by Louis O. Kelso
(click on title above to view full paper | 172kb
PDF file - requires Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view and print.)
England of the mid-nineteenth century, in the throes of the Industrial
Revolution, was not a pleasant place to work. Anyone who entertains
the contrary idea need merely consult the writings of the economists
of that period, or its historians, or even its novelists, such as Dickens.
It was against a background of the disintegration of the agricultural
economy of England, and the human chaos incident to the industrialization
of production that Karl Marx set himself the task of improving the
lot of the factory worker.
Beginning slowly during the first seventy-five years of the eighteenth
century and reaching a crescendo during the last quarter of that century
and the first half of the nineteenth century, incalculable changes
took place in the lives of laboring people. The transformation was
initiated first by the intensification of the division of labor and
later by the crowding of workers into hand or hand-and-machine factories.
This phase was, in factory after factory, followed by the mechanization
of progressively more of the manual tasks, shifting to animal power,
then water power and wind power, and then to steam for basic motive
power.
The resulting disorganization in the lives of the people affected
was stupendous and frightful. Only the few who were quick to adapt
themselves to the era of the machine were able to avoid the destruction — frequently
successive destructions — of their means of livelihood through
the radical changes resulting from rapid technical obsolescence of
the methods of production. The impact of these swift transformations
was more than could be safely digested and absorbed by the farm populations
which began to turn to the industrial cities for their means of living.
The division and subdivision of tasks once calling for the most highly
developed skills until the tasks could be performed in many instances
by women and children provided the opportunity, and the indigence entailed
in the shifting from an agricultural life to dependence upon the fluctuating
employment in factories provided the inducement: thousands of parents
exploited their children by forcing them into the factories. Wives
neglected their families to become factory employees. The full
fury of competition between man and machine, between merchants, between
manufacturers, and between nations was unleashed among people who had
not the faintest idea of its implications. Methods by which producers
could become reasonably informed about markets were wholly lacking.
Laws against adulteration of products had not yet been enacted. Industrial
safety codes and means of compensating the dependents of injured workmen
were unknown. The sanitary conditions of factories in general were
incredibly bad. An employer who worked the men, women, and children
in his factories only twelve hours a day was something of a public-spirited
paternalist. Foreign trade brought the local supplier into competition
with foreign producers he had never seen or heard of.
Newly born industrial enterprises and the people whose fortunes were
tied to them, learned the nature of industrial production primarily
by successive bitter experience. Businesses ran through constantly
recurring cycles of expansion, boom, over-production, liquidation,
and depression. Superimposed upon this disorganizing parade of booms
and slumps were the disrupting effects of primitive money and credit
systems providing mediums of exchange containing built-in erratic gyrations
of their own. The money system of Great Britain, like that of other
countries experiencing the Industrial Revolution, suffered not merely
from irresponsible banking, inadequate knowledge, poorly designed regulatory
laws, and rampant exploitations of the opportunities for financial
fraud, but also from the results of heavy importations of gold and
silver — the monetary metals — from the New World.
Without analyzing here the causes, we need merely note that the problems
of the workers fell upon deaf political ears in Britain and elsewhere
as the Industrial Revolution progressed, until their agonized suffering
reached the notoriety of an insuppressible public scandal. Even then,
the factory owners, who could point proudly to the fact that for the
first time in history, per capita increase in the output of
goods and services was beginning to race ahead, had no basis in experience
for knowing whether they could at once be humane in their labor relations
and still maintain their positions in the unprecedented hurly burly
of the competition.
Marx’s Work . . . The Cause of Injustice
Against this background, in which the mere outlines of industrial
production under free enterprise were vaguely taking shape, Marx set
himself the task of finding the cause of economic injustice. His masterpiece, Capital,
draws and documents the picture of the Industrial Revolution from the
standpoint of the industrial worker. He was the one primarily responsible
for having attached the name “capitalism” to the therefore
unclassified economic system of Great Britain. Marx’s source
materials, in addition to his own indefatigable personal studies of
factory life, were the reports of the Royal Commissioners on the Employment
of Children and Young Persons in Trades and Manufacturers, the Reports
of the Inspectors of Factories (who were appointed under the Factories
Regulation Acts of 1859), the Reports from the Poor Law Inspectors
on the Wages of Agricultural Labourers, the Reports of the Select Committee
(of the House of Commons) on the Adulteration of Food, and other official
documents, as well as the writings of the economists of his day.
Because of the dire suffering of the industrial workers, Marx, who
knew the facts and knew how to describe them, made a powerful emotional
case for economic reforms to improve the lot of the worker. Since the
actual operation of the system, which he called “capitalistic,” was
as enormously beneficial to the segment — less than 10 percent — of
the population who owned the factories as it was destructively detrimental
to most of the 90 percent who worked in them, Marx could have led a
revolt against the established order by pointing to this disparity
alone. But he did not choose to do so. He made the most painstaking
and ponderous effort to seek out the cause of the injustice.
At length, Marx rendered his verdict. The malefactor, the cause of
all this limitless human misery, was the capitalist. His crime, felonious
by all canons of human decency and fairness, was the unrecompensed
piracy from the defenseless industrial workers of most of the wealth
which they alone created. No plunder in history, said Marx,
could compare with the enormity of the offense of the capitalist who,
without working himself, appropriated the products of the worker, leaving
the worker with only the minimum amount paid as “slave-wages” to
keep him alive and to enable him to produce.
Marx and Capitalism . . . They Almost Meet in the Dark
The root of all of the evil Marx surveyed was, he concluded, the private
ownership of the means of production. The emotional case which he built
in favor of a revolution to improve the position of the industrial
worker was mountainous. The method of carrying out the revolution,
he advocated, was for the workers to seize the government by force
and then to use the state to expropriate the ownership of capital.
Unfortunately, the moral truth of the massive case which Marx marshaled
for improvement of the lot of the industrial worker was dwarfed by
the magnitude of his error in assigning as the cause of the maldistribution
of wealth, the private ownership of capital.
In the course of his investigation, Marx actually saw, but was prevented
by this error from comprehending, the underlying principles of capitalism.
Since there can be no doubt about Marx’s honest effort and fierce
desire to find the key to a workable industrial economy, we are justified
in venturing the speculation that had Marx understood the implications
of the principles of capitalistic distribution which presented themselves
to him as “appearances” only, he might have become
a revolutionary capitalist instead of a revolutionary socialist.
Karl Marx, as he reflected upon the causes of economic injustice in
the first century of capitalism, came to a conclusion as momentous
as it was mistaken. The world was to suffer as much from the critical
error of the decision as it had suffered to provoke Marx to make it.
Had he not been blinded by a borrowed myth, Marx might well have proclaimed “People
of the world, unite! Extend the benefits of capitalism to all mankind.” Instead,
he exhorted the workers of the world to unite and “throw off
the chains” of capitalism.
Had Marx chosen the capitalistic alternative rather than the socialistic
one, the world would be a vastly different place in which to live today.
Without the false and seductive promises of socialism, Russia, the
nation built on Marxism, would be without the principal rhetorical
weapon which it uses to seduce the minds of men.
Yet it is a fact that Marx actually considered the problems which
should have led him to discover capitalism. But for three basic errors
in reasoning, Marx might have been looked upon today as the apostle
of capitalism rather than its detractor and tormentor.
Read More - Download
the full paper (172k PDF)
