It has been said that the professional and professorial exponents of
economic science confine themselves to variants of a single theme.
Usually belonging to the master class by birth and education, and at any
rate attached to that class by the ties of economic interest, they are
ever guided by the conscious or subconscious aim of providing a
theoretical justification for the capitalist system, and their lives are
devoted to inculcating the art of extracting honey from the hive without
alarming the bees. Achille Loria is an exception to this generalisation.
Professor of political economy at Turin, and one of the most learned
economists of the day, he is anything but an apologist for the bourgeois
economy. With the exception of the first volume of Marx's Capital, no
more telling indictment of capitalism has ever been penned than Loria's
Analysis of Capitalist Property (1889).
This gigantic work has not been translated, but a number of Loria's
books are available to English readers: The Economic Foundations of
Society, 1902; Contemporary Social Problems, 1911; The Economic
Synthesis, 1914. A biographical and critical study of Malthus, in the
Italian, was rendered into English in 1917 and published in the United
States as the opening chapter of a symposium on Population and Birth
Control edited by the writers of this foreword. The Economic
Foundations of Society has run through five editions in Swan
Sonnenschein's (now Allen & Unwin's) "Social Science Series." But on the
whole Loria's works are less widely known in England and America than on
the continent, far less widely known than they deserve to be.
An exposition of his outlook and a study of his relationship to Marx
will not only be of interest in themselves, but will help readers to
surmount certain terminological difficulties in the Karl Marx. All
original thinkers write perforce in a language of their own minting.
Those of us to whom "surplus value," the "class struggle," the
"materialist conception," "economic determinism," have been familiar
concepts from childhood upwards, are apt to forget that Marx's
contemporaries were repelled by what they regarded as superfluous
jargon. The first students of Kant, the first students of Darwin, the
first students of all great innovators in philosophy, science, and the
arts, have had to master a new vocabulary before they could understand
what these writers were driving at; for new ideas must be conveyed in a
new speech or by the use of old words refashioned. We cannot understand
Loria, we cannot appreciate Loria's criticism of Marx, we cannot grasp
the nature of Loria's own affiliation to Marx, unless we realise
precisely what the Italian economist means by the speciously familiar
terms "income," "subsistence," "unproductive labourers," "recipients of
income," and the like. The familiarity of the words makes them all the
more misleading to those who do not hold the Lorian clue to guide them
through the economic labyrinth. Does this sound alarming? Yet Loria's
doctrines, like those of Marx, like those of Darwin, like those of—but
we must not say "like those of Kant"—are simplicity itself to anyone
who is able to survive the first shock of the encounter, to surmount the
first agony of a new idea.
In our own view the difficulty of economics in large part depends upon
the fact that it is either a system of apologetics or else a system of
attack. There are, in fact, two conflicting sciences: the economic
science of the master class, and the economic science of the
proletariat. Both are necessarily tendentious, and the conflicting
tendencies will remain irreconcilable as long as the class struggle
continues. Not until that struggle has been fought to a successful
issue, not until the co-operative commonwealth has come into existence,
can there be a comparatively dispassionate political economy. As
dispassionate as conic sections it can never be, for it is biological,
sociological, is by its very nature tinged with human interest, and can
therefore never be wholly impartial. But many of the contradictions and
perplexities of economics are by no means inherent; they are, we
contend, no more than confusing reflexes of the class struggle.
Loria seems to hold a somewhat similar opinion. In Contemporary Social
Problems (pp. 99, 100) he writes: "I am inclined to consider political
economy and socialism as two intellectual weapons which, for a long time
separate and mutually antagonistic owing to the apologetic theories of
the one and the subversive utopianism of the other, are drawing closer
and closer together as they become more human and the old animosities
disappear. Perhaps the day is not far distant when the two forces will
unite under one standard." To a casual reader this might suggest that
Loria thinks that the class struggle, that the conflict between orthodox
economics and socialism, can be overcome within the framework of the
bourgeois economy—that the capitalist Old-Man-of-the-Sea can at one and
the same time remain seated upon the back of the proletarian Sindbad the
Sailor, and walk beside him amicably arm in arm as the two climb the
mount of human endeavour. But an attentive student of Loria's Karl
Marx will realise that when the Italian speaks of "a day not far
distant," he means the morrow of the social revolution, when Marx's
promethean work shall have been completed, and when, led by Marx "the
emperor in the realm of mind," the human race shall have reached "the
brilliant goal which awaits it in a future not perhaps immeasurably
remote" (infra p. 162).
For Loria, one of the greatest living champions of the doctrine of
economic determinism, sees no difficulty in reconciling that doctrine
with a firm belief in the magistral efficacy, at the stage which
evolution has now reached, of the deliberate human will. "The economic
natural force," writes Eduard Bernstein (Evolutionary Socialism, p.
14), "like the physical, changes from the ruler of mankind to its
servant, according as its nature is recognised." Herein is embodied the
application in the special economic field of the profound general truth
that by scientific study man, the child of nature, learns to control
nature, and thereby to mould his own being and social environment in
accordance with the dictates of his own enlightened will. Similarly
Loria is far from the rigid economic determinism which would refuse to
admit the existence of "ideal" causation, or the possibility in the
sphere of sociology of intelligently adapting means to ends. "Idealism"
is a word which has been soiled by such ignoble use that one really
hesitates to employ it; but we must distinguish between idealism and
sentimentalism, and between idealism and window dressing. The right sort
of idealism is realist idealism, and Loria is a realist idealist. He
distinguishes clearly between fatalism and quietism, on the one hand,
and economic determinism tempered by rationalist guidance, on the other.
In The Economic Foundations of Society (pp. 376 et seq.) he writes:
"Can we say that a doctrine leads to fatalism which concedes a fertile
field to human activity, and which only seeks to mark out the limits
within which such efforts may be applied? Can we give the name of
quietism to a theory whose aims lie in the direction of substituting
enlightened action, aware of its ends, for blind and ignorant innovation
which is powerless to realise its purposes?... Turning to consider the
great social transformations which alter the structure of property, our
theory does, it is true, deny that such movements can be effected before
the necessary change in economic conditions has rendered them
inevitable; but far from this conclusion leading to the degradation of
human nature, it seems to us to inspire the highest sentiments. If we
examine the great spontaneous movements that have sought to modify
economic conditions before their time, we shall find that they all
lacked definite purpose. There was no clear idea of the new order of
things to be substituted for the old; on this account these movements
were wanting in discipline; they were anarchic, and hence their lack of
effect. Our theory, on the contrary, declares that it is first of all
necessary to learn the nature of the future social system, and, after
this knowledge has been acquired, to substitute a co-ordination of
effort towards this rigorously determined end for the blind and
disorganised attempts that have thus far been made in this direction....
Far from leading towards fatalism our theory tends to encourage rational
human activity, which alone can prevent, or at least mitigate, the
confusion otherwise attendant upon the social metamorphosis.... A wide
field is thus opened to human activity, and it is certainly a noble
mission for mankind to withdraw social development from the operation of
the blind and brutal forces of physical evolution and to submit the
process to the kindlier and more civilised action of human reason."
The definitive exposition of Loria's views is to be found in The
Economic Synthesis; but since in his theory of social evolution the
effects of increasing population play so notable a part, reference must
first be made to his examination of Malthus' theory of population. At
the outset, however, let us recall Marx's attitude to the Malthusian
doctrine.
Marx rejected the idea that, for human beings, population tends to grow
in such a manner as necessarily to press on the means of subsistence.
Though he accepted Darwinism and had a profound admiration for Darwin,
as far as the human species is concerned he rejected Malthusianism (on
which Darwinism is based), and wrote of Malthus in terms of bitter
personal hostility. The animus we may ignore, but the arguments are
worth recapitulating. Pressure of population, he says, is the outcome of
capitalism. On p. 645 of Capital Marx writes: "The labouring
population ... produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced
by it, the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous, is
turned into a relatively surplus population, and it does this always to
an increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the
capitalist mode of production, and in fact every special historic mode
of production has its own special laws of population, historically
valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for
plants and animals only, and only in so far as man has not interfered
with them." Later in the same chapter he says (in effect) that undue
fertility is characteristic of poverty-stricken circumstances, and that
with improved conditions the population difficulty tends to settle
itself.
We shall see that Loria says much the same thing, and shall consider the
assertion presently.
At a later date (1875) Marx writes somewhat more guardedly. In his
Criticism of the Gotha Programme the reference to the Malthusian
doctrine of population runs as follows: "But if I accept this law [the
iron law of wages] as formulated by Lassalle, I must likewise accept its
foundation. What is this foundation? As F. A. Lange showed shortly after
Lassalle's death, the iron law of wages is founded upon Malthus' theory
of population, a theory which Lange himself espoused. Now if the iron
law of wages be correct, it is impossible to abrogate it, even if we
should do away with wage labour a hundred times over, for not the wage
system alone, but every social system, must be governed by the law. Upon
this foundation, for fifty years and more, economists have continued to
demonstrate that socialism could never suppress poverty, which they
regard as resulting from the nature of things. Socialism, they declare,
can only generalise poverty, can only diffuse it simultaneously over the
whole surface of society!"
Does it not almost seem as if Marx, by 1875, had, for a moment at least,
glimpsed the real difficulty? For if we grant for the sake of argument
that the excess of population under capitalism be only a relative
excess, if we grant that each historic mode of production has its own
special law of population, the question we have to ask ourselves as
socialists is, "What will be the law of population under socialism?" May
not socialism tend to promote an absolute excess of population? Will
not natural increase, stimulated by easy circumstances, threaten the
stability of the system unless the growth of population be deliberately
checked? Will not the inhabitants of each area have to specify some
limit beyond which it is undesirable that the population of that area
should increase? Ways and means, social and individual, lie beyond our
present scope. But in our opinion Paul Lafargue, Henry George, and many
others who have written on this question, and who have endeavoured to
meet the Malthusian difficulty by a simple denial of the facts upon
which "Parson Malthus" grounded his theory, have displayed more zeal
than knowledge. As Karl Pearson wrote thirty years ago: "Marx by abusing
Malthus has not solved the population difficulty"; and we agree with the
same writer that "the acceptance of the law discovered by Malthus is an
essential of any socialistic theory which pretends to be scientific";
but happily it is no longer true that "Kautsky seems to stand alone
among socialists in accepting the Malthusian law and its consequences"
(The Ethic of Free-thought, 1888, pp. 438-9).
Loria's treatment of the subject is closely akin to that of Marx, though
Loria differs from Marx in that he speaks with admiration, nay almost
with veneration, of the author of The Principles of Population. As
regards the main issue, Loria contends that while Malthus elucidated a
profoundly important truth, he erred in respect of many of its
applications. In present conditions, i.e., under capitalism, says Loria,
there is no excess of population over food supply, but merely (in
certain countries) an excess of people in relation to the privately
owned capital which is able to secure profitable investment. Hence, as a
result not of over-population but simply of capitalist conditions, we
have in addition to the mass of the workers who obtain subsistence, on
the one hand an owning class with a superfluity, and on the other a
parasitic class of dependents, paupers, semi-criminals, and criminals.
He contends, further, that Malthus' theory is invalidated by the
ascertained fact that, as far as human beings are concerned, an excess
of food over population does not necessarily lead to an increase in the
birth rate—that a rising standard of life is nowadays apt to be
characterised by diminished procreation. Speaking of certain
postmalthusian applications of Malthus' theory, he writes (Contemporary
Social Problems, p. 79): "Some also suggest various physiological
expedients—the obscene abominations of the so-called neomalthusians—to
limit population. Do they not see that there is no excess of mouths to
be fed, and that procreation will of itself diminish with the
amelioration of the condition of the working classes, without recourse
to loathsome and unnatural practices?"
In this passage, as repeatedly in his Malthus, Loria fails oddly (for
so acute a mind) in his analysis of operating causes. As the result of a
rising standard of life—consequent upon improved economic conditions
among the proletariat—the workers, we are told (Malthus, p. 80),
"become less prolific." Thus the growth of population is "automatically"
regulated by economic means, and there is no need to have recourse to
"physiological expedients" to limit population. Yet he nowhere
endeavours to elucidate the working of this economic factor in the
biologic field, or to show how it can possibly operate unless precisely
in virtue of what he is so strangely and so inconsistently moved to
condemn, viz., the deliberate application of increasing physiological
knowledge by individual couples in order to regulate the number of their
offspring. In a word, by birth control.
As far as past stages of economic evolution are concerned, the
transition from primitive tribal communism to slavery, from slavery to
serfdom and the guild system, and from these to capitalism, Loria
himself insists that the prime motive force has been the pressure of
increasing population on the means of subsistence. Thus in Contemporary
Social Problems (pp. 128 et seq.) he writes: "We easily understand how
evolution takes place in the sphere of economic phenomena provided we
steadfastly hold in mind the simple premise that ceaseless increase in
population makes necessary the occupation and cultivation of lands ever
less fertile, hence requiring more efficacious means of production to
combat the increasing resistance of matter. Given, therefore, a certain
density of population and a certain degree of fertility of cultivated
land, there is rendered not only possible, but also necessary, a
determinate economic system permitting human labour to attain a
commensurate productivity; but population increasing, and the necessity
of cultivating less fertile lands becoming urgent, the economic system
hitherto existing proves inadequate, since the degree of productivity
which it permits to labour is insufficient to combat matter now become
more rebellious. As the economic and productive system which
corresponded with the preceding degree of the productivity of the soil
has grown incompatible with the new and more exacting conditions, it
must be supplanted by a better system. Then follows an epoch of social
disintegration which destroys the superannuated form, from whose ashes a
new structure arises; on the ruins of the shattered economic system is
erected a new one which allows human nature to become more productive,
and is therefore adapted, for a time, to combat the increasing
resistance of matter. However, with each additional increment to
population, a moment comes when it is necessary to bring under
cultivation lands which are still more resistant, and for the
development of which the prevailing economic system is found to be
inadequate; consequently this system suffers the fate of those which
have preceded it, and it is in turn destroyed to give place to a new and
superior form."
The detailed application of these ideas is one of the main themes of
Loria's Analysis of Capitalist Property. We learn, he says, from
history and statistics that capitalistic property (the term is here used
by Loria in the widest sense to include all the forms of property which
render possible the exploitation of one human being by another) is
everywhere and at all times due to one and the same cause, the
suppression of free land. As long as there is any free land, as long as
any man who so desires can take possession of a piece of land and
develop it by his labour, capitalistic property is impossible, because
no man will willingly work for another when he can establish himself for
his own account on a piece of land without paying for it. Where there is
free land, labour owns the means of production, so that agriculture is
carried on by free peasants on small holdings, whilst manufacturing
industry (in so far as this exists at such a stage) is in the hands of
independent artisans. In these conditions labour is isolated, and
isolated labour rarely produces anything more than the labourer's
subsistence. The regular supplementary production of "income" is the
characteristic feature of associated labour.
This brings us to The Economic Synthesis, a work which bears as
sub-title "A Study of the Laws of Income." It is, Loria tells us, "the
complement and the theoretic crown" of all his earlier writings. The
meaning he attaches to the word income is, in truth, simple enough; but
that meaning is the very core of Lorianism, just as surplus value is
(for many) the very core of Marxism. Isolated labour, labour of the kind
described in the last paragraph, produces, says Loria, first of all
subsistence—the bare necessities of life. In exceptionally favourable
conditions even isolated labour may produce something more than this,
and that something more is income. But as a rule, and more and more as
population increases and land of diminishing fertility has to be brought
under cultivation, isolated labour fails to produce anything beyond
subsistence, fails to produce even that, so that it becomes necessary to
have recourse to the superior productivity of associated labour. Now
for this, since the natural man is averse from associated labour, some
form of coercion, direct or indirect, is essential; and the history of
all the developed economic systems that have hitherto prevailed is the
history, in one form or another, of the coercion to associated labour.
Income, in the Lorian sense of the term, is "the specific product of
associated labour"; i.e., it is the surplus produced by labour because
it is associated, over and above what the labourers could have produced
in isolation. Working in isolation they produce, or theoretically might
have produced, subsistence for themselves; associated they produce
something more, which is income, and this accrues to those who control
and direct the associating force.
In primitive tribal communism that force emanates from the collectivity
of economic equals, and the "undifferentiated income" is communally
owned and consumed. But subsequently "differentiated income," received
by non-labourers, makes its appearance. In slave-owning communities,
differentiated income goes to the slave owners; in feudal serfdom, it
accrues to the baronage; under modern capitalist conditions the
dispossessed proletarian masses produce of course their own subsistence,
and produce in addition income for the legal owners of land and capital.
Slave owners, barons, capitalists, are in successive stages the
"recipients of [differentiated] income."
Throughout the history of these economic phases there has been a
conflict between the interests of the labourers and those of the
recipients of income, taking the form, in times of exceptional stress,
of slave insurrections and slave wars, of jacqueries and ruthless
reprisals by the baronage, of strikes and lock-outs. Here we have one
aspect of what Loria terms "the struggle between subsistence and
income," and this aspect coincides obviously enough with one aspect of
the Marxist class struggle.
The association of labour is the prime cause of labour's enhanced
productivity. But while the association increases productivity, the
coercion that is requisite to secure association exercises a restrictive
influence upon productivity, the restriction being more marked in
proportion to the severity of the coercion. Thus the crude and harsh
coercion of the slave-owning system makes slave labour (in part for
psychological reasons dependent upon the mentality of the labourer) less
productive than serf labour under the feudal system, wherein coercion
was somewhat milder. In modern capitalism coercion, though still very
real, is veiled, and for this reason (quite apart from the peculiar
advantages of machinofacture) associated labour is more productive under
capitalism.
It is the superior productivity of each successive system which has
rendered it victorious over its predecessor. With the dry light of
economic science Loria displays for us the working of the type of
production dominant to-day, the most effective system of production the
world has yet known.
Such is Loria's outline picture of the succession of economic phases.
It is impossible here to trace the Italian economist's detailed analysis
of the causes which lead to the break up of one economic system and its
replacement by another. Suffice it to say that in his view an important
part is played by the action of those whom he calls "unproductive
labourers," members of the educated caste living also on differentiated
income, on portions of income reallotted by the primary recipients of
income, whose interests, in the prosperous phase of any system of
income, the educated caste is thus paid to serve. A typical service is
that of the priestly order, which is maintained "to pervert the egoism"
of the labourers, to delude them into the belief that they are pursuing
their own better interests by peacefully and diligently producing income
for the master class.
But in the declining phase of any economic system (and Loria considers
that the wage system of capitalism has now, despite its imposing
appearance, actually entered its declining phase), the diminution of
income curtails the amount available for reallotment to the unproductive
labourers. Hence from supporters of the existing system they are
speedily transformed into its active opponents. These "intellectuals"
now make common cause with the labourers, the disinherited of the
earth; and the old property system totters to its fall.
He writes (The Economic Foundations of Society, p. 347): "All
revolutions undertaken by the non-proprietary classes alone, without the
support of the unproductive labourers, are ... foredoomed to failure.
The rebels, divided and disorganised, not at all sure of themselves and
uncertain of the ends they would attain, soon fall back under the
dominion of the proprietary class.... The ancient economy was not
destroyed by the revolt of the slaves, nor was the ruin of the medieval
economy effected by the armed uprising of the serfs. These two economic
systems did not succumb until the clients of the Roman economy and the
ecclesiastics of the medieval economy were induced by a falling-off of
their share in the constantly decreasing revenues [income] to break
their long-standing alliance with the revenue holders [recipients of
income] and to lend their support to the final revolt of the labouring
classes."
To the Lorian theory of revolution we shall return in conclusion, after
we have discussed the relationships of Loria to Marx. The theory
involves tactical questions of the utmost interest and importance. Apart
from these, the crux of the problem of transition to the co-operative
commonwealth centres, as most thoughtful socialists are coming to see,
around the question of the coercion to associated labour. A fundamental
part of the socialist outlook is the belief that the existence of a
special class of recipients of income, whether these be slave owners,
feudal barons, or legal monopolists of land and capital, is not needful
to modern civilisation. We affirm that the disappearance of such a class
(though that class may have played a necessary part in social evolution)
can now be witnessed by the enlightened without a single regret. But
what is to ensure the continuance of that high social productivity which
will be necessary to the maintenance of general wellbeing? Now that our
race is at length becoming truly self-conscious, will it be possible "to
transform the economic natural force from the ruler of mankind to its
servant?"
The closing sentences of The Economic Synthesis show in outline how
Loria envisages that possibility: "The essential social contradiction
can be eliminated, economic equilibrium can be established, only by
means of a profound transformation, affecting not merely the process of
distribution but also the process of production, relieving this latter
process from the coercion which has hitherto environed it and restricted
its efficiency; in other words by the destruction of the coercive
association of labour and its replacement by the free association of
labour. Herein is to be found the supreme objective towards which must
converge all the forces of social renovation." And in a terminal
footnote he adds: "This is now understood by all the most enlightened
economists, not excepting the socialists, who point out that a reform
which effects no more than the distribution of income among the
proletarians, while leaving unaffected the method by which that income
is actually produced, would have no more than an extremely restricted
and fugitive effect; and that a decisive and durable social renovation
must be initiated by a radical metamorphosis in the process of
production."
We have now to ask, what does Loria consider the most important elements
of Marxist teaching? In his account of the Communist Manifesto (infra
p. 68) he tells us that "this writing contains the whole
Marxist system in miniature, and ... supplies a critique of all
doctrinaire, idealist, and utopian forms of socialism. Thus the
Manifesto voices the two fundamentals of Marxism: the dependence of
economic evolution upon the evolution of the instrument of production,
in other words the technicist determination of economics; and the
derivation of the political, moral, and ideal order from the economic
order, in other words the economic determination of sociology—or, as
we should express it to-day, historical materialism."
On pp. 145 and 146 he tells us that we must "recognise in Marx
the supreme merit of having been the first to introduce the evolutionary
concept into the domain of sociology, the first to introduce it in the
only form appropriate to social phenomena and social institutions; not
as" an "unceasing and gradual upward movement," but as a "succession of
age-long cycles rhythmically interrupted by revolutionary explosions."
Speaking of Marx's "masterly investigation into the successive forms of
the technical instrument, of productive machinery," he says that Marx
may be termed "the Darwin of technology.... This physiology of industry,
which is now the least studied and least appreciated of Marx's
scientific labours, nevertheless constitutes his most considerable and
most enduring contribution to science."
Loria wrote his Karl Marx nearly two years before the publication of
William Paul's The State, of which pp. 2 to 7, the section on "Man and
Tools" is devoted to a restatement of this aspect of Marxism; and the
Italian economist is not acquainted with the thought-trend of Walton
Newbold. As far as the young but rapidly growing and vigorous school of
British Marxists is concerned, it is certainly no longer true that
Marx's work as "the Darwin of technology" is the least studied and least
appreciated of Marx's scientific labours.
To the class struggle Loria does not refer at any length in this essay
on Karl Marx. We have already seen that he recognises the enormous part
the class struggle has played in history; but he has throughout life
remained the man of science, the man of the study; he has never entered
the arena as what the French term a "militant." In 1904, when the
Italian Socialist Party wished him to be socialist parliamentary
candidate for Turin, Loria refused on the ground that parliamentary
life would interfere with his theoretical studies; and it may be that
for these and other reasons he is less keenly impressed than are most
left-wing socialists of the profound importance of diffusing among the
workers awareness of the class struggle.
Economic determinism has been sufficiently considered in what has gone
before. If in the present study Loria says less about it than about some
of the other elements of Marxism, this is not because he considers it of
minor importance, nor because he accepts it uncritically, but because he
has devoted an entire volume to the exposition of this aspect of
reality.
It remains, then, to discuss Loria's outlook on the Marxist theory of
value. It is here that Lorianism will be most strenuously challenged by
those more enthusiastic disciples of Marx who, even if they do not
accept the dogma of Marx's infallibility, none the less regard the
doctrine of value, based on the labour theory of value, as the very
heart of Marxist socialism.
We must remember that it is natural for persons who do not gain their
subsistence by applying their labour power to the production of
commodities, and whose claim to the title of "workers" will nevertheless
hardly be disputed, to question the labour theory of value. Bernard
Shaw, for example, in his pamphlet The Impossibilities of Anarchism,
protests that it is "natural for the [manual] labourer to insist that
labour ought to be the measure of price, and that the just wage of
labour is its average product; but the first lesson he has to learn in
economics is that labour is not and never can be the measure of price
under a competitive system. Not until the progress of socialism replaces
competitive production and distribution with individual greed for its
incentive, by collectivist production and distribution with fair play
all round for its incentive, will the prices either of labour or of
commodities represent their just value."
Leaving Shaw to the tender mercies of the orthodox Marxists who will not
be slow to declare that if he means "value" he should not say "price,"
and that if he thinks that "price" and "value" are interchangeable terms
he is not worth powder and shot, and without ourselves venturing to rush
into the fray, we may suggest that our propagandists would be less
inclined to make the Marxist theory of value an article of faith, "which
faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled without doubt he shall
perish everlastingly"—if they could realise that the theory is perhaps
no more than a difficult point of abstract economic doctrine which is
not essential to the use of the conception of surplus value as a means
of making the worker aware of the basic character of capitalist
exploitation. Bernstein explains the matter very well in the book
previously quoted (p. 35): "Practical experience shows that in the
production and distribution of commodities a part only of the community
takes an active share, whilst another part consists of persons who
either enjoy an income for services which have no direct relation to the
process of production, or have an income without working at all. An
essentially greater number of men thus live on the labour of all those
engaged in production than are actively engaged in it, and income
statistics show that the classes not actively engaged in production
appropriate, moreover, a much greater share of the total produced than
the ratio of their number to that of the actively producing class. The
surplus labour of the latter is an empiric fact, demonstrable by
experience, which needs no deductive proof. Whether the Marxist theory
of value be correct or not, is quite immaterial to the proof of surplus
labour. It is in this respect no demonstration, but only a means of
analysis and illustration."
The professional economist, however, cannot rest content with these
loose formulations. Loria feels that there is a void in the Marxist
system, and it seems to us (though Loria nowhere tells us so in set
terms) that the Lorian doctrine of differentiated income, the most
essential part of the Italian economist's teaching, is really an attempt
to restate the theory of surplus value in a form absolutely proof
against enemy attack. Be this as it may, the conception, however
interesting, is far less easy to convey to the uninstructed mind, and it
is unlikely, for propaganda purposes, to replace the simple formula of
surplus value. But is it not essential that those who undertake to teach
socialist economics should themselves fully understand the objections to
the Marxist theory of value, and that they should have a clear grasp of
Loria's alternative doctrine of the nature of capitalist exploitation?
Let us return, in conclusion, to the Lorian theory of revolution. If we
may summarise that theory in colloquial phraseology, it is that, while
economic evolution must pave the way for revolution, the final stages of
revolution have been effected in the past, and can only be effected in
the future, through the co-operation of "disgruntled intellectuals."
These are the "unproductive labourers" of Loria's scheme, who have
served as hirelings of the master class during the prosperous phase of
an economic system: but in the declining phase of that system, when the
diminution of income curtails the amount available for these secondary
recipients of income, they turn against the primary recipients, their
employers, make common cause with the subject class, and give the
death-blow to the old order.
This may possibly have been true of the fall of the slave economy, and
it may possibly have been true of the fall of the medieval economy; but
we do not think it is true that a revolution of the non-proprietary
classes under capitalism is "foredoomed to failure" unless these
classes secure the support of the unproductive labourers. Their support
for a genuinely proletarian revolution can hardly be expected, on
Loria's own theory. The intellectuals who aided in the overthrow of the
slave economy, and the intellectuals who helped to subvert the feudal
order and to promote the bourgeois and industrial revolution, did so,
says Loria, in order to maintain their position as "recipients of
income," to maintain their position as members of a privileged class.
What have such as they to gain from a proletarian revolution, which will
abolish class, will put an end to exploitation, will do away for ever
with the private appropriation of income and surplus value?
We need only turn our eyes eastward to see how such "intellectuals" will
hail the revolution of the propertiless. Despite the onslaughts of the
capitalist powers, the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic has
lived long enough to show the sort of help socialists may expect from
the Kerenskys. Men of this calibre, "people whose interests lie in the
opposite direction," even if they "are carried away by the new ideas and
enter the lists for the new order of things" (Boudin, The Theoretical
System of Karl Marx, 1918), are aghast when the real revolution comes,
and endeavour to lay the red spectre they have helped to conjure up.
In truth, a revolution foredoomed to failure would be that of
proletarians who should depend in large measure upon the support of
disgruntled intellectuals. A serf's life was on the average better than
that of a chattel slave; a wage labourer's life is on the average better
than was that of slave or serf. But neither the replacement of slavery
by feudalism, nor the replacement of feudalism by capitalism, secured
the emancipation of labour in any adequate sense of that term. All that
a proletarian revolution carried through with the help of middle-class
intellectuals is likely to bring about is some form of Fabian
collectivism or state capitalism—in a word, the servile state. As far
as the productive labourers are concerned the revolution would be a
sham. The form of the state might be revolutionised, but the
authoritative state would endure, and production would be effected, not
by the free, but by the coercive association of labour.
What Loria has failed to recognise is that the conditions of the problem
are now radically changed. As he says, in the old revolutions the rebels
were divided and disorganised, were not sure of themselves, and were
uncertain of the ends they would attain. As far as the workers were
concerned, revolt only was possible, not revolution. It is otherwise
to-day; and still more will it be otherwise the day after to-morrow.
Thanks to the new forms of organisation now being worked out: thanks to
industrial unionism and the growth of the workers committees and shop
stewards movements; and thanks above all to independent working class
education, which is forging the new weapons and simultaneously teaching
the workers how to use them, which is fashioning the limbs of the
co-operative commonwealth within the womb of the capitalist
order—thanks to all these things, the workers of the day after
to-morrow need not put their trust in the frail reed of the support of
intellectuals. Once more we raise the Marxist slogan and cry: "The
emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves."
And if we modify another Marxist watchword, quoted on p. 154
below, that force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a
new one, it is only to say that, while we do not repudiate force (which
the skilled accoucheur ever has in reserve), new times bring new
methods. The self-educated workers of the future may have no occasion to
use force, and certainly need not await the aid of Loria's unproductive
labourers. For the day draws nigh, and on that day the workers will
achieve their own salvation. They will achieve the salvation of all the
workers, and indeed of all the world of man; but it will not be all the
workers that will actively participate. No more will be possible than
that there should be a considerable minority of educated workers. A
minority they must inevitably remain until after the social revolution;
but a little leaven can leaven a large lump. The midwife of revolution
is not force but—independent working class education.
In a word, the "dynamogenic function" of which Loria speaks (infra pp. 159 and 160),
attaches not to poverty but to slavery. The poor
have seldom failed to realise their poverty, and poverty when extreme
has at times led to revolt; but it is the new realisation of the
slavery of wagedom that is organising the workers for the social
revolution. By means of Marxist education "the proletarian is breaking
his chains and entering upon an era of conscious and glorious freedom."
Do we seem to imply that there is no place in our movement for
middle-class intellectuals? Such is not our meaning. They have played in
the past a rôle of supreme importance, and may still have a notable part
to play in the future. But the intellectuals for whom there is a place
are not the kind of intellectuals described in Loria's theory of
revolution, and the rôle of the intellectual is no longer the one which
he assigns. It is not those intellectuals who are dissatisfied with
their reallotment of income, not those who are discontented with their
ration of loaves and fishes, not those who sigh for the vanishing cakes
and ale, who will help the coming of the definitive social revolution.
Rarely indeed, too, is the function of the socialist intellectual the
function of leadership. To an increasing extent, under the new
conditions, he tends to be no more than the fifth wheel of the
revolutionary coach.
The right sort of intellectual had a function in the past; it was to
help the workers to overcome their division and disorganisation, to help
them to be sure of themselves, to help them to clear views of the ends
they must attain. That work is afoot. The ferment has been created:
created by such men as Marx, whose abilities would have secured him
ease, comfort, wealth, had he made his peace with bourgeoisdom, but who
was a revolutionist by deliberate choice; by such men as Engels, a
well-to-do manufacturer; by such men as Loria himself, a university
professor; by such men as the American, Scott Nearing, who recently
forfeited his academic position because he would not keep the class
struggle out of his lectures on economics. Can it be said that men like
Herzen, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, have been, or that men like Trotzky and
Lenin are, the disgruntled intellectuals of Loria's theory of
revolution? Quite apart from leadership under such peculiar conditions
as obtain in Russia, there is work for socialist intellectuals, the
work of promoting independent working-class education, the work of
assisting in the spread of the ferment generated by the writings of
earlier revolutionary thinkers.
Our conviction that we ourselves, declassed bourgeois, have a modest
function, that though not part of the team, not even spokes of a fifth
wheel, we may at least help to complete the outfit as little dogs under
the waggon, is witnessed by our translation of Achille Loria's monograph
on Karl Marx.
Eden and Cedar Paul.
London,
The Centenary of Karl Marx.
KARL MARX
KARL MARX
