A Critical Examination of Socialism

by W. H. Mallock

And now let us go back to the question of labour and ability; and we shall see, in the case of products to the production of which both are essential, that, while ability is the practical cause of all such amounts or values as exceed what would have been produced by labour if there were no ability to direct it, it cannot be claimed in any similar sense that all amounts and values are conversely produced by labour, which exceed what would have been produced by the action of directive ability, if no labour existed for such ability to direct.

The reason why labour, in this respect, differs from ability is as follows: Whether directive ability shall or shall not exert itself depends upon human volitions which, according to circumstances, are alterable, just as it depends upon alterable human volitions whether a framework of steel be constructed in this way or in that; or whether a lamp be replenished with oil or no. But whether ordinary manual labour shall or shall not exert itself, is not similarly dependent on human volition at all. Let a nation be organised, no matter on what principles, the majority of the citizens will have to labour in any case. The supposition of their labouring is bound up with the supposition of their existence. To suppose that the labourers as a whole could permanently cease to labour, is like supposing that they could exist and yet permanently cease to breathe. They can cease to labour for moments, just as for moments a man can hold his breath, as they do on the occasion of a strike; but they can do so for moments only. Except in a region where climatic conditions are exceptional, what makes men labour is not an employing class, but nature. Directive ability does not make them labour; it finds them labouring. It finds them like wheels which are driven by an eternal stream, and which must turn and turn for ever, until they fall to pieces. To inquire, then, what would happen if labour ceased to exert itself is like inquiring what would happen if the earth were to retard its diurnal motion, or if some natural force—for example, that of gravitation—were to strike work for the sake of intimidating the cause of all things. Such suppositions are for practical purposes meaningless. But with the directive ability of the few, as opposed to the directed labour of the many, the case is dramatically different. For while there never can be any question of the directive faculties of the few being left alone in a world where there is no labour—for in the case of the majority, nature, the eternal taskmaster, will always make labour compulsory, so long as stomachs want food and naked backs want clothing—there constantly has been, and there may be again, a question of whether this mass of ordinary human labour shall find any exceptional ability so developed and so organised as to direct it. In the earlier states of society no such ability was operative. In savage communities it is not operative now; and there is constantly a question, among modern civilised nations, whenever the security of social institutions is threatened, of the action of this faculty being temporarily suspended altogether, either because those persons possessing it are deprived of the motives without which they will not exert it, or else because the labourers individually, on one ground or another, are impatient of submitting themselves to the direction of any intelligences but their own.

In other words, when we are seeking to measure the products due respectively to directive ability and to labour, by computing what would happen if either of these agencies were withdrawn, the withdrawal of one of them—that is to say, of ability—can alone be taken as possible by any practical reasoner. We have before us practically two alternatives only. One is a condition of things under which the exceptional ability of the few directs and co-ordinates the labour of the average many. The other is a condition of things under which the labour of the average many has to exert itself with the same severe continuity, but is guided, co-ordinated, and stimulated by none of those special faculties which raise a few men above the general level of efficiency. When these special faculties are applied to the direction of average labour, the output of wealth increases. When their application is interfered with or ceases, the output of wealth declines; and in the only practical sense of the words "cause" or "producer," these faculties of direction, or the exceptional persons who exercise them, are the true causes or producers of the whole of that portion of wealth which comes into being with their activity, and disappears or dwindles with their inaction.

The practical validity of this method of computation has been formally recognised, though not completely understood, by some of the later socialists themselves. Mr. Webb, for example, and his associates, have admitted that, of the wealth of the modern world a considerable part consists of "the rent of business ability."[19] This way of expressing the matter is true so far as it goes. It expresses, however, one-half of the truth only. Mr. Webb and his friends mean that, if we take the world as it is, the products due to ability in any given industry consist of the quantity by which the products of one firm, because it is managed by a man of superior talent, exceed the products of another firm which differs from the first only in the fact that it is managed by another man whose talent is not so great. They assume as their starting-point, in every case, the presence of directive ability sufficient to organise the labourers in such a way that the products of the entire group shall provide the labourers with wages which are up to a certain standard, and a minimum of profit or of surplus values besides. This lowest grade of ability is one of the postulates of their argument, just as in calculating agricultural rent the first postulate of our argument is a lowest grade of land.

Now, in connection with many questions of a more or less limited kind, this assimilation of the products of superior ability to rent, and of ability of a lower grade to land which is practically rentless, will serve our purpose well enough. Between the two cases, however, there is a vast and underlying difference; and when we consider our present problem under its widest and most vital aspect, it is the difference, not the likeness, between them, which constitutes our main concern. The nature of this difference has been pointed out already. When we are discussing rent and agriculture, land is a necessary assumption, for unless there were land, there could be no agriculture at all; but there can be, has been, and still is in the world, abundance of labour without directive ability; and while it would be meaningless to ask what would happen to rent if all land disappeared, the question of what would happen to labour if all ability were in abeyance is precisely the question raised by all schemes of economic revolution, and one which has been constantly illustrated by the facts of economic history.

Of such facts we may take the following, picturesque example: In the eighteenth century the Jesuit Fathers in Uruguay succeeded in teaching the natives a variety of Western arts, among others that of watch-making, and so long as the Jesuits were on the spot to direct them the natives exhibited much manual skill. But when, owing to political causes, the Jesuits were driven from the country, the natives sank back into their previous industrial helplessness. The temporary efficiency of their labour had been due to the ability that directed it; and as soon as that ability was withdrawn, the labour, left to itself, shrank again to its old relative inefficiency. Now, here we have a case precisely analogous to that which we have to deal with when considering at the present day how much of the products of any civilised nation is produced by the labour of the average units of the population, and how much by the ability of the exceptional men directing them. It is not a question of how much this or that group of labourers, which is directed by a man of the highest grade of ability, produces in excess of the products of some similar group which is directed by another man whose ability is somewhat inferior; it is a question of how much the same nation would produce, if every director of other men's labour were withdrawn, and the present labouring units left to their own devices.

These two questions, though not mutually exclusive, differ as much as the question of why one of two balloons rises above the earth to a height of three miles and a furlong, while a second balloon reaches the height of three miles only, differs from the question of why either of them rises in the air at all. Mr. Webb and his friends, with their theory of the rent of ability, confine themselves to the first of these—namely, the question of why one balloon rises a furlong higher than the other. The real question which we have to deal with here is why both balloons lift their aeronauts at least three miles into the clouds, while other men who have no balloon to lift them can get no higher than the top of the church steeple. Or to come back to literal fact, our problem must be expressed thus: Let us take the present population of Great Britain or America, and, having noted the wealth at present annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with, every man, who, in virtue of his assimilated scientific knowledge, his inventive gifts, his constructive and practical imagination, his energy, his initiative, and his natural powers of leadership, was better able to direct others than the other nine were to direct themselves?

We cannot make this experiment in precisely the way described; but history will provide us with equivalents which are sufficiently accurate for our purpose. There are, for example, in the case of Great Britain, data which have enabled statisticians with a considerable degree of unanimity to estimate the values produced per head of the industrial population at various periods from the reign of Charles II. till to-day, and to reduce these values to comparable terms of money. Now, we need not insist too much on the accuracy of the figures in question; but one broad fact is unmistakably shown by them—that the product per head towards the close of the nineteenth century was, to say the least of it, from four to five times as great as it was towards the close of the sixteenth. To what, then, was this increase in industrial productivity due? It was not due to any change in the spontaneous workings of nature. It can only have been due to some change in the character of human effort—either in that of the effort of each separate manual labourer, or else in that of the men by whom the labour of others is directed. The average labourer, however, at the close of the nineteenth century did not differ, as an isolated labouring unit, from the average labourer as he was at the time of the fire of London. The increase in industrial productivity must therefore be necessarily due to a change in the ability of those by whom the labourers are organised and directed. And here a priori reasoning is confirmed by actual facts, for the change which has taken place in the class which directs the labour of others has been, during the period in question, of the most notorious and astonishing kind. That class had been progressively absorbing into itself, and concentrating on the conduct of industry, ambitions, intelligences, and strong practical wills, which formerly found their outlets in very different channels—ecclesiastical, political, and more especially military. Man for man, then, industry became more productive, because to an increasing degree the ablest men of the nation concentrated their exceptional powers on directing the business of production; and any one who wished to push things to an extreme conclusion might contend that the entire amount—some four or five hundred per cent.—by which the product per head in the year 1880 exceeded the product per head some two hundred years before, was due to directive ability, and directive ability only; and that the labourers, in their capacity of labourers, had no claim whatsoever to it. We will, however, put the case in a much more moderate form. We will, for argument's sake, concede to self-directed labour all that increase in the values produced per head, which took place between the time of Charles II. and the general establishment in Great Britain of the modern industrial system, with its huge mills and factories, and its concomitant differentiation of the directing class from the directed—an event which had been securely accomplished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In making this concession, we shall, indeed, be defying fact, and ignoring the improvements, alike in manufacture and agriculture, which had taken place during the hundred years preceding, especially during the last fifty of them, and which were solely due to a minority of exceptionally able men.[20] We shall thus be conceding to the labourer far more than his due. Certainly no one can contend that we concede too little.

Let us take, then, the beginning of the nineteenth century as our standing-point; and, assuming that labour was the sole producer then, compare its productivity per head with the productivity of industrial effort—of labour and ability combined—some eight or nine decades later. The labourers of Great Britain as a body, to the exclusion of all other classes, actually divided among themselves, about the year 1880, more wealth per head—something like forty-five per cent.—than would have been theirs if they had lived in the days of their own grandfathers, and been able to appropriate as wages the income of the entire country.

Let us, then, repeat the question which we asked just now. Where has this addition to the income of labour come from? That part of it is attributable to ability—the ability of the Watts, the Stephensons, the Arkwrights, the Bessemers, the Edisons, and so forth—nobody in his senses will deny. Can it be said that any of it is attributable to labour? The period now under consideration is so brief that this question is not hard to answer. It can easily be shown that man, as a labourer skilled or unskilled, has acquired individually no new efficiencies since—to say the least of it—the days of the Greeks and Romans. An ancient gem-engraver would to-day be eminent among modern craftsmen. The implements of the Roman surgeons, the proportional compasses used by the Roman architects, the force-pumps and taps used in the Roman houses—all things that could be produced by a man directing his own muscles—were produced in the Rome of Nero as perfectly as they could be produced to-day. To this fact our museums bear ample and minute witness; while the Colosseum and the Parthenon are quite enough to show that the masons of the ancient world were at least the equals of our own. If no advance, then, in the quality of manual labour as such has taken place in the course of two thousand years, it is idle to contend that its powers have increased in the course of eighty. But a still more remarkable proof that they actually have not done so, and that no such increase has contributed to the increase of modern wealth, is supplied by events belonging to these eighty years themselves. I refer to the policy pursued by the trade-unions of reducing the practical efficiency of all their members alike to the level which can be reached by those of them who are least active and dexterous. Bricklayers, for example, are forbidden by the English unions to lay, in a given time, more than a certain number of bricks, though by many of them this number could be doubled, and by some trebled, with ease. Now, although, from the point of view of those bodies who adopt it, such a policy has many advantages, and is perhaps a tactical necessity, this levelling down of labour to the minimum of individual efficiency is denounced by many critics as a prelude to industrial suicide, and the alarm which these persons feel is doubtless intelligible enough. It is, however, largely superfluous. The levelling process in question must of course involve a certain amount of waste; but its effect on production as a whole is under most circumstances inappreciable. Building as a whole is not checked by the fact that the best bricklayers may do no more than the worst. All kinds of commodities are multiplied, improved, and cheapened, while thousands of the operatives whose labour is involved in their production are allowed to attend to but one machine, when they might easily attend to three. In a word, while the unions have been doing their effective best to keep labour, as a productive agent, stationary, or even to diminish its efficiency, the product of industry as a whole exhibits an unchecked increase. And what is the explanation of this? Little as the trade-unions realise the fact themselves, their own policy is an object-lesson which supplies us with the simple answer. The answer is that the increase of modern wealth—certainly its increase during the past eighty years—has not been due to any change in the efficiency of labour at all; that labour is merely a unit which directive ability multiplies; that if in the year 1800 labour produced everything, and its total products then be expressed by the number five, the products of the industrial population would be five per head still, if ability, as a multiplying number, successively expressible by two and three and four, had not increased the quotient to ten, fifteen, and twenty; ability thus being the producer, not indeed of the five with which we start, but of all the increasing differences between this and the larger numbers.