(a). Industrial improvements tend to reduce wages. They do so, says Marx, through first mutilating the labourer intellectually and corporeally. As a result of subdivision of labour, workmen are rapidly becoming mere one-sided specialists. Headwork is being separated more and more from handwork in the labourer's occupation, and this differentiation of function leads to a hierarchy of wages which affords great opportunity for exploiting the labourer. Muscular power is more easily dispensed with than formerly, and so the cheaper labour of women and children is largely superseding the dearer labour of men. If this goes on much further, the manufacturer will get the labour of a whole family for the wages he used to pay to its head alone, and the labourer will be converted into a slave-dealer who sells his wife and children instead of his own labour. That this kind of slavery will find no sort of resistance from either master or labourer, is to Marx's mind placed beyond doubt by the fact that though the labour of children under 13 years of age is restricted in English factories, advertisements appear in public prints for "children that can pass for 13."
(b). Industrial improvements tend to lengthen the day of labour. Machinery can go on for ever, and it is the interest of the capitalist to make it do so. He finds, moreover, a ready and specious pretext in the greater lightness of the work as compared with hand labour, for keeping the labourer employed beyond the normal limits of human endurance. Capitalists always complain that long hours are a necessity in consequence of the increasing extent of fixed capital which cannot otherwise be made to pay. But this is a mistake on their part, says Marx. For, according to the factory inspector's reports, shortening the day of labour to 10 hours has increased production and not diminished it, and the explanation is that the men can work harder while they are at it, if the duration of their labour is shortened. Shortening the day of labour has not only increased production, but actually increased wages. Mr. Redgrave, in his Report for 1860, says that during the period 1839-1859 wages rose in the branches of industry that adopted the ten hours' principle, and fell in trades where men wrought 14 and 15 hours a day. Small wages and long hours are always found to go together, because the same causes which enable the employer to reduce wages enable him to lengthen the labouring day.
5. Piecework. Industrial improvements tend, Marx maintains, to overwork, to undue intensification of labour, for machinery can go at almost any rate all day and all night, and labourers are compelled by various expedients to work up to it. Among these expedients none is more strongly condemned by Marx than piecework, as encouraging over-exertion and overtime. He says that though known so early as the 14th century, piecework only came into vogue with the large system of production, to which he thinks it the most suitable form of payment. He states (though this is not quite accurate) that it is the only form of payment in use in workshops that are under the factory acts, because in these workshops the day of labour cannot be lengthened, and the capitalist has no other way open to him of exploiting the labourer but by increasing the intensity of the labour. He ridicules the idea of a writer who thought "the system of piecework marked an epoch in the history of the working man, because it stood halfway between the position of a mere wage labourer depending on the will of the capitalist and the position of the co-operative artisan who in the not distant future promises to combine the artisan and the capitalist in his own person." Better far, he holds, for the labourer to stick to day's wages, for he can be much more easily and extensively exploited by the piece system. He contends that experience has proved this in trades like the compositors and ship carpenters, in which both systems of payment are in operation side by side, and he cites from the factory inspectors' reports of 1860 the case of a factory employing 400 hands, 200 paid by the piece and 200 by the day. The piece hands had an interest in working overtime, and the day hands were obliged to follow suit without receiving a farthing extra for the additional hour or half-hour. This might be stopped by further legislation, but then Marx holds that the system of piece payment is so prone to abuse that when one door of exploitation shuts another only opens, and legislation will always remain ineffectual. Every peculiarity of the system furnishes opportunity either for reducing wages or increasing work. On the piece system the worth of labour is determined by the worth of the work it does, and unless the work possess average excellence the stipulated price is withheld. There is thus always a specious pretext ready to the employer's hand for making deductions from wages on the ground that the work done did not come up to the stipulated standard. Then again, it furnishes the employer with a definite measure for the intensity of labour. He judges from the results of piecework how much time it generally takes to produce a particular piece, and labourers who do not possess the average productivity are turned off on the ground that they are unable to do a minimum day's work. Even those who are kept on get lower average wages than they would on the day system. The superior workman earns indeed better pay working by the piece, but the general body do not. The superior workman can afford to take a smaller price per piece than the others, because he turns out a greater number of pieces in the same time, and the employer fixes, from the case of the superior workman, a standard of payment which is injurious to the rest. In the end a change from day's wages to piece wages will thus be found to have merely resulted in the average labourer working harder for the same money. Marx, however, admits that when a definite scale of prices has been in long use and has become fixed as a custom, there are so many difficulties to its reduction that employers are obliged, when they seek to reduce it, to resort to violent methods of transforming it into time wages again. He gives an example of this from the strike of the Coventry ribbon-weavers in 1860, in resistance to a transformation of this kind.
These are only some of the evils Marx lays at the door of piecework; he has many more charges. From rendering the superintendence of labour unnecessary, it leads to abuses like the sub-contracts known in this country as "the sweating system," or what is a variety of the same, to contracts of the employer with his manager, whereby the latter becomes responsible for the whole work, and employs and pays the men. From making it the pecuniary interest of the labourer to work overtime, piecework induces him to overstrain his powers, and both to transgress the legal or normal limits of the day of labour, and to raise or exceed the normal degree of the intensity of labour. Marx, quoting from Dunning, says that it was customary in the engineering trade in London for employers to engage a foreman of exceptional physical powers, and pay him an extra salary per quarter to keep the men up to his own pace; an expedient which, he adds, is actually recommended to farmers by Morton in his "Agricultural Encyclopædia." He attributes to piecework, especially in its operation on women and children, the degeneration of the labouring class in the potteries, which is shown in the Report of the Commission on the Employment of Children. But while Marx thus objects to piecework because it leads to overwork, he objects to it also because it leads to underwork. It enables employers to engage more hands than they require, when they entertain perhaps only an imaginary expectation of work, for they know they run no risk, since paying by the piece they pay only for what is done. The men are thus imperfectly employed and insufficiently paid.
6. Relative Over-population. One of the worst features of modern industrial development is the vast number of labourers whom it constantly leaves out of employ. This Marx calls relative over-population. Of absolute over-population he has no fear. He is not a Malthusian. He holds that there is no population law applicable to all countries and times alike. Social organisms differ from one another as do animals and plants; they have different laws and conditions. Every country and age has its own law of population. A constant and increasing over-population is a characteristic of the present age; it is a necessary consequence of the existing method of carrying on industry; but it is nothing in the nature of an absolute over-growth; it is only, to Marx's thinking, a relative superfluity. There is plenty of work for all, more than plenty. If those who have employment were not allowed to be overwrought, and if work were to-morrow to be limited to its due amount for every one according to age and sex, the existing working population would be quite insufficient to carry on the national production to its present extent. Even in England, where the technical means of saving labour are enormous, this could not be done except by converting most of our present "unproductive" labourers into productive. There is therefore, Marx conceives, no reason why any one should be out of work; but at present, what with the introduction of new machinery, the industrial cycles, the commercial crises, the changes of fashion, the transitions of every kind, we have always, besides the industrial army in actual service, a vast industrial reserve who are either entirely out of employment or very inadequately employed. This relative over-population is an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic management of industry, which first compels one-half of the labouring community to do the work of all, and then makes use of the redundancy of labour so created to compel the working half to take less pay. Low wages spring from the excessive competition among labourers caused by this relative over-population. "Rises and falls in the rate of wages are universally regulated by extensions and contractions in the industrial reserve army which correspond with changes in the industrial cycle. They are not determined by changes in the absolute number of the labouring population, but through changes in the relative distribution of the working class into active army and reserve army—through increase or decrease in the relative numbers of the surplus population—through the degree in which it is at one time absorbed and at another dismissed." The fluctuations in the rate of wages are thus traced to expansions or contractions of capital, and not to variation in the state of population. Marx ridicules the theory of these fluctuations given by political economists, that high wages lead to their own fall by encouraging marriages, and so in the end increasing the supply of labour, and that low wages lead to their own rise by discouraging marriages and reducing the supply of labour. That, says Marx, is very fine, but before high wages could have produced a redundant population (which would take eighteen years to grow up), wages would, with modern industrial cycles, have been up, down, and up again through ordinary fluctuations of trade.
Relative over-population is of three kinds: current, latent, and stagnant. Current over-population is what comes from incidental causes, the ordinary changes that take place in the every-day course of industry. A trade is slack this season and brisk the next, has perhaps its own seasons, like house-painting in spring, posting in summer. Or one trade may from temporary reasons be busy, while others are depressed. In the last half year of 1860 there were 90,000 labourers in London out of employment, and yet the factory inspectors report that at that very time much machinery was standing idle for want of hands. This comes from the labourer being mutilated—that is, specialized—under modern subdivision of labour, and fit for only a single narrow craft. Another current cause of over-population is that under the stress of modern labour the workman is old before his years, and while still in middle life becomes unfit for full work, and passes into the reserve. Marx says this is the real reason for the prevalence of early marriages among the working class. They are generally condemned for being improvident, but they are really resorted to from considerations of providence, for working men foresee that they will be prematurely disabled for work, and desire, when that day comes, to have grown-up children about them who shall be able to support them. Other current causes are new inventions and new fashions, which always throw numbers out of work. Latent over-population is what springs from causes whose operation is long and slow. The best example of it is the case of the agricultural labourers. They are being gradually superseded by machinery, and as they lose work in the country they gather to the towns to swell the reserve army there. A great part of the farm servants are always in this process of transition, a few here, and a few there, and a few everywhere. The constancy of this flow indicates a latent over-population in the rural districts, and that is the cause of the low wages of agricultural labourers. By stagnant over-population Marx means that which is shown in certain branches of industry, where none of the workmen are thrown back entirely into the reserve, but none get full regular employment.
CHAPTER V. THE FEDERALISM OF CARL MARLO.
Marlo and Rodbertus are sometimes spoken of as the precursors of German socialism. This, however, is a mistake. The socialism which now exists appeared in Germany among the Young Hegelians forty years ago, before the writings of either of these economists were published, and their writings have had very little influence on the present movement. Rodbertus, it is true, communicated a decided impulse to Lassalle, both by his published letter to Von Kirchmann in 1853, and by personal correspondence subsequently. He was a landed proprietor of strongly liberal opinions, who was appointed Minister of Agriculture in Prussia in 1848, but after a brief period of office retired to his estates, and devoted himself to economic and historical study. He took a very decided view of the defects of the existing industrial system, and held in particular that, in accordance with Ricardo's law of necessary wages, the labourer's income could never rise permanently above the level of supplying him with a bare subsistence, and consequently that, while his labour was always increasing in productivity, through mechanical inventions and other means, the share which he obtained of the product was always decreasing. What was required was simply to get this tendency counteracted, and to devise arrangements by which the labourer's share in the product might increase proportionally with the product itself, for otherwise the whole working population would be left behind by the general advancement of society. The remedy, he conceives, must lie in the line of a fresh contraction of the sphere of private property. That sphere had been again and again contracted in the interests of personal development, and it must be so once more. And the contraction that was now necessary was to leave nothing whatever in the nature of private property except income. This proposal is substantially identical with the scheme of the socialists; it is just the nationalization of all permanent stock; but then he holds that it could not be satisfactorily carried out in less than five hundred years. Rodbertus's writings have never been widely known, but they attracted some attention among the German working class, and he was invited, along with Lassalle and Lothar Bucher, to address the Working Men's Congress in Leipzig in 1863. He promised to come and speak on the law of necessary wages, but the Congress was never held in consequence of the action of Lassalle in precipitating his own movement, and from that movement Rodbertus held entirely aloof. He agreed with Lassalle's complaints against the present order of things, but he disapproved of his plan of reform. He did not think the scheme of founding productive associations on State credit either feasible or desirable, and he would still retain the system of wages, though with certain improvements introduced by law. He thought, moreover, that Lassalle erred gravely in making the socialists a political party, and that they should have remained a purely economic one. Besides, he looked on it as mere folly to expect, with Lassalle, the accomplishment in thirty years of changes which, as we have seen, he believed five centuries little enough time to evolve.