Part 11 (1/2)

[125] _Ma.s.s and Cla.s.s_, page 101.

[126] _Message to Congress_, January, 1906.

[127] _Ma.s.s and Cla.s.s_, page 53.

[128] Vide _War of the Cla.s.ses_, by Jack London, page 17.

[129] _Organized Labor_, by John Mitch.e.l.l, page ix.

[130] The remainder of this chapter is largely reproduced from my little pamphlet, _Shall the Unions go into Politics?_

[131] This aspect of the exploitation of the laborers has been brought to the front very dramatically by the many recent ”strikes” against high rents and high prices for meat and other commodities. Rent strikes and riots against high prices have become common events in our large cities.

[132] _Organized Labor_, by John Mitch.e.l.l, page 324.

[133] See _Report of Commission of Investigation_, Senate Ex. Doc. No.

7, Fifty-third Congress, third session.

[134] Particulars are taken from a pamphlet by five members of the New York Bar and issued by the Social Reform Club, New York, in 1900.

[135] See the article by Judge Seabury, _The Abuses of Injunctions, in The Arena_, June, 1903.

[136] See the New York daily papers, January 31, 1906.

CHAPTER VII

KARL MARX AND THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM

I

The first approach to a comprehensive treatment by Marx of the materialistic conception of history appeared in 1847, several months before the publication of the _Communist Manifesto_, in ”La Misere de la Philosophie,”[137] the famous polemic with which Marx a.s.sailed J. P.

Proudhon's _La Philosophie de la Misere_. Marx had worked out his theory at least two years before, so Engels tells us, and in his writings of that period there are several evidences of the fact. In ”La Misere de la Philosophie,” the theory is fundamental to the work, and not merely the subject of incidental allusion. This little book, all too little known in England and America, is therefore important from this historical point of view. In it, Marx for the first time shows his complete confidence in the theory. It needed confidence little short of sublime to challenge Proudhon in the audacious manner of this scintillating critique. The torrential eloquence, the scornful satire, and fierce invective of the attack, have rather tended to obscure for readers of a later generation the real merit of the book, the importance of the fundamental idea that history must be interpreted in the light of economic development, that economic evolution determines social life.

The book is important for two other reasons. First, it was the author's first serious essay in economic science--in the preface he boldly and frankly calls himself an economist--and, second, in it appears a full and generous recognition of that brilliant coterie of English Socialist writers of the Ricardian school from whom Marx has been unjustly, and almost spitefully, charged with ”pillaging” his princ.i.p.al ideas.

What led Marx to launch out upon the troubled sea of economic science, when all his predilections were for the study of pure philosophy, was the fact that his philosophical studies had led him to a point whence further progress seemed impossible, except by way of economics. The Introduction to ”A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”

makes this perfectly clear. Having decided that ”the method of production in material existence conditions social, political, and mental evolution in general,” a study of economics, and especially an a.n.a.lysis of modern industrial society, became inevitable. During the year 1845, when the theory of the economic interpretation of history was absorbing his attention, Marx spent six weeks in England with his friend Engels, and became acquainted with the work of the Ricardian Socialists already referred to.[138] Engels had been living in England about three years at this time, and had made an exhaustive investigation of industrial conditions there, and become intimately acquainted with the leaders of the Chartist movement. His fine library contained most of the works of contemporary writers, and it was thus that Marx came to know them.

Foremost of this school of Socialists which had arisen, quite naturally, in the land where capitalism flourished at its best, were William G.o.dwin, Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin, and John Francis Bray. With the exception of Hall, of whose privately printed book, ”The Effects of Civilisation on the People of the European States,” 1805, he seems not to have known, Marx was familiar with the writings of all the foregoing, and his obligations to some of them, especially Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, were not slight. While the charge, made by Dr. Anton Menger,[139] among others, that Marx took his surplus value theory from Thompson is quite absurd, and rests, as Bernstein has pointed out, upon nothing but the fact that Thompson used the words ”surplus value” frequently, but not at all in the same sense as that in which Marx uses them,[140] we need not attempt to dispute the fact that Marx gleaned much of value from Thompson and the two other writers. While criticising them, and pointing out their shortcomings, Marx himself frequently pays tributes of respect to each of them. His indebtedness to any of them, or to all of them, consists simply in the fact that he recognized the germinal truths in their writings, and saw far beyond what they saw.

G.o.dwin's most important work, ”An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice,”

appeared in 1793, and contains the germ of much that is called Marxian Socialism. In it may be found the broad lines of the thought which marks much of our present-day Socialist teaching, especially the criticism of capitalist society. Marx, however, does not appear to have been directly influenced by it to any extent. That he was influenced by it indirectly, through William Thompson, G.o.dwin's most ill.u.s.trious disciple, is, however, quite certain. Thompson wrote several works of a Socialist character, of which ”An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness, Applied to the newly proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth,” 1824, and ”Labour Rewarded. The Claims of Labour and Capital Conciliated, or How to Secure to Labour the Whole Products of its Exertions,” 1827, are the most important and best known. Thompson must be regarded as one of the greatest precursors of Marx in the development of modern Socialist theory. A Ricardian of the Ricardians, he states the law of wages in language that is almost as emphatic as La.s.salle's famous _Ehernes Lohngesetz_, which Marx made the b.u.t.t of his satire.[141] Accepting the view of Ricardo,--and indeed, of Adam Smith and other earlier English economists, including Petty,--that labor is the sole source of exchange value,[142] he shows by cogent argument the exploitation of the laborer, and uses the term ”surplus value” to designate the difference between the cost of maintaining the laborer and the value of his labor product, a.s.sisted, of course, by machinery and other capital, which goes to the capitalist. By a most labored argument, Professor Anton Menger has attempted to create the impression that Marx took, without acknowledgment, his _theory of the manner in which surplus value is produced_ from Thompson, simply because Thompson frequently used the _term itself_.[143] Marx never claimed to have originated the term. It is to be found in the writings of earlier economists than Thompson even, and Marx quotes an anonymous pamphlet ent.i.tled _The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties_. _A Letter to Lord John Russell_, published in London in 1821, in which the phrase ”the quant.i.ty of the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist” appears.[144] Nor did Marx claim to be the first to distinguish surplus value. That had been done very clearly by many others, including Adam Smith.[145] What is original in Marx is the explanation of the manner in which surplus value is produced.

John Gray's ”A Lecture on Human Happiness,” published in 1825, has been described by Professor Foxwell as being ”certainly one of the most remarkable of Socialist writings,”[146] and the summary of the rare little work which he gives amply justifies the description. Gray published other works of note, two of which, ”The Social System, a Treatise on the Principle of Exchange,” 1831, and ”Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money,” 1848, Marx subjects to a rigorous criticism in ”A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” Thomas Hodgskin's best-known works are ”Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital,”

1825, and ”The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted,”

1832. The former, which Marx calls ”an admirable work,” is only a small tract of thirty-four pages, but its influence in England and America was very great. Hodgskin was a man of great culture and erudition, with a genius for popular writing upon difficult topics. It is interesting to know that in a letter to his friend, Francis Place, he sketched a book which he proposed writing, ”curiously like Marx's 'Capital,'” according to Place's biographer, Mr. Wallas,[147] and from which the conservative old reformer dissuaded him. John Francis Bray was a journeyman printer about whom very little is known. His ”Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy,” published in Leeds in 1839, Marx calls ”a remarkable work,” and in his attack upon Proudhon he quotes from it extensively to show that Bray had antic.i.p.ated the French writer's theories.[148]

The justification for this lengthy digression from the main theme of the present chapter lies in the fact that so many critics have sought to fasten the charge of dishonesty upon Marx, and claimed that the ideas with which his name is a.s.sociated were taken by him, without acknowledgment, from these English Ricardians. As a matter of fact, no economist of note ever quoted his authorities, or acknowledged his indebtedness to others, more generously than did Marx, and it is exceedingly doubtful whether even the names of the precursors whose ideas he is accused of stealing would be known to his critics but for his frank recognition of them. No candid reader of Marx can fail to notice that he is most careful to show how nearly these writers approached the truth as he conceived it.

II