Chapter 13 chapter eight

methods and means of production I If a society, a city, or a place wants to assure its residents that there will be no shortage of necessities of life (we must know that the concept of necessities of life can be expanded to include some luxuries), then, in any case, production must be What is absolutely necessary—land, machinery, factories, transport agencies, etc.—occupies.Capital in private hands should also be confiscated and returned to society as a whole. We have already said that the great evil of bourgeois society is not only that the capitalists take the greater part of the profits of all trades, so that they can eat without labor; The well-being of all people is its purpose.This is why we attack the present society.

In fact, it is absolutely impossible to carry out commercial production in accordance with the policy of serving the interests of all people.To do this would be to wish the capitalist to leave his sphere to perform duties beyond the capacity of a capitalist (that is, an individual manufacturer trying to enrich himself).The organization of capitalism (which is based on the self-interest of each entrepreneur) has already handed over to society all that it wills, and it has increased the productivity of labour.Taking advantage of the industrial revolution with the introduction of the steam engine, the rapid development of chemistry and machinery, and various other modern inventions, etc., capitalists have done their best to increase the productivity of human labor for their own benefit, and in general have achieved a lot. Big hit.But it is impossible to ask it to do anything else, such as expecting the capitalist to use the superior productivity of his labor for the benefit of society as a whole, which is tantamount to begging him for benevolence and charity. It cannot be based on charity.

The most important task of society now is to expand this enormous productive force, which is today confined to a certain industry, and to apply it to the general good.It is obvious, however, that society, in order to make use of this superior productivity of labour, for the well-being of all, must possess all the organs of production. Economists often say that a certain type of young laborers who are proficient in a particular technology can live a relatively comfortable life under the current social system.True, they often show us these few with pride.But is the privilege enjoyed by these few—the comfort—safety?Or to-morrow the privileged will be out of work through the greed, carelessness, and negligence of their employers; and the happiness enjoyed now will be the source of misery for months and years to come.Many great industries—textiles, iron, sugar, etc., not to mention other small, short-lived industries—have withered either under the influence of speculation, or as a result of natural fluctuations in business, or as a result of competition among the capitalists themselves. Or stand still; have we not seen?If the major textile and mechanical industries, etc., were to go through another panic like the one in 1886, it would needless to say that all other small industries would for a while come to a complete standstill.

And let us look at the price paid for the comparative comfort of a certain class of laborers?Unfortunately, this was really bought with the decline of agriculture and the shameless plunder of the peasants, and the misery of the people.Let's take those millions of people who have a hard life, no food, no lodging, no fixed salary, no fixed place to work, and farmers who work fourteen hours a day to make ends meet, and these few special laborers who enjoy more or less a little happiness Compare!Capital depopulates the countryside, capital plunders colonies and industrially backward countries, and capital judges that most laborers cannot receive specialized education, so that they have only ordinary knowledge even about their own occupations.

This is not merely an accident, but an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system.In order to remunerate a certain part of the laborers, farmers have to become cattle and horses that bear the burden of the present society; villages have to be deserted for the sake of cities; cheap goods, so that the manufactures of great industry can reach purchasers who have little means of income.In order to sell coarse and coarse garments to laborers with little wages, the tailor is compelled to settle for wages which are not enough to feed him.Because under the capitalist system, workers in two or three special industries can enjoy a limited and happy life, those backward Eastern countries are often plundered and squeezed by Western Europe.

The evil of the present system is therefore not the fact that the "surplus value" of production goes to the capitalists, as Lord Baldus1 and Marx said, which simply narrows the concept of socialism and the general conception of the capitalist system. ; "surplus-value" itself is the effect of a deeper cause.The real evil is not so much the fact that the common people do not consume the surplus, but rather the fact that it makes possible the existence of surplus value; To take a small part of the produce of their labor, and especially a small part of the goods which their labor can produce.This evil will not be abolished so long as the machinery of production remains in the hands of a few, as long as people are obliged to pay heavy taxes to the proprietors for the right to use machinery for the cultivation of the land, as long as the land When the proprietors of machinery and machinery are at liberty to produce at will those articles (which are not necessarily useful articles) which will bring them the greatest profit, only a few are temporarily assured of their well-being; Purchased by the poor.It is not enough, in fact, to distribute the profits of trade evenly among a few particular laborers, while on the one hand many others are robbed.It is a matter of producing, with the least human effort possible, the greatest possible quantity of what is necessary for the well-being of all.

① Karl Rodbertus (1805-1875), a German economist. - translator This generalized end can never be the end of the individual capitalist; therefore the whole society, which takes this conception of production as its ideal, is compelled to confiscate everything that would increase well-being.Society should own land, factories, mines, transport institutions, etc., and should also study the proper methods and means of production, and the question of what kind of production can promote the well-being of the whole. II How many hours should a man labor in a day to produce nutritious food for his family, a comfortable place to live, necessary clothes, etc.?This is a question often discussed by socialists, and they probably all come to the following conclusion: If all human beings were to work, then only four or five hours of work a day would suffice.Franklin at the end of the eighteenth century fixed this labor time at five hours; and though the desire for comfort increased, so did the productivity, and at a still greater rate.

①B． Franklin (1706-1790), American statesman, one of the founders of American independence. - translator In agriculture more, we can see that the soil can contribute to its cultivation if it is cultivated according to sound scientific methods, and instead of scattering seeds at will, as is now the case in fields which are cultivated in a crude way. There must be many products for us.The fields in the western United States, some thirty miles square, are still barren compared with the manures of civilized countries, yielding only ten or even fifteen bushels to the acre; It is said that compared with the fields in Europe and the eastern United States, it is half less. ②And relying on the power of machinery, two people can cultivate four acres of land in a day, and a hundred people can produce food for a year for the ten thousand people sitting in their homes in a year.

① This is the situation in the past few decades. - translator ②This is also the situation in the past, the same below. - translator Therefore, in such a state, a man can get more than enough bread for the whole year by working thirty hours (five hours a day, six half-days in total); It can feed a family of five. If we practice intensive farming, a man can obtain the bread, meat, vegetables, and luxuries of fruit for his whole family in less than sixty half-days' work.This can be proved by the results obtained today. Let us examine the cost of building laborers' dwellings in today's metropolises, and we can believe that a laborer's hut (plain price 250 pounds) would cost only 1,400 pounds in a British metropolis. 1,800 or even 1,800 days of work (assuming five hours of work per day) is enough.This kind of house can last for at least fifty years; a man can obtain a well-furnished, hygienic, and extremely comfortable dwelling for his family by working part-time for twenty-eight or even thirty-six days a year.But if such a house is rented from the landlord, the laborer has to work full-time for seventy-five or even one hundred days a year to pay the rent.

This calculation expresses the highest value of a house in England at present, and we must note that this is the calculation obtained in the defective organization of the present society, and will of course be much cheaper in the good society of the future.Housing for workers in the workers' quarters of Belgium is much cheaper to build.We may therefore conclude, if we think carefully, that in a good society thirty or even forty days of half-day labor in a year will suffice for a man to obtain a very comfortable home. Now when it comes to clothes, the real value of clothes is difficult to determine, because the benefits of brokers (middlemen) and others cannot be calculated.For example, the levy is levied on every yard of cloth from the landlord, the sheep breeder, the wool merchant, and all other intermediaries to the railway company, the mill owner, the weaver, the merchant of ready-made clothes, the dealer in the clothes, etc. Taxes, calculated together, we can imagine how much we paid to that group of capitalists for each piece of clothing.It is absolutely impossible, therefore, to say that those coats which cost three or four pounds in the great London shops were worth many days' labour.

All we can affirm at present is that, by the power of present machinery, we can manufacture an almost unbelievable number of objects, cheaply and quickly. Just two or three examples will suffice.Thus in the 751 cotton mills (spinning and weaving) in the United States, 175,000 men and women workmen, besides producing vast quantities of thread, also produce 203,300,000 yards of cotton cloth.On average, nine and a half hours of work per day, a total of 300 days of work, can produce more than 12,000 yards of cotton cloth, that is, 40 yards every ten hours.Let us say that a family requires no more than two hundred yards a year, which amounts to fifty hours of labour, or five hours a day for ten days' work.Besides we have thread; that is to say thread for sewing and silk for making wool-cotton mixtures. As for the achievements of weaving alone, according to the statistics of the U.S. government, in 1870, laborers worked 13 to 14 hours a day, and produced 10,000 yards of white cloth in a year; after 16 years ( 1886) could weave 30,000 yards with only fifty-five hours of work per week.Now, productivity has increased even more rapidly. As far as flowered cloth is concerned (weaving and printing time included), 2,670 hours of labor a year--twelve yards inside and outside an hour--would produce 32,000 yards.Seventeen hours' labor a year would suffice, then, to obtain two hundred yards of calico.What we must pay attention to is that the time it takes for the raw material to be sent from the farming place to the factory, and gradually deformed until it is made into cotton cloth is within these seventeen hours.But if he were to buy the two hundred yards of cotton cloth from a merchant, a laborer with a higher income would have to pay at least ten or fifteen days (ten hours a day) of labor, that is to say, a hundred hours of labor. Or the price of one hundred and fifty hours of labor.If an English farmer desires this luxury, he will have to work a month or more to pay for it. From this example, we can see that under a good social organization, as long as we work half-days for fifty days a year, we can obtain more beautiful clothes than those worn by the petty bourgeoisie today. As mentioned above, in order to obtain the produce of the land, we only need to work five hours a day for a total of sixty days; in order to obtain a house to live in, we only need to work forty days; for Fifty days' work is enough to get clothes and hats; and if we calculate the annual working days as three hundred days, excluding the days of rest, it is only half a year's work. One hundred and fifty days of labor remain, therefore, which may be employed in the manufacture of other necessaries of life—wine, sugar, coffee, furniture, transport, etc. Of course, these calculations are only approximate and not absolutely correct, but they can also be proved by other methods.Let us see: in the so-called civilized countries of today, there are many people who wander around with their hands and do nothing; there are many people who are engaged in harmful occupations that should be eliminated; , the actual producers are only half of its nationals, and if the work done by ten people is now done by twenty people to produce useful goods, and if society strives to save human energy, then these twenty people only need to do it for five hours a day The labor is enough, and the production will not be reduced.At present, there are many useless slaves in every rich man's house; and in the administration, there is almost one official for every ten inhabitants, or even six inhabitants, which is useless and wasteful; This waste of human energies, and the use of such forces to increase the productive forces of the nation, is enough.We can, in fact, reduce the time of work to four or three hours a day, while at the same time producing no less quantity of goods than is at present produced. Let us consider these facts in their entirety.We can then draw the following conclusion: Suppose there is now a society of not more than a few million inhabitants engaged in agriculture and various industries—for example, Paris and the Seine-et-Oise.Suppose all children in this society learn to work with their brains and hands.Excepting women who educate children, every man of age, from twenty or twenty-two to forty-five or fifty, should work five hours a day and be engaged in a Occupations deemed necessary in the city, but free to choose any sector.Only such a society can guarantee the well-being of everyone in it.It is more real than the comfort enjoyed by the middle class today.And every worker in this society has at least five hours a day to spend on science, art, and personal desires that are not conveniently classified under the necessities (when human productivity increases, these things also become necessities and are no longer luxury. Rare stuff) above.