Who Are the Inventors? How the Capitalists “Save”
Dear Sir,—The words “The Working Class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced,” appear monthlv in your interesting little paper THE SOCIALIST STANDARD. But are they true? Let 100 working men collect in a primaeval forest, and let it be given to them, by the previous owner ; or say, an island. What will happen? They will promptly starve though owning the land, and the forest-trees, and the coal deep down below the trees ; and so on and on ! Work? Yes, but they need tools, which must be (a) invented, as saws and drills and explosives and spades ; and (b) food to go on with, for six months, till they can build houses and sow corn, and reap it.
(a) Inventions by trained scientists are needful, and (b) saved money (saved by someone) to buy tools and food ere the corn can be ripe ; or saved food to exchange for tools ; and saved bricks, with which to build houses. Marx ignores (a) the inventors and (b) savers—called capitalists—as far as I have read his bulky volume “Das Capital.”
Yours, etc., G1LBKRT T. SADLER, M.A., LL.B.
Before going to the real problem raised by Mr. Sadler, it is worth while pointing out the weakness and inaccuracy of his illustration. Under the primitive conditions he asks us to consider, the forest would not belong to a private owner, and there would not be individuals of differentiated classes to give or to receive it. Further, it is useless to consider modern industrial workers placed in a strange and primitive environment if what wre really want to know is what happens in the quite different environment provided by up-to-date capitalism. It is true that 100 industrial workers placed in a primaeval forest would probably starve to death unless edible fruits and roots were.available, but so would a 100 Edisons, a 100 railway shareholders or 100 company promoters, and so would any collection of civilised individuals placed in such a position without tools or supplies. The presence of inventors would avail them nothing, since inventors, like other people, cannot go without food for six months.
If, instead of this, we take a reasonable illustration—that of primitive man in the environment with which he was familiar, we find that he did live without capitalists or trained scientists, and with only the most primitive tools. We know of no evidence that the earliest improvements in the methods of production were outstanding inventions by individual inventive geniuses. If they were, we would expect to see primitive races in historical times advancing rapidly through the activities of similar inventors within their own ranks. On this point, Mr. Walter Libby, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of the History of Science in the Carnegie Institute of Technology, says :—
“In fact, as we approach the consideration of prehistoric times it becomes difficult to distinguish inventions from the slow results of development—in metallurgy, tool-making, building, pottery, war-gear, weaving, cooking, the domestication of animals, the selection and cultivation of plants.” (Introduction to the History of Science. Pub. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 191S, p. 232.)
In short, the set of circumstances Mr. Sadler asks us to consider, never existed except in his imagination. So let us leave his mythical example and examine the world we live in to-day, bearing in mind that the passage he quotes from our “Declaration of Principles” does not refer to primitive man but is taken from a paragraph beginning, “That society as at present constituted, etc.” (See back page.)
In passing, we may notice that inventions in our own day are dependent on the general level of knowledge and progress, as they were in primitive times. The inventor has to be educated and must work with the material provided by the society he lives in. He must learn from others, including other inventors. The idea of an isolated invention alone revolutionising industry is quite untrue to facts. In 1857 it was stated that the spinning machinery then in use was a compound of about 800 separate inventions. (See Evolution of Modern Capitalism, by J. A. Hobson. P. 79.)
Herbert Spencer dealt with this question in his Study of Sociology. He says : —
“Even were we to grant the absurd supposition that the genesis of the great man does not depend on the antecedents furnished by the society he is born in, there would still be the quite sufficient facts that he is powerless in the absence of the material and mental accumulations which his society inherits from the past and that he is powerless in the absence of the co-existing population, character, intelligence, and social arrangements. . . . Suppose a Watt, with all his inventive power, living in a tribe ignorant of iron, or in a tribe that could get only as much iron as a fire blown by hand-bellows will smelt, or suppose him born among ourselves before lathes existed ; what chance would there have been of the steam engine? Imagine a Laplace unaided by that slowly developed system of mathematics which we trace back to its beginnings among the Egyptians ; how far would he have got with the Mécanique Céleste ?”
Mr. Sadler’s next point is that “Labour is not enough. Trained scientists are needful.” This implies that, in Mr. Sadler’s opinion, the work of trained scientists is not labour. What is it then?
When we use the term “Labour” we mean what Marx quite clearly explains in Capital :—
“I use the term labour power or capacity for labour to denote the aggregate of those bodily and mental capacities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any kind.” (Italics ours.) (Vol. I, p. 154. Allen & Unwin Edition.)
Scientific staffs and inventors employed by companies to exercise their “bodily and mental capacities,” are members of the working class like any other paid servants earning their living by selling their labour-power. The capitalist buys the use of “brains” as he buys bricks, in the market at the market price. Scientific workers are recognising this and organising in their trade unions to bargain about the price.
In many industries to-day, owing to technical conditions, invention and discovery-are no longer left to chance, as the employers find that it pays to employ trained and specialised staffs, making inventions, not for themselves, but for their employers. But it is not true that inventions come only from “trained scientists.” Still less was it true in the past.
In the early days of capitalism they came in the main from ordinary workers.
Brunel, the famous engineer, giving evidence before the House of Lords Committee in 1851, was asked whether scientific men or operatives were usually responsible for inventions, and replied : “I think the greater number of inventions have originated with practical operatives.” (Quoted in The Modern Case for Socialism, by A. W. Humphrey, 1928, p. 83.)
Mr. J. A. Hobson, in his Evolution of Modem Capitalism, points out that “nearly all the great textile inventors were practical men, most of them operatives immersed in the details of their craft. . . . Cartwright alone was a man leading a life of thought.” (P. 80.)
The Right Hon. Christopher Addison, Minister of Munitions during the War, tells how the Inventions Board selected from an enormous number of suggestions, received in 18 months, over 2,000 which were good enough to be the subject of further experiment. He says that “the experience of the Inventions Department was that, despite a good deal of rubbish, suggestions and ideas of a valuable kind . . . streamed in upon us from the humblest quarters.” (Italics ours.) (Practical Socialism, Vol. II, p. 12.)
The Railways and the Post Office are organisations which have special research staffs, but in addition they receive hundreds or thousands of suggestions from their operating staffs in the course of a year. Mr. J. P. Longmuir, of Mavor and Coulson. Ltd., Glasgow, stated recently that his firm receives 3,000 suggestions a year from its employees. (Times, April 12th, 1932.) On the other hand, Mr. C. R. F. Engelbach, of the Austin Motor Company, stated that the mass-production of motor cars “required a very trained brain before suggestions could be of any value. His firm had a trained department to do nothing but think of suggestions.”
HOW THE CAPITALIST “SAVES”
Mr. Sadler next says that “saving” is required, so that tools and food, etc., can be provided for the workers during the production process, or, as he puts it, “ere the corn be ripe.”
It is of course true that workers have to be fed and clothed while engaged in production, and that the food and clothing must come from somewhere. But it is equally true that the capitalist also has to be fed and clothed while his workers are engaged in production. Farmers do not fast and wear a loincloth while waiting for the corn to be harvested and milled and for the wool to be shorn and woven. The food and clothing both for employers and workers comes from the labours of workers in the food and clothing trades. The talk of tht capitalist “saving” these things up and “providing” them is only true in the purely legal sense that the capitalists own the products of the labour of all workers and can legally withhold the products, or allow them to be used only on terms satisfactory to themselves. The owner of the goods produced by the workers “provides” them for further production in the same sense that our public buildings are erected by the dignitaries who put up a tablet bearing the inscription : “Erected by the Mayor and Aldermen.”
The capitalist does “save” in the sense that he does not spend all his income on goods for his own consumption, but his possession of an income (often of colossal amount) is not the result of his inventive faculty, or of his thrift or of his ability. The property income of the capitalist comes to him because as an owner of means of production he can compel propertyless workers to work for him on the condition that they yield up to him all the products and receive back as wages roughly what is required to keep them and their families.
The original accumulation of capital was often achieved by legally and illegally driving peasant owners off the land, a process of force and fraud.
As regards our contemporary capitalists their wealth is for the most part inherited. Mr. Josiah Wedgwood, B.Sc., in his Economics of Inheritance (Pub. Routledge, 1929) has shown that only one-third of the men in the “upper and middle classes” have acquired their fortunes largely in their own lifetime.
The late Sir William Ashley, Economic Adviser to the Conservative Party, in his Economic Organisation of England, discusses the notion that capital is accumulated by “abstinence” and “self-denial,” and says :—
“Phrases like these have occasioned no little mirth ; it is hard to discover self-denial or parsimony as the world understands these words, in the process by which modern capital is largely accumulated.” (p. 157.)
It is absurd of Mr. Sadler to say that he cannot find where Marx deals with this in Capital. Over 200 pages are devoted to it in Vol. I alone. (See Chapters XXI to XXIV.)
Summing up, we can say that it is the working class who, speaking generally, provide the brain and muscle required in producing and distributing wealth. They provide inventions, and the income out of which the capitalist “saves.” The statement to which Mr. Sadler objects is a genoralisation which cannot be overthrown.
H.