MORTIMER J. ADLER ON COMMUNISM

I then asked the group the $64 question. During the week I which Smith did not labor at all, and all the work productive of wealth was done by Brown, did Smith rightfully earn-without laboring-the wealth Z that was left to him after he paid Brown Y out of the total wealth X produced that week? If the answer to that question is affirmative, I said to the group, then a number of things follow that we ought to acknowledge and agree upon.

First, one’s own labor power of hand and mind is the only private property that is not acquired. It is each individual’s birthright of natural property. This fact makes unjust the ownership and use of human beings as chattel slaves. Only consumable goods and capital instruments can be rightfully owned as private property.

Second, if an individual puts into productive operation the capital he owns, then, even if he does not work himself, that contribution to the production of wealth rightfully earns for him whatever share of the total wealth produced that is not paid to the laborers involved for the work they do. The nonworking capitalist is not unproductive. In other words, wealth can be acquired either (a) by working to produce it or (b) by putting the capital one owns into production or (c) by the combination of both factors. Smith could have labored himself, along with Brown, instead of reading, and then more wealth than X would have been produced, and Smith’s share of the total would have been larger than Z.

Third, labor and capital are distinct factors in the production of wealth, and each deserves, by right, that portion of the wealth produced to which each contributes. Labor is the independent and capital the dependent factor does not blur the distinct contributions that each makes to the production of wealth.

Finally, the wealth that is rightly earned by the productive use of the capitol one owns refutes the view that what an individual receives from the productive use of capital is “unearned income.” The profits or dividends of capital are earned income in exactly the same sense that the wages or salaries paid to labor are earned income.

These insights, I pointed out, challenge the correctness of all the basic propositions in Marx’s labor theory of value. If these insights are sound, then it cannot be correct to declare, as Marx does, (a) that all wealth is produced by labor and labor alone, either by living labor or by the labor congealed in machines, and other capitol instruments; (b) that the portion of the wealth produced taken by the owners of capital is “surplus value”- an “unearned increment” that capitalists steal their “exploitation of labor”; and (c) that capital, certainly the modern form of capital-the machines used in factories after the Industrial Revolution, not the simple hand tools used by laborers before it-cannot be rightfully acquired as private property.

The correct principles are: (a) No one should have more liberty than justice allows, which is to say, no more than individuals can use, without injuring anyone else or the general welfare of society; and (b) No society should establish more equality than justice requires, combining that with as much inequality as justice requires.

Postponing for a moment the consideration of the various means by which this right can be secured, the clearest way of stating the parallelism and correlation of democracy and socialism is to say that a society is socialistic to the extent that it achieves in the economic order the same kind of equality that justice requires in the political order and which democracy achieves; all haves (that is, no have-nots, no persons deprived of a decent livelihood), but among the haves, come having more and some having less according to the degree to which they contribute to the economic welfare of society as a whole.

What is the mistake that lies at the root of this radical transference of the ownership of capital to the state? It is the error that we discovered when we read and discussed Locke in our first session. It is the labor theory of value, the theory (1) that all wealth is produced by labor, living or congealed labor; (2) that the owners of capital are totally unproductive; and (3) that they exploit labor by taking from it an “unearned increment” or the “surplus value” that labor produces. The profits of the capitalists come from thus exploiting labor; therefore, profit is theft. The following text from the Manifesto says all this, though as we saw, it says it not too clearly.

To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members-nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society-can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

Let us now take wage labor.

The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life and that leaves n surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of the appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only insofar as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society accumulated labor is but a means to wide, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

What is meant here by “accumulated labor”? It is the machinery produced by labor that Marx in other places called “congealed labor.” Only by thus calling machinery itself a form of labor can any sense be made of the statement that all wealth is produced by labor and also the statement that the capitalists are unproductive even when they put their capital to work productively.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property is already done away with for nine-tenth of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

The importance of this text, I pointed out to the participants, is that it implies a third remedy, not found in the Manifesto, but consistent with its stated object of alleviating or curing the misery of the working class.

The first of the remedies actually proposed by Marx we discussed in the previous session-inroads on the rights of capital, or the erosion of private property rights by the ten measures that the Manifesto enumerates in its closing pages.

Marx’s second remedy is more drastic. It is the one that we considered earlier in this session- the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production, not just the erosion of the rights of the owners. While the first remedy may only alleviate the misery of the working class, the second, in Marx’s judgment, goes much further. It eliminates it, by eliminating the capitalist’s exploitation of labor. That is why Marx chose it as the radical remedy for the misery of the working class.

Now here, in the text just quoted, we can see the opportunity for a third and quite distinct remedies, not recognized by Marx, but equally appropriate to his purpose-that is neither the erosion of private property rights, not the abolition of private property itself but the extension of the ownership of capital from the few to the many.

But if the cause of the misery of the working class is the private ownership of capital instruments, then the abolition of private ownership is obviously the cure.

And if the cause of the misery of the working class is the uneroded property rights of the capitalist who, under completely laissez-faire conditions, pays the labor employed a bare subsistence wage, then just as obviously the remedy is to erode those rights, not abolish them.

But if the cause of the misery of the working class is that all or most of the capital available to a society is privately owned by less than one-tenth of the population, then the remedy which fits that cause is promoting the ownership of capital by a much larger proportion of the population.

I added at once that Marx and Lenin must have had some very special and mistaken view of the nature of the state and of its origin, because though class antagonisms may be involved in all or most historic states, the state as such-the political community or civil society-is not itself the product of class conflict. Since most of the participants had been at an earlier time in one of my Executive Seminars in which we read Aristotle’s Politics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and Locke’s Second Treatise Concerning Civil Government, they knew that the origin of the state lay in the political nature of man and the human need for political life and liberty, and that it served the purpose of securing these goods as indispensable to the pursuit of happiness or a good human life as a whole.

Though they both acknowledge the individual inequalities that exist in any human population, inequalities in endowment and in performance, they do not acknowledge that in a classless society, in which all are haves and there are no have-nots, there will still be a justifiable distinction between those who deserve to have more and those who deserve to have less. They did not anticipate Nikita Khrushchev’s amendment of the maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” by adding the principle of distributive justice that is expressed in the maxim “to each according to his contribution.”

What should replace the despotic rule of the Communist party? Certainly not a government that eschews the use of coercive force to enforce it laws. Even a classless society, there will always remain a criminal element against whom the government must exercise coercive force. The notion that in a classless society the criminal element in the population will disappear is contrary to all recorded facts. In the Western societies that have approached, but not yet fully realized, classlessness, a criminal class still remains.

1. Marx’s labor theory of value, the theory that labor, living labor or the labor congealed in machinery, produces al the wealth a society consumes and uses; and that the private owners of capital who drive income without working for it are totally unproductive.

2. Marx’s assertion that capital instruments cannot rightfully be owned and operated by private individuals or corporations and, therefore, that capital must be owned and operated by the state.

3. As an inexorable consequence of the state capitalism that Marx advocated, the establishment of a totalitarian state, in which all political and economic power is concentrated in the central government, called by Marx “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” as carried on by the despotic regime of the Communist party.

4. The Leninist doctrine of the withering away of the state (either the bourgeois oligarchy in the West or the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union) on the march to the establishment of a classless society. This has not yet occurred in Russia and is not likely to occur there or elsewhere except by steps in the direction of political and economic deprivation and that institute pluralistic societies that are both democratic and socialistic.

5. The utopian fantasy of a society existing without any government at all, one that exercises coercive force to maintain peace and harmony and to prevent and punish criminal conduct; in short, the espousel of philosophical anarchy implicit in Lenin’s doctrine of the withering away of the state.

6. Finally, the Marxist-Leninist misunderstanding of what justice requires with regard to equality and inequality, political and economic. Not only does it require that all should be haves, but it also requires that some should deservedly have more and some have less.