William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
Marx’s economic theories center about labor in the machine age. He gives this class the Roman name of proletariat. Attached to that section of the plebeians who were fertile, in distinction to the almost sterile patrician families of Rome, it was used rather as a comic term than in the new, serious use given to it by Marx. A better term, in English usage, would be the working class, in American, the workers. But the influence of French socialists, who naturally carry over Latin usage, has become traditional in Socialist thought, and so we shall term the modern industrial worker the proletariat.
Marx’s labor theories specifically concern industrial labor in the age of capitalism (that is, from 1784, if an arbitrary date must be chosen, to the present). It is of this labor he is thinking when he says that it sells its laboring power to capitalists, and that it creates all value socially by the time it devotes, as a mass, to production.
That is not to say that Marx is not vividly concerned with labor at all stages of development, including Hindu peasants and Chinese coolies. But his specific economic theory of capitalism isolates labor as producing socially and as integrated with immense machine developments. Other labor, such as that of clerks in retail stores, he assimilates to this great mass of productive labor.
The Slum Dwellers
By the end of the eighteenth century the mass of the people in England were driven off the farms by the continued enclosure movement. The independent farmer, too, was ruined. In Ireland a nation of paupers came into being as the primitive clans were driven off their lands by alien conquerors. In Scotland the heads of the clans, mere feudal repositories of the rights of their clansmen, drove off their own flesh and blood and so peopled the dreadful slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh. In France the magistracy, though not so effective, played much the same part. The people, huddled in the towns, could not be absorbed by the manufacturing system. Not until capitalism arose was this artificially created surplus population made available to industry, and the hideous proletariat of Hogarth’s cartoons regimented into orderly factory bees.
By 1800 a large section of the English people lived in towns. In every country, for the first time since classic antiquity, the towns grew far more rapidly than the surrounding countryside and, in several countries, the absolute population of the country declined. The factories developed at a pace that made every previous social change appear geological.
Ruthless Exploitation
The conditions of labor were atrocious. The working day was steadily lengthened. A machine never sleeps. The helpless population was driven to work as many hours as possible so that the investment in factories should not be wasted. Idle time was loss. The physical limits of endurance were the only factors that stopped the laborer from being exploited twenty-four hours a day. It was grudgingly acknowledged that he had to sleep.
Twelve to fourteen hours was the median. No one worked less than seventy-two hours a week, and the average was nearer eighty-four hours. In Belgium the sixteen-hour day was frequent. Since working the machines required, in most instances, little training, and certainly nothing like years of apprenticeship, women and children were sucked into their vortex. As the actual amount of physical labor in tending the looms was often not excessive, at any given time, children of four, even, were impressed. Thousands worked from dawn to sunset.
The “knocker-up” appeared at every house before the invention of the alarm clock, and the barefooted family, mother wearing petticoat and shawl, and the ragged children, all answered the factory summons. Beween the lengthening of the working day, the intensity of labor, the enslavement of the family (instead merely of the breadwinner), the vile housing, there resulted a human inferno which, even at this day, it is impossible to read of in cold blood. The stricken population had only three surceases. The first was alcohol, the second religion, the third emigration.
The Malthusian Theory
Since the towns were crowded with a population that could never find work, at the rate it increased, no matter how amazing the development of capitalism, it occurred to economists that its misery was due to the surplus of population itself. These ideas, reiterated in the eighteenth century, were summarized by T. R. Malthus in his Principles of Population (1798), together with an addition in 1803 of precepts for the poor. The burden of this celebrated theory was that the population of a country tends to increase in a geometrical ratio, that is, in the series, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc., whereas subsistence, from the land, can at best only increase arithmetically, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. Since by this reasoning it was patent that in ten generations there would be fifty men for one loaf of bread, and as things never do get this bad, Malthus developed the theory of the preventive check. War, famine, and disease checked the geometrical increase of population so as to bring it brutally into line with the limited amount of food.
Later Malthus, as befits a parson, counseled the workers to be continent. Not only were they to work fourteen hours a day for six days but they were to be denied the simplest physiological pleasures of animals. They could never escape from starvation in any event, since even were they to overturn the social order and despoil the rich, their tendency to reproduce would plunge them into a still deeper poverty. The niggardliness of nature and not the injustice of man was at the heart of their woes.
It is easy to see that dread of the French Revolution, plus the simply terrifying increase of the proletariat, conspired to make this the accepted theory of the early factory system.
The Wages Fund Theory
With it was joined the theory that the capitalists advance a wages fund. This fund is limited in amount. Since the wages fund is fixed, or nearly fixed, the laborer can improve his lot only if he has fewer children. There will then be fewer to divide the wages fund. This theory too found wide acceptance, and by the time of John Stuart Mill (1847) was almost undisputed.
Increase of Population
Despite these limitation theories, the capitalist system did not have a fixed limit of population, held by preventive or prudential checks, nor a fixed wages fund, but showed rather the most explosive powers of expansion yet recorded. In 1780 the population of Europe and of colonies peopled by European stock was not over 130 million. By 1910 the European stock had increased to 600 millions. Malthus’s checks had kept it at no more than 130 millions for countless millenniums (the Roman Empire was nearly as peopled as that), but capitalism increased it nearly five times as much in four generations as in all the previous annals of mankind.
The colonial and emigration stock alone was over 150 millions. Beside this, Europe controlled directly 800 million people of a lower technological culture, such as Hindus, Negroes, American Indians, Malays.
Three-fourths of the human race were direct subjects of capitalist states, and one single native population only, the Japanese, escaped subjugation by mimicking the arts of industrial society. Its feudal culture was harnessed quickly to an alien technique. The more insolent Chinese civilization despised the West and suffered greatly for its literary, esthetic, and philosophical aloofness. By 1910, the world was parceled between the capitalist powers and the native races were being brought into the factory system, much to the despair of European labor.
Urban Society Monopolizes Culture
The face of the earth was transformed. Pastoral and rural society, hitherto the interest of mankind, no longer set its tone. Even music and poetry, in both of which the shepherd’s reed echoed longest, came to bear the impress of mechanical noises and clipped, direct speech. The arts, once exclusive properties of a privileged, feudal caste, became popular. The newspaper made reading cheap. The arts of diffusion-printing, the phonograph, radio, moving pictures-laid emphasis on consumption. These secondary products of capitalism became themselves giant industries, opening up large avenues of investment and employment. Above all, the culture of the cities, crowded with proletarians, became universal. The country retreated to mockery; the slower tempo of its production was thought to be mirrored in its mind. The speed of the factory chain became the model of intelligence. It shaped man in its image.
Immense Increases in Cities
In 1800 the city population of Europeans was under 10 millions. The largest agglomeration was the mercantile and banking town of London. It had a million inhabitants. Its size and complexity frightened thinkers. “A man tired of London is tired of life,” spoke the sententious Dr. Johnson. “And all that mighty heart is lying still,” wrote the awed Wordsworth at night on Westminster Bridge. By 1910 the urban population exceeded 225 millions in lands of the European race.
The invention of the cheap automobile had rendered the countryside, too, less rural. For this reason Marxians hold that a state of society with 225 millions in cities is not to be compared fruitfully with an economy like that of, say, 1780 with an urban 10 millions. It must call for a wholly different economic treatment.
Class Changes
This changed physical environment brought about enormous changes in social classes. In 1780 the industrial proletariat, that is, persons working in large workshops or factories, could not have numbered more than 3 million, including miners. By 1910, the industrial proletariat, persons gainfully employed in the service of others and in other than petty establishments, must have numbered about 8o millions, perhaps over 100 millions. Alongside them grew up about 20 million professional men and skilled technicians, civil servants, etc., all either salaried or dependent on workingmen, basically, for a living.
The peasantry advanced also but in a different ratio. Whereas in 1780, the farming population numbered about 92 per cent of European peoples, by 1910 they numbered barely 50 per cent. If Russia is left out of account, in what is now the capitalist world they numbered less than 40 per cent. They increased from 120 million to 300 million, but mainly because of Russia and the United States.
The industrial population had risen from 10 million to about 300 millions (225 millions in towns and cities, 75 million in industrial employments in mines and smaller setdements). But the rural population, despite the unlimited promise of the Mississippi valley, the Argentine, Australia, and the Volga basin, increased but 2½ times, the industrial, 30 times.
In Western Europe, the story is far different. Here the urban population (and industrial) rose from 9 millions to over 160 millions, the rural from 90 to somewhat less than 140 millions. The proportion of classes has wholly altered. Also, in 1780 the mass of Prussian, Polish, Russian, and Balkan peasants were serfs and largely outside the mercantile economy. Now they were included in the world market for cheap goods.
Labor is now a commodity. The workers are as numerous as the sands of the sea; they are hired and fired in millions. Factories grow ever larger. The worshop with over 100,000 employees makes its appearance. An area of less than one square mile in New York sees 400,000 people toiling at desks, carefully making marks on papers. Man is no longer Frank or Jake, he is a “social problem.”
Mass Consumption
Working in masses, enjoying himself in masses, living socially, this new man is subject to mass production. Instead of each carriage-maker having his own style of landau and brougham, a million Chevrolets are enjoyed by a million families per annum. When Eddie Cantor puns, two hundred million ribs ache. When John Barrymore prints a kiss, sixty million girls sigh. Such a breed has few reactions in common with the serf of the 1400’s who rejoiced three times a year at a juggler’s tricks in the market place of a village. Quality of taste is not here in question: it is the class mind that has changed. The electric light has increased the day, men reduce their sleep. Sleep is “wasting time.”
The Psychology of the Proletariat
Hence there arises a class of hundreds of millions, periodically unemployed, having no real capital (some chance savings at best), unstable in location, either renters or quasi-renters of their dwellings (by time payments), living without space, and yet avid, ambitious, watching with hungry eye the thousand gratifications they cannot buy.1 Educated, since otherwise they would be inefficient as producers; civic, since the bourgeoisie conferred rights and liberties on them so as to win their alliance against the feudal enemy; living under a machine-gun fire of stimulants, light, noise, ideas, propaganda; here is man alive, the new man, the proletariat. A minimum of resources with a maximum of temptations.
This awareness, born with the genesis of the capitalist system, Marx considers as the root of class consciousness. Not that these mental properties are basic. They originate in the contradictions between labor and capital in the workshop, factory, store, office. Marx views every society as creating inevitable social by-products that heighten whatever contradictions there are at the source of production.
Class Consciousness
How did class consciousness arise?
At first in religion. Man, overworked, hungered for human association. The Established Church in England was at that period wholly at the service of squire and gentleman. The people instinctively grouped in chapels where the word of God was preached by poor men. (In Adam Bede this society is beautifully recreated.) In America, the church was the civic center, the only gathering place for the isolated farmers. Its tradition persisted in the mill towns. The communal singing of hymns and the long sermons gave the poor some dignity and heavenly, if not earthly, importance.
Their human qualities were preserved. They were never made one with the machine. The masters, on the whole, approved of their churchgoing, as it made them “steady.” In Catholic countries, workers’ associations almost immediately took the form of rebellious association, since there it was either authority or nothing. This was especially true in the country of the sharpest class conflicts, France.
Trades Unions
Although trades unions were prohibited as felonious in England, and even more brutally in France by the Chapellier law (1791), the pressure of the associated workers (especially the chapel worshippers) broke through and trades unions were legalized in 1825 in England and 1864 in France. In the United States, workingmen’s associations, especially in the Jacksonian era, compelled modification of the masters’ statutes, diminished poll taxes and property qualifications for voting, and even imposed general public education. By 1840 the rights of labor had basically been asserted and American democracy in the Northern states became more than a veneer over Hamiltonian business society.2
The Labor Struggle
Labor’s first battles were for the limitation of the labor of women and children and, above all, for the right of collective bargaining, the object of which was first of all to reduce their hours of labor. A Homeric battle raged for decades. The economists, almost to a man, predicted the end of the world if labor were employed less than twelve hours a day. At last a break in the aristocratic classes, due to the demagogy of Disraeli (1844) and the philanthropy of Shaftesbury, enabled the workers to break through and the ten-hour law was enacted. This marked the first defeat of the capitalists, the first evidence that the state was no longer their exclusive theater but an arena of conflict, even though they still held the whips and the workers were gladiators.
But the reason for the victory of British labor was not so much its own as it was due to the industrial subjugation of India. British capital rewarded its home labor with part of the newly-won rewards wrung from the natives.
Divisions within the Proletariat
The class conflict was cushioned on the backs of Indian labor. Hence there arose a comparatively privileged skilled labor-class in England that has been notably conservative in tactics and obtuse to theory, since it is a junior partner in imperialism. In the United States, too, the waves of immigrant labor, together with the opening of the West, enabled the older, skilled labor to create privileged craft unions with higher initiation fees, and to trade off benefits for selected groups without reference to labor as a whole. As the immigrant common labor was transmuted by training into skilled labor, it was admitted into the charmed circle, while the ever-gaining production took up millions of new workers from many lands. Unskilled labor came to be given to Negroes and Slavs and Italians almost exactly as the Roman Guards were recruited from Macedonia and Mauretania and Dacia. It may be more than a coincidence that the faces of American millionaires began to look exactly like those of Roman patricians.
By the eve of the Great War the urban population, and even part of the rural population, were for the most part proletarians. The farming population were no longer serfs. Capitalist farming had taken the place of feudal tenure. Production of wealth was too gigantic to bear comparison with that in any previous society. Total population and urban population were also many times that accumulated in the previous ages of mankind.
This amazing social order, the most vigorous and progressive ever known, was, however, unstable. It depended on crises to clear its difficulties. Unemployment was its primary resource. Class conflicts, consciously expressed, become normal. Social unity is wanting. There is an immense discrepancy between the technical accomplishments of the proletariat and its amusements, as compared with its insecurity and want of reserves. The system is tortured by the need for expansion and the shortage of time in which to expand. For the hundreds of millions of proletarians, Marx expounds his theories. He also hopes to gain the poorer middle class and the middle and poorer class of farmers. He has no message for the capitalist. Against him practically the whole critical economic science of his time is marshaled.
1. On relative wants, see Marx’s Wage-Labor and Capital.
2. Although the feudal system in New York was not abolished until the tent-war of the 1840’s caused it to be prohibited in the 1846 State Constitution.