Labour and the Popular Welfare

by W. H. Mallock

That the Chief Productive Agent in the modern world is not Labour, but Ability, or the Faculty which directs Labour.

◆1 What was said in the last chapter shows that productive Human Exertion is of two kinds, and does not consist only of what is meant by Labour,

◆2 As familiar instances will show us.

◆¹ I said in the last chapter that machinery or Fixed Capital was congealed Wage Capital. But as Wage Capital is metamorphosed into machinery only owing to the fact that it is at once the instrument and the guide of Human Exertion, machinery may be called congealed exertion also. This description of it is but half original; for Socialistic writers have for a long time called it “congealed Labour.” But between the two phrases there is a great and fundamental difference, and I now bring them thus together to show what the difference is. The first includes the whole meaning of the second, whereas the second includes only a part of the meaning of the first. Let us take the finest bronze statue that was ever made, and also the worst, the feeblest, the most ridiculous. ◆² Both can with equal accuracy be called congealed Labour; but to call them this is just as useless a truism as to call them congealed bronze. It describes the point in which the two statues resemble each other; it tells us nothing of what is far more important—the points in which the two statues differ. They differ because, whilst both are congealed Labour, the one is also congealed imagination of the highest order, the other is also congealed imagination of the lowest. The excellence of the metal and of the casting may be the same in both cases. Or again, let us take a vessel like the City of Paris, and let us take also the vessel that was known as the Bessemer Steamer. The Bessemer Steamer was fitted with a sort of rocking saloon, which, when the vessel rolled, was expected to remain level. The contrivance was a complete failure. The hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on it were practically thrown away, and the structure ended by being sold as old iron. Now these two vessels were equally congealed Labour, and congealed Labour of precisely the same quality; for the workmen employed on the Bessemer Steamer were as skilful as those employed on the City of Paris. And yet the Labour in the one case was congealed into a piece of lumber, and in the other case it was congealed into one of the most perfect of those living links by which the lives of two worlds are united. To call both the vessels, then, congealed Labour, only tells us how success resembles failure, not how it differs from it. The City of Paris differs from the Bessemer Steamer because the City of Paris was congealed judgment, and the Bessemer Steamer was congealed misjudgment.

It is therefore evident that in using Capital so as to make Labour more efficacious, as distinct from wasting Capital so as to make Labour nugatory, some other human faculties are involved distinct from the faculty of Labour; and I have employed, except when it would have been mere pedantry to do so, the term “Human Exertion” instead of the term “Labour,” because the former includes those other faculties, and the latter does not; or, if it includes them, it entirely fails to distinguish them, and merely confounds them with faculties from which they fundamentally differ. Thus, when I pointed out in the last chapter that Capital, in so far as it increased the productivity of Labour, was mental and moral energy as applied to muscular energy, I might have said with equal propriety, had my argument advanced far enough, that it was one kind of Human Exertion guiding and controlling another kind. Here we come to the great central fact which forms the key to the whole economic problem: the fact that in the production of wealth two kinds of Human Exertion are involved, and not, as economists have hitherto told us, one—two kinds of exertion absolutely distinct, and, as we shall see presently, following different laws.

◆1 Economic writers vaguely recognise this fact, but have never formally expressed it, or made it a part of their systems.

◆2 They confuse all productive exertion together under the heading of Labour.

◆¹ Economic writers, like the world in general, do indeed recognise, in an unscientific way, that productive exertion exhibits itself under many various forms; but their admissions and statements with regard to this point are entirely confused and stultified by the almost ludicrous persistence with which they classify all these forms under the single heading of Labour. Mill, for instance, says that a large part of profits are really wages of the labour of superintendence. He speaks of “the labour of the invention of industrial processes,” “the labour of Watt in contriving the steam-engine,” and even of “the labour of the savant and the speculative thinker.” ◆² He employs the same word to describe the effort that invented Arkwright’s spinning-frame, and the commonest muscular movement of any one of the mechanics who assisted with hammer or screwdriver to construct it under Arkwright’s direction. He employs the same word to describe the power that perfected the electric telegraph, and the power that hangs the wires from pole to pole, like clothes-lines. He confuses under one heading the functions of the employer and the employed—of the men who lead in industry, and of the men who follow. He calls them all labourers, and he calls their work Labour.

◆1 But practically, Labour means muscular or manual exertion.

◆2 Mental and moral exertion, as applied to production, must therefore be given another name: