The Stupidity of Karl Marx By Henry Strickland Constable 1896
STUPIDITY OF RADICALISM ABOUT MUSCLE LABOUR
SOCIALIST—RADICALISM is founded on Karl Marx’s astonishing fallacy, that all profits should go to manual labourers, inasmuch as all production comes from muscular labour. But this is true only among the lowest savages, who have not brains sufficient even to invent a spade. The wealth and the great things that are done in the world do not come from muscular labour, but from brains to invent, economy to save, prudence to keep what is saved, foresight to see beyond the present moment, patient thought to make complicated and elaborate plans, will to carry out the plans, ambition to become rich, and steady perseverance, self-control, and self-denial enough to sacrifice the present to the future. We may say, perhaps with an approximation to truth, that forty-five per cent of what is produced in the world is produced by exceptional brain power and inventive and organizing genius; forty-five per cent by moral qualities, such as ambition, self-control, and will-force; and ten per cent by muscular labour. Arkwright’s inventive genius, combined with his ambition, will—force, and foresight, produces, perhaps, ninety per cent of the manufactured cotton goods produced in the world. Indeed, mere muscle by itself would not produce any. Patagonians are stated to have much muscle for savages, and a country that will grow cotton; but they produce no cotton goods, and probably never will. Then, can a more stupid statement possibly be made than that of Karl Marx, that all production comes from muscular force?
Saying that all great creations, like cathedrals, palaces, or railroads, are creations of manual or muscle labour, is just what children would say who can see the outside of things with the eyes, but nothing deeper. It is like a man who, seeing a rock from a mountain crush a house to powder, thinks it a wonderful exemplification of force, quite unconscious that it is absolutely nothing as a force compared with the quiet, almost imperceptible, forces of the sun’s warmth and action unceasingly working and bringing out all the glorious life and beauty in the world. A stupid man, like the Radicals I am speaking of, sees a navvy hurl a spadeful of earth that he knows he himself could hardly lift, and concludes, in the emptiness of his head, that this is the force that makes the railway. The real force is the quiet, molecular working that goes on in the brains of men of enterprise, energy, genius, ambition, foresight, self-control, invention, and organizing faculty. Herbert Spencer says that spiritual and intellectual, as well as physical, phenomena might, if men had knowledge to do it, be stated in terms of force somewhat in this way: If Shakespeare’s brain did fifty horse-power of work in composing the soliloquy of Hamlet, Goethe did twenty-two horse-power of work in composing Mignon’s song in “Wilhelm Meister.” Whatever truth there may be in this, it is manifest that men cannot measure and weigh these forces. Still, we know that some ninety per cent or more of the forces that built York Minster were spiritual forces—that is, intellect-force plus moral-force, plus religious-force.
Capital, says the Socialist, is that which muscular labour produces; but there is no capital till the gains are saved, and this requires brain-power, moral and intellectual—that is, brain-force to make, and brain-force to keep when made. “It is more difficult,” said a wise man, “to keep what is acquired than to acquire it"—meaning that it requires qualities such as self-control, of which the mass of mankind have but very little; so, “when they get on horseback, they ride to the devil.” “Greater virtues,” says Rochefoucauld, “are needed to bear good fortune than bad.”
The fact is, great self~control, great intelligence, great energy, great ambition, great foresight, and great enterprise (this rare combination of faculties) form a gigantic force, which does all the great things that are done in the world. Muscle by itself can do hardly anything. It cannot even create a spade—that first step in civilization and in equality—still less a plough, which may be called the second step. And yet muscle is, of course, wanted. In fact, all classes are necessary. It is like the organs of the body; take away any one of them, and the organism dies.
The shallowness of Radicalism is unfathomable. Wealth is unceasingly breeding wealth. Destroy the wealth, and this reproduction ceases. Radicalism seems to look on the riches of a country as a certain fixed sum in the hands of a few people, and that, if these riches were taken from them and divided among the masses, the millennium would commence, and happiness be universal. Of course, the real effect would be to bring about among the poor universal indigence, famine, and misery unspeakable, inasmuch as the breeding of wealth, that ought to be unceasing, would come to an end. As I have said, the working classes get, directly or indirectly, every penny of the incomes of the rich, which incomes are renewed and increased year by year by means of the brains, energy, and self-control of the owners of the capital. Turn over the riches to the poor, and all would be lost, inasmuch as the poor (exceptions apart) are poor because they are hereditarily, from the times of savagery, deficient in the qualities necessary for making, keeping, renewing, and increasing wealth; though they may have other virtues, such as generous and affectionate instincts, to any amount. Everything in the world depends upon character—on mental, and still more on moral, qualities.
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