The previous employment of labor is an indispensable condition to every productive operation, on any other than the very smallest scale. Except the labor of the hunter and fisher, there is scarcely any kind of labor to which the returns are immediate. Productive operations require to be continued a certain time before their fruits are obtained. Unless the laborer, before commencing his work, possesses a [pg 058] store of food, or can obtain access to the stores of some one else, in sufficient quantity to maintain him until the production is completed, he can undertake no labor but such as can be carried on at odd intervals, concurrently with the pursuit of his subsistence.
The possession of capital is thus a third requisite of production, together with land and labor, as noted above. Henry George (“Progress and Poverty,” chap. iv) holds an opposite opinion: “The subsistence of the laborers who built the Pyramids was drawn, not from a previously hoarded stock” (does he not forget the story of Joseph's store of corn?), “but from the constantly recurring crops of the Nile Valley.”
He can not obtain food itself in any abundance; for every mode of so obtaining it requires that there be already food in store. Agriculture only brings forth food after the lapse of months; and, though the labors of the agriculturist are not necessarily continuous during the whole period, they must occupy a considerable part of it. Not only is agriculture impossible without food produced in advance, but there must be a very great quantity in advance to enable any considerable community to support itself wholly by agriculture. A country like England or the United States is only able to carry on the agriculture of the present year because that of past years has provided, in those countries or somewhere else, sufficient food to support their agricultural population until the next harvest. They are only enabled to produce so many other things besides food, because the food which was in store at the close of the last harvest suffices to maintain not only the agricultural laborers, but a large industrious population besides.
The claim to remuneration founded on the possession of food, available for the maintenance of laborers, is of another kind; remuneration for abstinence, not for labor. If a person has a store of food, he has it in his power to consume it himself in idleness, or in feeding others to attend on him, or to fight for him, or to sing or dance for him. If, instead of these things, he gives it to productive laborers to support [pg 059] them during their work, he can, and naturally will, claim a remuneration from the produce. He will not be content with simple repayment; if he receives merely that, he is only in the same situation as at first, and has derived no advantage from delaying to apply his savings to his own benefit or pleasure. He will look for some equivalent for this forbearance:[103] he will expect his advance of food to come back to him with an increase, called, in the language of business, a profit; and the hope of this profit will generally have been a part of the inducement which made him accumulate a stock, by economizing in his own consumption; or, at any rate, which made him forego the application of it, when accumulated, to his personal ease or satisfaction.
Chapter II. Of Unproductive Labor.
§ 1. Definition of Productive and Unproductive Labor.
Labor is indispensable to production, but has not always production for its effect. There is much labor, and of a high order of usefulness, of which production is not the object. Labor has accordingly been distinguished into Productive and Unproductive. Productive labor means labor productive of wealth. We are recalled, therefore, to the question touched upon in our [Preliminary Remarks], what Wealth is.