VII. Karl marx and the economics of socialism

• • Prefaces
  • I. Introduction
  • II. Robert Owen and the Utopian Spirit
  • III. The "Communist manifesto" and the scientific spirit
  • IV. The materialistic conception of history
  • V. Capitalism and the law of concentration
  • VI. The class struggle theory
  • VII. Karl marx and the economics of socialism
  • VIII. Outlines of socialist economic theory
  • IX. Outlines of the socialist state
  • X. The means of realization

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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 Misère de la Philosophie," the famous polemic with which Marx assailed J. P. Proudhon's La Philosophie de la Misère. 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 Misère 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 principal 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 analysis 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. 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 Godwin, 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, 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, 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.

Godwin'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, Godwin's most illustrious 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 tooriginated the term. It is to be found in the writings of earlier economists than Thompson even, and Marx quotes an anonymous pamphlet entitled The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. A Letter to Lord John Russell, published in London in 1821, in which the phrase "the quantity of the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist" appears. Nor did Marx claim to be the first to distinguish surplus value. That had been done very clearly by many others, including Adam Smith. 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," 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, 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 anticipated the French writer's theories.

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 associated 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

When the February revolution of 1848 broke out, Marx was in Brussels. The authorities there compelling him to leave Belgian soil, at the request of the Prussian government, he returned to Paris, but not for a long stay. The revolutionary struggle in Germany stirred his blood, and with Engels, Wilhelm Wolf, the intimate friend to whom he later dedicated the first volume of "Capital," and Ferdinand Freiligrath, the fiery poet of the movement, Marx started the New Rhenish Gazette. Unlike the first Rhenish Gazette, the new journal was absolutely free from control by business policy. Twice Marx was summoned to appear at the Cologne assizes, upon charges of inciting the people to rebellion, and each time he defended himself with superb audacity and skill, and was acquitted. But in June, 1849, the authorities suppressed the paper, because of the support it gave to the risings in Dresden and the Rhine Province. Marx was expelled from Prussia and once more sought a refuge in Paris, which he was allowed to enjoy only for a very brief time. Forbidden by the French government to stay in Paris, or any other part of France except Brittany, which, says Liebknecht, was considered "fireproof," Marx turned to London, the mecca of all political exiles, arriving there toward the end of June, 1849.

His removal to London was one of the crucial events in the life of Marx. It became possible for him, in the classic land of capitalism, to pursue his economic studies in a way that was not possible anywhere else in the world. As Liebknecht says: "Here in London, the metropolis (mother city) and the center of the world, and of the world of trade—the watch tower of the world whence the trade of the world and the political and economical bustle of the world may be observed, in a way impossible in any other part of the globe—here Marx found what he sought and needed, the bricks and mortar for his work. 'Capital' could be created in London only."

Already much more familiar with English political economy than most English writers of his time, and with the fine library of the British Museum at his small rooms in a cheap lodging house on Dean Street, the front room serving as reception room and study, and the back room serving for everything else. In a diary note, Mrs. Marx has herself left us an impressive picture of the suffering of those early years in London. Early in 1852, death entered the home for the first time, taking away a little daughter. Only a few weeks later another little daughter died, and Mrs. Marx wrote concerning this event:—

"On Easter of the same year—1852—our poor little Francisca died of severe bronchitis. Three days the poor child was struggling with death. It suffered so much. Its little lifeless body rested in the small back room; we all moved together into the front room, and when night approached, we made our beds on the floor. There the three living children were lying at our side, and we cried about the little angel, who rested cold and lifeless near us. The death of the dear child fell into the time of the most bitter poverty ... (the money for the burial of the child was missing). In the anguish of my heart I went to a French refugee who lived near, and who had sometimes visited us. I told him our sore need. At once with the friendliest kindness he gave me two pounds. With that we paid for the little coffin in which the poor child now sleeps peacefully. I had no cradle for her when she was born, and even the last small resting place was long denied her. What did we suffer when it was carried away to its last place of rest!"

The poverty, of which we have here such a graphic view, lasted for several years beyond the publication of the "Critique," on to the appearance of the first volume of "Capital." When this struggle is remembered and understood, it becomes easier to appreciate the life work of the great Socialist thinker. "It was a terrible time, but it was grand nevertheless," wrote Liebknecht years afterward to Eleanor Marx. As this is the last place in which the personality of Marx, or his personal affairs, will be discussed in this volume, and in view of constant misrepresentations on the part of unscrupulous opponents of Socialism, a further word concerning his family life may not be out of place. Those persons who regard Socialism as being antagonistic to the family relation, and fear it in consequence, will find no suggestion of support for that view in either the life of Marx or his teaching. The love of Marx and his wife for each other was beautiful and idyllic. A true account of their love and devotion would rank with the most beautiful love stories in literature. Their friends understood that, too, and there is a world of significance in the one brief sentence spoken by Engels, when told of the death of his friend's beautiful wife, who was likewise is dead too," he said simply. He knew that from this blow Marx could not recover. It was indeed true. Though he lingered on for about three months after her death, the life of Marx really ended when the playmate of his boyhood, and the lover and companion of all the years of struggle, died with the name of her dear "Karl" upon her lips.

Marx was an ideal father as well as an ideal husband. Always passionately fond of children, he could not resist the temptation to join the games of children upon the streets, and in the neighborhoods where he lived the children soon learned to regard him as their friend. To his own children he was a real companion, always ready to amuse and to be amused by them.

III

The studious years spent in the reading room of the British Museum complete the anglicization of Marx. "Capital" is essentially an English work, the fact of its having been written in German, by a German writer, being merely incidental. No more distinctively English treatise on political economy was ever written, not even "The Wealth of Nations." Even the method and style of the book are, contrary to general opinion, much more distinctly English than German. I do not forget his Hegelian dialectic with its un-English subtleties, but against that must be placed the directness, vigor, and pointedness of style, and the cogent reasoning, with its wealth of concrete illustrations, which are as characteristically English. Marx belongs to the school of Petty, Smith, and Ricardo, and their work is the background of his. "Capital" was the child of English industrial conditions and English thought, born by chance upon German soil.

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, English economic thought was entirely dominated by the ideas and methods of Ricardo, who has been described by Senior, not without justice, as "the most incorrect writer who ever attained philosophical eminence." So far as such a sweeping criticism can be justified by looseness in the use of terms, it is justified by Ricardo's failing in this respect. That he should have attained the eminence he did, dominating English economic thought for so many years, in spite of the confusion which his loose and uncertain use of words occasioned, is not less a tribute to Ricardo's genius than evidence of the poverty of political economy in England at that time. In view of the constant and tiresome reiteration of the charge that Marx pillaged his labor-value theory from Thompson, Hodgskin, Bray, or some other more or less obscure writer of the Ricardian school, it is well to remember that there is nothing in the works of any of these writers connected with the theory of value which is not to be found in the earlier work of Ricardo himself. In like manner, the theory can be traced back from Ricardo to the master he honored, Adam Smith. Furthermore, almost a century before the appearance of "The Wealth of Nations," Sir William Petty had anticipated the so-called Ricardian labor-value theory of Smith and his followers.

Petty, rather than Smith, is entitled to be regarded as the founder of the classical school of political economy, and Cossa justly calls him "one of the most illustrious forerunners of the science of statistical research." He may indeed fairly be said to have been the father of statistical science, and was the first to apply statistics, or "political arithmetick," as he called it, to the elucidation of economic theory. He boasts that "instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments," his method is to speak "in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense; and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Consideration of others." The celebrated saying of this sagacious thinker that "labor is the father and active principle of wealth; lands are the mother," is more Marxian than Ricardian. Petty divided the population into two classes, the productive and non-productive, and insisted that the value of all things depends upon the labor it costs to produce them. This is, as we shall see, entirely Ricardian, but not Marxian. But these are the ideas Marx is supposed to have borrowed, without acknowledgment, from comparatively obscure followers of Ricardo, in spite of the fact that he gives abundant credit to the earlier writer. It has been asked with ample justification whether these critics of Marx have read either the works of Marx or his predecessors.

Adam Smith, who accepted the foregoing principles laid down by Petty, followed his example of basing his conclusions largely upon observed facts instead of abstractions. It is not the least of Smith's merits that, despite his many digressions, looseness of phraseology, and other admitted defects, his love for the concrete kept his feet upon the solid ground of fact. With his successors, notably Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, it was far otherwise. They made political economy an isolated study of abstract doctrines. Instead of a study of the meaning and relation of facts, it became a cult of abstractions, and the aim of its teachers seemed to be to render the science as little scientific, and as dull, as possible. They set up an abstraction, an "economic man," and created for it a world of economic abstractions. It is impossible to read either Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, but especially the latter, without feeling the artificiality of the superstructures they created, and the justice of Carlyle's description of such political economy as the "dismal science." With a realism greater even than Adam Smith's, and a more logical method than Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, Marx restored the science of political economy to its old fact foundations.

IV

The superior insight of Marx is shown in the very first sentence of his great work. The careful reader at once perceives that the first paragraph of the book strikes a keynote which distinguishes it from all other economic works comparable to it in importance. Marx was a great master of the art of luminous and exact definition, and nowhere is this more strikingly shown than in this opening sentence of "Capital": "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity." In this simple, lucid sentence the theory of social evolution is clearly implied. The author repudiates, by implication, the idea that it is possible to lay down universal or eternal laws, and limits himself to the exploration of the phenomena appearing in a certain stage of historical development. We are not to have another abstract economic man with a world of abstractions all his own; lone, shipwrecked mariners upon barren islands, imaginary communities nicely adapted for demonstration purposes in college class rooms, and all the other stage properties of the political economists, are to be entirely discarded. Our author does not propose to give us a set of principles by which we shall be able to understand and explain the phenomena of human society at all times and in all places—the Israel of the Mosaic Age, the nomadic life of Arab tribes, Europe in the Middle Ages, and England in the nineteenth century.

In effect, the passage under consideration says: "Political economy is the study of the principles and laws governing the production and distribution of wealth. Because of the fact that in the progress of society different systems of wealth production and exchange, and different concepts of wealth, prevail at different times, and at various places at the same time, we cannot formulate any laws which will apply to all times and all places. We must choose for examination and study a certain form of production, representing a particular stage of historical development, and be careful not to attempt to apply any of its laws to other forms of production, representing other stages of development. We might have chosen to investigate the laws which governed the production of wealth in the ancient Babylonian Empire, or in Mediæval Europe, had we so desired, but we have chosen instead the period in which we live."

This that we call the capitalist epoch has grown out of the geographical discoveries and the mechanical inventions of the past three hundred years or so, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its chief characteristic, from an economic point of view, is that of production for sale instead of direct use as in earlier stages of social development. Of course, barter and sale are much older than this epoch which we are discussing. In all ages men have exchanged their surplus products for other things more desirable to them, either directly by barter or through some medium of exchange. In the very nature of things, however, such exchange as this must have been incidental to the life of the people engaging in it, and not its principal aim. Under such conditions of society wealth consists in the possession of useful things. The naked savage, so long as he possessed plenty of weapons, and could get an abundance of fish or game, was, from the viewpoint of the society in which he lived, a wealthy man. In other words, the wealth of pre-capitalist society consisted in the possession of use-values, and not of exchange-values. Robinson Crusoe, for whom the possibility of exchange did not exist, was, from this pre-capitalist viewpoint, a very wealthy man.

In our present society, production is carried on primarily for exchange, for sale. The first and essential characteristic feature of wealth in this stage of social development is that it takes the form of accumulated exchange-values, or commodities. Men are accounted rich or poor according to the exchange-values they can command, and not according to the use-values they can command. To use a favorite example, the man who owns a ton of potatoes is far richer in simple use-values than the man whose only possession is a sack of diamonds, but, because in present society a sack of diamonds will exchange for an almost infinite quantity of potatoes, the owner of the diamonds is much wealthier than the owner of the potatoes. The criterion of wealth in capitalist society is exchangeable value as opposed to use-value, the criterion of wealth in primitive society. The unit of wealth is therefore a commodity, and we must begin our investigation with it. If we can analyze the nature of a commodity so that we can understand how and why it is produced, and how and why it is exchanged, we shall be able to understand the principle governing the production and exchange of wealth in this and every other society where similar conditions prevail, where, that is to say, the unit of wealth is a commodity, and wealth consists in an accumulation of commodities.

V

The visit to America, in 1907, of a distinguished English critic of Socialism, Mr. W. H. Mallock, had the effect of thrusting into prominence a common misconception of Marxian Socialism, and it is highly significant that, except in the Socialist press, none of the numerous comments which the series of university lectures delivered by that gentleman occasioned, called attention to the fact that they were based throughout upon a misstatement of the Marxian position. Briefly, Mr. Mallock insisted that Marx believed and taught that all wealth is produced by manual labor, and that, therefore, it ought to belong to the manual workers. In order that there may be no misstatement of our amiable critic's position, it will be best to quote his own words. He says, in Lecture I: "The practical outcome of the scientific economics of Marx is summed up in the formula which is the watchword of popular Socialism. 'All wealth is due to labor; therefore all wealth ought to go to the laborer'—a doctrine in itself not novel, but presented by Marx as the outcome of an elaborate system of economics" (page 6). The careful reader "One is the attempt of Marx and his school, which represents ordinary manual labor as the sole producer of wealth" (Lecture IV, page 81); " ... the Marxian doctrine ... that manual labor is the sole producer of wealth" (Lecture V, page 115). It would be easy to add many other quotations very similar to these, but it is unnecessary. From the quotations given we can gather Mr. Mallock's conception of what Marx taught regarding the source of wealth.

It will be seen that Mr. Mallock alleges: (1) That Marx believed and taught that all wealth is produced by ordinary manual labor; (2) that he held, as a consequence, that all wealth ought to belong to the manual laborers, thus basing an ethic of distribution upon production; (3) that he taught that all productive effort is absolutely equal in productive value, in other words, that ten hours' work of one kind is economically as valuable as ten hours' of any other kind, so long as the labor is productive.

It is not easy to command the necessary self-restraint to reply with dignity to such wholesale misrepresentation as this. There is not the slightest scintilla of a foundation in fact for any one of the three statements. Not a single passage can be quoted from Marx which justifies any one of them. As we shall see, Marx specifically repudiated each one of them, a great deal more forcefully than Mr. Mallock does. That such misrepresentations of Marx should have been permitted to pass unchallenged in so many of our great colleges and universities is to our national shame. We will briefly consider the teaching of Marx under each of the three heads.

First, the source of wealth. It is true that such phrases as "Labor is the source of all wealth" are constantly met with in the popular literature of Socialism, but so far as that is the case it is not due to the teaching of Marx, but rather in spite of it. In the writings of the early Ricardian Socialists these phrases abound, but nowhere in all the writings of Marx will such a statement be found. For many years the opening sentence in the Programme of the German party contained the phrase "Labor is the source of all wealth and of all culture," but it was adopted in spite of the protest of Marx. The Gotha Programme was adopted in 1875. A draft was submitted to Marx and he wrote of it that it was "utterly condemnable and demoralizing to the party." Of the passage in question, he wrote: "Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and of such, to be sure, is material wealth composed) as is labor, which itself is but the expression of a natural force, of human labor-power." That the clause was adopted was a bitter disappointment to Marx, and was due to the insistence of the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle. To say that Marx held labor to be the sole source of wealth is to misrepresent his whole teaching.

But while the Lassallians, and before them the Ricardians, used the phrase, it is evident that they assumed the inclusion of what Marx calls "Nature." They know very well that labor, mere exertion of physical strength, could produce nothing. If, for instance, a man were to spend all his strength trying to lift the pyramids, alone and unaided by mechanical power, it is quite evident to the meanest intellect that his exertions would not produce a single atom of wealth. It is equally obvious that if we take any use-value, whether it be an exchange-value or not being immaterial, we cannot eliminate from it the substance of which it is composed. Take, for example, the canoe of a savage, which is a simple use-value, and a meerschaum pipe, which is a commodity. In the canoe we have part of the trunk of a tree taken from the primeval forest, one of Nature's products. But without the labor of the savage it would never have become a canoe. It would have remained simply part of the trunk of a tree, and would not have acquired the use-value it has as a canoe. But it is likewise true that without the tree the canoe could not have existed. So with our meerschaum pipe. It is not simply a use-value: it is also an article of commerce, an exchange-value, a commodity. Its elements are, the silicate mineral which Nature provided and the form which human labor has given it. We can apply this test to every form of wealth, whether simple use-values or commodities, and we shall find that, in Mill's phrase, wealth is produced by the application of human labor to appropriate natural objects.

This brings us to the second point in Mr. Mallock's criticism, namely, that Marx held that only "ordinary manual labor" is capable of producing wealth, and that, therefore, all wealth ought to go to the manual laborers. One looks in vain for a single passage in all the writings of Marx which will justify this criticism. It may be conceded at once that if Marx taught anything of the kind, the defect in Marxian theory is fatal. But it must be proven that the defect exists—and the onus probandi rests upon Mr. Mallock. One need not be a trained economist or a learned philosopher to see how absurd such a theory must be. Suppose we take, for example, a man working in a factory, at a great machine, making screws. We go to that man and say: "Every screw here is made by manual labor alone. The machine does not count; the brains of the inventors of the machine have nothing to do with the making of screws." Our laborer might be illiterate and unable to read a single page of political economy with understanding, but he would know that our statement was foolish and untrue. Or, suppose we take the machine itself and say to the laborer: "That great machine with all its levers and wheels and springs working in such beautiful harmony was made entirely by manual workers, such as molders, blacksmiths, and machinists; no brain workers had anything to do with the making of it; the labor of the inventors, and of the men who drew the plans and supervised the making, had nothing to do with the production of the machine"—our laborer would rightly conclude that we were either fools or seeking to mock him as one.

Curiously enough, notwithstanding the frequent reiteration of this criticism of Marx by Mr. Mallock, he himself, in an unguarded moment, provides the answer by which Marx is vindicated! Thus, speaking of the great classical economists, Adam Smith, Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, he points out that they included "all forms of living industrial effort, from those of a Watt or an Edison down to those of a man who tars a fence, grouped together under the common name of labor" (Lecture I, page 16). And again: "At present the orthodox economists and the socialistic economists alike give us all human effort tied up, as it were, in a sack, and ticketed 'human labor'" (Lecture I, page 18). Now, if the Socialist includes in his definition of labor "all human effort," it stands to reason that he does not mean only "ordinary manual labor" when he uses the term. Thus Mallock answers Mallock and vindicates Marx!

Of course, Marx, like all the great economists, includes in his concept of labor every kind of productive effort, mental as well as physical, as Mr. Mallock, to the utter destruction of his disingenuous criticism, unconsciously—we must suppose—admitted. Take, for example, this definition: "By labor power or capacity for labor is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises when he produces a use-value of any description." As against this luminous and precise definition, it is but fair to quote that of Mr. Mallock himself. He defines labor as "the faculties of an individual applied to his own labor"—a meaningless jumble of words. The fifty-seven letters contained in that sentence would mean just as much if put in a bag, well shaken, and put on paper just as they happened to fall from the bag.

Marx never argued that the producers of wealth had a right to the wealth produced. The "right of labor to the whole of its produce" was, it is true, the keynote of the theories of the Ricardian Socialists. An echo of the doctrine appeared in the Gotha Programme of the German Socialists to which reference has already been made, and in the popular agitation of Socialism in this and other countries it is echoed more or less frequently. Just in proportion as the ethical argument for Socialism is advanced, and appeals made to the sense of justice, the rich idler is condemned and an ethic of distribution based upon production becomes an important feature of the propaganda. But Marx nowhere indulges in this kind of argument. Not in a single line of "Capital," or his minor economic treatises, can any hint of the doctrine be found. He invariably scoffed at the "ethical distribution" idea. In the judgment of the present writer, this is at once his great strength and weakness, but that is beside the point of this discussion. Suffice it to say, though it involves some reiteration, that Marx never took the position that Socialism ought to take the place of capitalism, because the producers of wealth ought to get the whole of the wealth they produce. His position was rather that Socialism must come, simply because capitalism could not last.

Finally, we come to the charge that Marx taught that "all productive effort is absolutely equal in productivity." Incredible as it may seem, it is nevertheless a fact that everything Marx has to say upon the subject is directly opposed to this notion, and that, as we shall see later on, his famous theory of value is not only not dependent upon a belief in the equal productivity of all productive effort, but would be completely shattered by it. Not only Marx, but also Mill, Ricardo, and Smith, his great predecessors, recognized the fact that all labor is not equally productive. Of course, it requires no special genius to demonstrate this. That a poor mechanic with antiquated tools will produce less in a given number of hours than an expert mechanic with good tools, for example, is too obvious for comment. The Marx assailed by Mr. Mallock, and numerous critics like him, is a myth. The real Marx they do not touch—hence the futility of their work. The Marx they attack is a man of straw, not the immortal thinker. Endowed

"With just enough of learning to misquote," their assaults are vain.

VI

Having thus disposed of some of the more prevalent criticisms of Marx as an economist, we are ready for a definite, consecutive statement of the economic theory of modern Socialism. First, however, a word as to the term "scientific" as commonly applied to Marxian Socialism. Even some of the friendliest of Socialist critics have contended that the use of the term is pretentious, bombastic, and altogether unjustified. From a certain narrow point of view, this appears to be an unimportant matter, and the vigor with which Socialists defend their use of the term seems exceedingly foolish, and accountable for only as a result of enthusiastic fetish worship—the fetish, of course, being Marx.

Such a view is very crude and superficial. It cannot be doubted that the Socialism represented by Marx and the modern political Socialist movement is radically different from the earlier Socialism with which the names of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Owen, and a host of other builders of "cloud palaces for an ideal humanity," are associated. The need of some word to distinguish between the two is obvious, and the only question remaining is whether or not the word "scientific" is the most suitable and accurate one to make that distinction clear; whether the words "scientific" and "utopian" express with reasonable accuracy the nature of the difference. Here the followers of Marx feel that they have an impregnable position. The method of Marx is scientific. From the first sentence of his great work to the last, the method pursued is that of a painstaking scientist. It would be just as reasonable to complain of the use of the word "scientific" in connection with the work of Darwin and his followers, to distinguish it from the guesswork of Anaximander, as to cavil at the distinction made between the Socialism of Marx and Engels and their followers, and that of visionaries like Owen and Saint-Simon.

Doubtless both Marx and Engels lapsed occasionally into Utopianism. We see instances of this in the illusions Marx entertained regarding the Crimean War bringing about the European Social Revolution; in the theory of the increasing misery of the proletariat; in Engels' confident prediction, in 1845, that a Socialist revolution was imminent and inevitable; and in the prediction of both that an economic cataclysm must create the conditions for a sudden and complete revolution in society. These, I say, are Utopian ideas, evidences that the founders of scientific Socialism were tinctured with the older ideas of the Utopists, and even more with their spirit. But when we speak of "Marxism," what mental picture does the word suggest, what intellectual concept is the word a name for? Is it these forecasts and guesses, and the exact mode of realizing the Socialist ideal which Marx laid down, or is it the great principle of social evolution determined by economic development? Is it his naïve and simple description of the process of capitalist concentration, in which no hint appears of the circuitous windings that carried the actual process into unforeseen channels, or the broad fact that the concentration has taken place and that monopoly has come out of competition? Is it his statement of the extent to which labor is exploited, or the fact of the exploitation? If we are to judge Marx by the essential things, rather than by the incidental and non-essential things, then we must admit his claim to be reckoned with the great scientific sociologists and economists.

After all, what constitutes scientific method? Is it not the recognition of the law of causation, putting exact knowledge of facts above tradition or sentiment; accumulating facts patiently until sufficient have been gathered to make possible the formulation of generalizations and laws enabling us to connect the present with the past, and in some measure to foretell the outcome of the present, as Marx foretold the culmination of competition in monopoly? Is it not to see past, present, and future as one whole, a growth, a constant process, so that instead of vainly fashioning plans for millennial Utopias, we seek in the facts of to-day the stream of tendencies, and so learn the direction of the immediate flow of progress? If this is a true concept of scientific method, and the scientific spirit, then Karl Marx was a scientist, and modern Socialism is aptly named Scientific Socialism