Labour and the Popular Welfare

by W. H. Mallock

CHAPTER I

The Confusion of Thought involved in the Socialistic Conception of Labour.

◆1 After what has now been said, every one will admit that Ability, as distinct from Labour, is as truly a productive agent as Labour is.

◆2 But Socialists, even if they admit this fact, by their inaccurate thought and language obscure the meaning of the fact;

◆¹ There is one point which now must be quite plain to every reader, and on which there is no need to insist further; namely, that Ability is as truly a productive agent as Labour, and that if Labour produces any part of contemporary wealth, Ability just as truly produces another part. This proposition, when put in a general way, will, after what has been said, not be disputed by anybody; but there are various arguments which readers of socialistic sympathies will probably invoke as disproving it in the particular form just given to it. Certain of these arguments require to be discussed at length; but the rest can be disposed off quickly, and we will get them out of the way first. ◆² They are, indeed, not so much arguments as confusions of thought, due largely to an inaccurate use of language.

These confusions are practically all comprehended in the common socialistic formula which declares all production, under modern conditions, to be what Socialists call “socialised.” By this is meant that the whole wealth of the community is produced by the joint action of all the classes of men and of all the faculties employed in its production; and the formula thus includes, as Socialists will be careful to tell us, all those faculties which are here described as Ability. Now such a doctrine, if we consider its superficial sense merely, is so far from being untrue that it is a truism. But if we consider what it implies, if we consider the only meaning which gives it force as a socialistic argument, or indeed invests it with the character of any argument at all, we shall find it to be a collection of fallacies for which the truism is only a cloak. For the implied meaning is not the mere barren statement that the exertions of all contribute to the joint result, but that the exertions of all contribute to it in an equal degree; the further implication being that all therefore should share alike in it.

◆1 Making use of the same fallacy as that of Mill, which has been already criticised.

◆¹ This is really Mill’s argument with respect to Land and Labour, put into different language and applied to Labour and Ability. It says in effect precisely what was said by Mill, that when two causes are both necessary to producing a given result, it is absurd to say that the one produces more or less of it than the other: only here the argument can be used with greater apparent force. For the Socialists may say that if the principle which has been explained in this book is admitted, and if Ability is held to produce all that part of the product which is over and above what Labour could produce by itself, Labour, by the same reasoning, could be proved to produce the whole of the product, since, without the assistance of Labour, Ability could produce nothing. Accordingly, they will go on to say, this conclusion being absurd, the reasoning which leads to it must be false, and we must fall back again on the principle set forth by Mill. Labour and Ability are both necessary to the result, and being equally necessary must be held to contribute equally to producing it.

This argument, as I have said, has great apparent force; but again we have a plausibility which is altogether upon the surface. If Labour and Ability were here conceived of as faculties, without regard to the number of men possessing them, the argument would, whatever its logical value, coincide broadly with one great practical fact, to which by and by I shall call the reader’s attention; namely, that Labour and Ability do in this country divide between them the joint product in nearly equal portions. But those who make use of the socialistic formula use it with a meaning very different from the above. When they say that Ability and Labour contribute equally to producing a given amount of wealth, they mean not that the men who exercise one faculty produce collectively as much as the men who exercise the other; for that might mean that five hundred men of Ability produced as much as five hundred thousand labourers; and that is the very position which the Socialists desire to combat. They mean something which is the exact reverse of this: not that one faculty produces as much as the other faculty, but that one man produces as much as, and no more than another man, no matter which faculty he exercises in the producing process. They mean not that the faculty of Labour which an ordinary ploughman represents, produces as much as the faculty represented by an Arkwright or by a Stevenson, but that the individual ploughman, by the single task which he himself performs, adds as much to his country’s wealth as the creators of the spinning-frame and the locomotive.

◆1 Their meaning needs only to be clearly stated to show its absurdity.