In Shaw's article, Stanley Jevons: His Letters and Journal, a review of the Letters and Journal of W. Stanley Jevons, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, May 29th, 1886, he says: “He (Jevons) was far too orthodox in his practical conclusions for those materialists of the science—the revolutionary Socialists—who saw in him a mere 'bourgeois economist,' as their phrase goes. He does not seem to have had any suspicion that Mr. Hyndman and his friends made any economic pretensions at all; but it is remarkable that the most successful attack so far on the value theory of Karl Marx has come from Mr. Philip Wicksteed, a well-known Unitarian minister, who is an able follower of Jevons in economics.” Shaw was now the complete Jevonian, had thrown the Marxian theory completely over, and exactly located the step Marx missed. Shaw himself readily admits that Marx came within one step of the real solution. Whilst Marx left Shaw unconvinced as to Marxian economics, he left him profoundly imbued with Marxian convictions. In Marx, Shaw discerned one who “wrote of the nineteenth century as if it were a cloud passing down the wind, changing its shape and fading as it goes; whilst Ricardo the stockbroker and De Quincey the high Tory, sat comfortably down before it in their office and study chairs as if it were the Great Wall of China, safe to last until the Day of Judgment with an occasional coat of whitewash.” While refusing to deify Marx as a god, Shaw lauds him with what is, for him, the rarest of panegyrics. “He (Marx) never condescends to cast a glance of useless longing at the past: his cry to the present is always, 'Pass by: we are waiting for the future.' Nor is the future at all mysterious, uncertain, or dreadful to him. There is not a word of hope or fear, nor appeal to chance or providence, nor vain remonstrance with Nature, nor optimism, nor enthusiasm, nor pessimism, nor cynicism, nor any other familiar sign of the giddiness which seizes men when they climb to heights which command a view of the past, present and future of human society. Marx keeps his head like a god. He has discovered the law of social development, and knows what must come. The thread of history is in his hand.”

The point to be grasped, however, is contained in Shaw's admonition: “Read Jevons and the rest for your economics, and read Marx for the history of their working in the past, and the conditions of their application in the present. And never mind the metaphysics.” Shaw stood upon the shoulders of giants, for Jevons had laid the foundations, and Wicksteed it was who first pointed out to English Socialists the flaw in Marx's analysis of wares.[73] But in that remarkably succinct and lucid style for which he is justly famous, Shaw elaborately analyzed the questionable points in the Marxian structure and explained the latent errors involved, for the comprehension, not simply of the economist, but of the man-in-the-street. It is neither possible, nor even desirable, here to give the steps by which Shaw controverted Marx; reference to Shaw's numerous articles on the subject will give these to the curious. But the conclusions he reached are worthy of enumeration.[74] In the first place, Shaw objected to Marx's dogmatic assertion of the generally accepted Ricardian theory that “wares in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value”; and for the simple reason that the Jevonian theory called this dogma into question. In the second place, following Wicksteed, Shaw takes Marx to task for first insisting that the abstract labour used in the production of wares does not count unless it is useful, and then contradicting himself by stripping the wares of the abstract utility conferred upon them by abstractly useful work. The logical consequence of admitting abstract utility as a quality of wares produced by abstract human labour is conclusively to disconnect value from mere abstract human labour. Marx thus adroitly begs the question: as Shaw says: “It is as if he (Marx) had proved by an elaborate series of abstractions that liquids were fatal to human life, and had finished by remarking: 'Of course, the liquids must be poisonous.'” Armed with the fact of abstract utility, and the Jevonian weapons of “the law of indifference” and “the law of the variation of utility,” Shaw was enabled to prove with mathematical rigour that value does not represent the specific utility of the article, but its abstract utility; and not its total abstract utility, but its final abstract utility—at the “margin of supply,” in Wicksteed's phrase—i.e., the utility of the final increment that is worth producing. Translated into terms of labour, this means that the value of the ware represents, not the quantity of human labour embodied in it, but the “final utility,” in Jevonian phrase, of the abstract human labour socially necessary to produce it. As Shaw puts it: “Instead of wares being equal in value because equal quantities of labour have been expended on them, equal quantities of labour will have been expended on them because they are of equal value (or equally desirable), which is quite another thing. That slip in the analysis of wares whereby Marx was led to believe that he had got rid of the abstract utility when he had really only got rid of the specific utility, was the first of his mistakes.” Under certain ideal conditions, there is a coincidence between “exchange value” and “amount of labour contained”; but as these ideal conditions seldom, if ever, occur in practice, no scientific validity attaches to the Marxian statement that “commodities in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value.” Lastly, Shaw insists that if Marx's theory of value were correct, it would refute, not confirm, Marx's theory of “surplus value.” The proprietor's monopoly completely upsets those ideal conditions on which Marx's theory of value is based. It can be demonstrated by Jevonian principles that Marx's assumption, that the subsistence wage is the value of the labour force, is untenable, even on Marxian principles. Marx did not see that it is impossible, according to the “law of indifference,” for one part of the stock of a commodity available at any given time to have value whilst another part has none, since no man will give a price for that which he can obtain for nothing. Moreover, when he attempts to differentiate labour power from steam power, Marx's logic breaks down. As Shaw says: “Marx's whole theory of the origin of surplus value depends on the accuracy of his demonstration that steam power, machinery, etc., cannot possibly produce surplus value. If Marx were right then a capital of ten thousand pounds, invested in a business requiring nine thousand pounds for machinery and plant, and one thousand pounds for wages (or human labour power), would only return one-ninth of the surplus value returned by an equal capital of which one thousand pounds was in the form of plant and nine thousand pounds in wage capital. As a matter of fact, the 'surplus value' from both is found to be equal.”[75]

A Study of Six Socialists.

From a drawing by H. G. Wells, here reproduced by his permission.

Shaw saw plainly enough that the theory of value did not matter in the least so far as the soundness of Socialism was concerned. For, as he once expressed it in a letter to me, “if you steal a turnip the theory of the turnip's value does not affect the social and political aspect of the transaction.” But, of course, Hyndman and the few Socialists who had read Marx and nothing else, were furious over Shaw's iconoclastic articles in the National Reformer. In view of the fact that the opponents of Socialism continually damaged the cause of the Socialists by alleging that the Socialists' economic basis was Marx's theory and was untenable, with the result that the Socialists persisted in accepting the allegation and defending Marx, Shaw resolutely forced the quarrel into publicity as far as he could. His prime object was to make it clear that the Fabians were quite independent of the Marxian value theory. A heated controversy on the subject in the Pall Mall Gazette of May, 1887, engaged in by Shaw, Hyndman, and Mrs. Besant, did not down the ghost of the value theory; for the controversy was reopened in To-Day two years later. An Economic Eirenicon, by Graham Wallas, was followed by Marx's Theory of Value, contributed by H. M. Hyndman, in which, it seems, he merely repeated the old Marxian demonstration without making any attempt to meet the Jevonian attack. Whereupon Shaw “went for” Hyndman in his most aggravating style in an article entitled Bluffing the Value Theory, which finished the campaign except for a series of letters in Justice by various hands, the tenth of which, in July, 1889, was written by Shaw. There were other letters by Shaw on the same subject, written at different times, which appeared in the Daily Chronicle. William Morris never made any pretence of having followed the controversy on its abstract technical side; and perhaps the most amusing feature of the entire campaign was a sort of manifesto which Belfort Bax induced Morris to sign, in which Hyndman, Bax, Aveling and Morris declared that all good Socialists were Marxites! Shaw was once denounced in public meeting by a Marxian Socialist for pooh-poohing Marx as an idiot. His own position, as he himself once remarked to me, lay somewhere between this and that of worshipping Marx as a god. In one of the most remarkable essays ever written by Shaw, entitled The Illusions of Socialism, Shaw pointed out why it was that a difficult and subtle theory like that of Jevons could never be as acceptable as a crude and simple labour theory like that of Marx, which seemed to imply that wealth rightly belonged to the labourer.[76]

From the standpoint of the Marxian religionist, the second heresy of which Shaw is guilty consists in his recognition of the Class War doctrine as a delusion and a suicidal political policy. To Shaw, the form of organization deduced from the Class War doctrine is always the same. “All you have to do is to form a working-class association, declare war on property, explain the economic situation from the platform and at the street corner, and wait until the entire proletariat (made 'class-conscious' by your lucid lectures) joins you. This being done simultaneously in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, etc., etc., nothing remains but a simultaneous movement of the proletarians of all countries, and the sweeping of capitalism into the sea because 'ye are many: they are few.' What can be easier or more scientific?” But a study of the history of Socialism led Shaw to the discovery that the Class War theory had gone to pieces every time it had been invoked. Lassalle attempted to organize the imaginary class-conscious proletariat, only to be disillusioned before the end of the first year by the “damned wantlessness” of the real proletariat. Owen before him likewise had failed, after apparently converting all Trade-Unionism to his New Moral World. When Marx planned the Socialist side of “The International” in the sixties, he showed his contempt for the trade-union side, with the result: “On the trade-union side a great success.... On the Socialist side, futility and disastrous failure, culminating, in 1871, in one of the most appalling massacres known to history.” Marx can scarcely be said to have tried to organize the class-conscious proletariat; but the moment his useless vituperation of Thiers, “brilliant as a sample of literary invective, but useless for the buttering of parsnips,” made known to English workmen his real opinion of bourgeois civilization, they abandoned him in horror and left the International memberless. In Germany, “Liebknecht made no serious headway until he became a parliamentarian, playing the parliamentary game more pliably than Parnell did, though always 'old-soldiering' his way with the greenhorns by prefacing each compromise with the declaration that Social Democracy never compromised.” In France, Jaurès and Millerand have not so much abandoned the Class War doctrine as wholly neglected and ignored it, thus reducing the old Guèsdist Marxism to absurdity. In England, “the once revolutionary Social-Democratic Federation has been forced by the competition of the quite constitutional Independent Labour Party to give up all its ancient Maccabean poetry, and, after a period of uselessness and surpassing unpopularity as an anti-Fabian Society with a speciality for abusing Mr. John Burns, to settle down into a sort of Ultra-Independent Labour Party, ready to amalgamate with its rival if only an agreement can be arrived at as to which is to be considered as swallowing the other.”

Not merely a study of the Class War doctrine from the historical standpoint, but also an examination into the assumptions upon which it rests, have thoroughly convinced Shaw that Socialists have for long been making overdrafts upon their Capital. Shaw has never sought to shirk the real point at issue by the quibble of substituting the sort of class-consciousness called snobbery, mighty as is that social force, for the economic class-consciousness of the German formula. In Shaw's interpretation, Hyndman and the Marxists use the term “Class War” to denote a war between all the proletarians on one side and all the property-holders on the other—in Schaeffle's phrase “a definite confrontation of classes”—which will be produced when the workers become conscious that their economic interests are opposed to those of the property-holders. Shaw's position is effectively summed up in his words:

“The people understand their own affairs much better than Marx did, and the simple stratification of society into two classes ... has as little relation to actual social facts as Marx's value theory has to actual market prices. If the crude Marxian melodrama of 'The Class War; or, the Virtuous Worker and the Brutal Capitalist,' were even approximately true to life, the whole capitalist structure would have tumbled to pieces long ago, as the 'scientific Socialists' were always expecting it to do, instead of consolidating itself on a scale which has already made Marx and Engels as obsolete as the Gracchi had become in the time of Augustus. By throwing up fabulous masses of 'surplus value,' and doubling and trebling the incomes of the well-to-do middle classes, who all imitate the imperial luxury and extravagance of the millionaires, Capitalism has created, as it formerly did in Rome, an irresistible proletarian bodyguard of labourers whose immediate interests are bound up with those of the capitalists, and who are, like their Roman prototypes, more rapacious, more rancorous in their Primrose partisanship, and more hardened against all the larger social considerations, than their masters, simply because they are more needy, ignorant and irresponsible. Touch the income of the rich, and the Conservative proletarians are the first to suffer.”[77]