ing he attaches to the term "labor." This is necessary, because it has been often charged against him that he recognizes only manual labor, and this would, of course, be a fatal defect in his "scientific" socialism. For only the simplest forms of manual labor are possible without mental effort a fact that is universally recognized in the distinction between skilled and unskilled labor, for "skill" is something more than mere manual dexterity. The man who shovels dirt into a cart needs and uses little more mind than the horse that draws it, but the machinist at his lathe must have and use a high quality of mental power. The factory organization tends, it is true, to minimize all effort of mind, and to reduce all workers to the level of machines, but somewhere in the process of making every article mental power is urgently required.1

Marx seems to recognize this fact, when he says, "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 whenever he produces a use-value of any description." 2 A few pages further on he says again: "Labor is, in the first place, a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as one of her own

1 Evolution is pushing the capitalist out of industry; many of the large concerns are managed by paid presidents and superintendents; in time all will be so managed. The capitalist more and more becomes a promoter and manipulator of securities. He has so organized industry that he is on the point of organizing himself out of it and becoming a mere

owner.

2 "Capital," p. 145.

forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants." 1

But while he thus makes a formal recognition of mental labor, throughout his discussions Marx practically ignores it. The above extracts are his only explicit declarations on the subject, and it is doubtful if these mean anything else than the necessary mental effort that accompanies manual labor. Pure mental labor receives from him not even formal recognition. The services of superintendence, the designing of machinery and buildings, the creative activity of invention - all such mental labor is unrecognized in his whole treatise, appears to be excluded from his arguments, and would apparently find no reward in a social state organized according to his ideal. It does not seem an exaggeration, therefore, of the practical effect of his teaching to represent Marx as holding that wealth is produced by manual labor alone, and therefore of right belongs entirely to the manual worker.

Here again the system of Marx is based on theoretic deductions, rather than on an induction of facts, contradicts universal human experience, and is fundamentally defective. The chief element in the creation of value is not manual labor, but intelligence or mental labor. Labor undirected by intelligence is of little worth — that is why skilled labor is paid more than unskilled, and that is why the director of work, who performs mental labor only, is the most highly paid of all. Recent socialists, like Mr. Spargo, have been compelled to abandon Marx "Capital," pp. 156, 157.

1

at this point (protesting, however, that their master has been misinterpreted) and teach explicitly that labor must be held to include all productive energies, whether mental or physical. They recognize the truth, which cannot be denied without disaster, that the man who designs a locomotive is a laborer equally with the men who build it; the man who organizes and directs a business is a laborer no less than the man who works at lathe or loom. They even go further and admit that this is the higher form of labor, requires the rarer gifts and training, and is the more important factor in the production of wealth. In this, the later Socialism is distinctly more scientific than that of Marx.

We are now ready to consider the theory of surplusvalue (Mehrwerth), the capstone of Marx's "scientific " Socialism. Under the present capitalistic system, instead of individuals working separately we have men employed by a capitalist, who buys their labor-time or labor-power like any other commodity, paying for it its exchange-value or market price.2 But labor-power differs from other commodities in creating new values in the process of being used up. The laborer is paid his wages, the price of which is fixed by the law of supply and demand at an amount that will maintain the worker and his family in a state of efficiency. But his labor produces more value than these wages represent, so that while the capitalist pays for the labor-power its exchange-value,

1 Spargo, "Socialism,” pp. 226–228.

2 Economists generally speak of labor as a "commodity." As a matter of fact, there is no such thing as "labor" the working-man sells to his employer his own body and soul for a given time, an inseparable part of himself. It is this vital human element that must be reckoned with, and this constitutes the difference between the different grades of "labor."

he obtains for himself its use-value. Suppose that the laborer requires for his daily support a certain quantity of goods that we may represent by A, and can produce this value in six hours. The employer has bought his entire labor-power and can require him to work six hours more, making his product for the day A+b. This b is surplus-value, which the capitalist acquires at the laborer's expense and appropriates to himself. This the capitalist is able to do because he possesses the means of production tools and raw materials, which he has acquired through his money-capital. The laborer would be glad to work for himself, without dependence on the capitalist, but he has neither money to buy materials nor machinery to turn out product. He must accept the capitalist's offer of employment and wages, or starve. The capitalist finds for him the market for his commodity, labor-power, for which he pays its value in exchange, pocketing the difference.

This transaction, Marx maintains, is only a legalized form of robbery.1 Society ought to be so organized that the whole of a man's labor, and not a part merely, should inure to his own advantage. There ought to be no capitalist employer to take from the poor man half of his earnings, without rendering to the poor man anything in return, save that which is already his own inalienable right as a man, the right to earn his living by his own labor. Therefore, the ideal at which society should aim is cooperative production, and coöperative production on a universal scale is the essence of Socialism - from which

1 "Capital is dead labor that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." - Das Kapital, Vol. I, Chap. X.

equitable distribution is a corollary. Capital, now in individual hands, owes its existence to society as a whole, and should rightfully belong to society as a whole. Owned in common, it would be administered for the common good. Labor would then be paid its usevalue and not its exchange-value. The full product

of labor would be divided among the laborers themselves, and there would be no favored class to seize the lion's share of wealth towards the production of which it had contributed nothing.

What Marx calls "surplus-value" is evidently precisely what other economists call profit. Marx has used a great number of pages to describe in wearisome detail the capitalistic method of creating and appropriating surplus-value, and the whole pretentious discourse, with its philosophical jargon and mathematical formulas, reduces itself to the simple proposition that every capitalist expects to sell his goods for more than the cost of production and so make a profit. But what sane man ever dreamed of questioning this? Why all this pother to prove that men do not engage in business for the mere benefit of their health? It would have been simpler, and honester too, to say that the laborer has a moral right to the entire product of his labor and that profit is ethically wrong.1 Profit makes possible the exploitation of labor; Socialism proposes to abolish profit.

But here are two separate propositions, and a motion

1 The right to the whole product of labor, first clearly asserted by Rodbertus, is individualistic anarchism, not pure Socialism. It was modified in the Gotha programme (1875), into the assertion that the whole product of labor, being possible only through society, belongs to society; and its ultimate distribution is determined, not by the ethical right of the producer, but by the claims of society.