Materialization

“ The materials of manufacture being all drawn from the land, and many of them from agriculture, which supplies in particular the entire material of clothing; the general law of production from the land, the law of diminishing return, must in the last resort be applicable to manufacturing as well as to agricultural history. As population increases, and the power of the land to yield increased produce is strained harder and harder, any additional supply of material, as well as of food, must be obtained by a more than proportionally increasing expenditure of labour. ”

“ We propose to own the commodities we produce ourselves and to exchange commodities containing a certain quantity of necessary social labor, for other commodities representing an equal quantity of necessary social labor.
You and I work for the boss because he owns the factory or mine or railroad or the mill. Ownership of the means of production and distribution (the factories, land, mines, mills—the machinery that produces things) makes masters of capitalists and wage-workers of you and me. ”

“ The payment of wages, therefore, always implies the previous rendering of labour. Now, what does the "rendering" of labour in production imply? Evidently the production of wealth, which, if it is to be exchanged or used in production, is capital. ”

“ Whatever things a man makes with his own hands, out of such materials as his proportionate share of land yields, must be allowed to be his own; and these may be accumulated, if they are not consumed by the maker of them; or they may be exchanged for other things, made by and belonging to other people, of an equal value; to be strictly estimated by the quantity of the labour employed in making the things exchanged. ”

“ How would industry progress, and wages be dispensed, if the master manufacturer could offer payment of wages only in yards or pieces of cloth, the iron-master in ore, or the land-proprietor in oxen, sheep, corn, hay, or cabbages? ”

“ Since materials are destroyed as such by being once used, the whole of the labour required for their production, as well as the abstinence of the person who supplied the means for carrying it on, must be remunerated from the fruits of that single use. Implements, on the contrary, being susceptible of repeated employment, the whole of the products which they are instrumental in bringing into existence are a fund which can be drawn upon to remunerate the labour of their construction, and the abstinence of those by whose accumulations that labour was supported. ”

“ Production is the process of applying labour-force to raw material, and the exchange or market value of the commodity which is the product is created by the labour-force expended by the labourer in working. That value, which solely results from the labour so expended, is measured by the time occupied by the labourer upon the production of the newly-created commodity in question. ”

“ When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalised; that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labour in the process of production until that process should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product. ”

“ In exchange for pieces of them, products requiring an equal amount of labor are readily given. When the product and the piece of metal represent the same labor, or an approximation to it, they are freely exchanged. ”

“ Mines, factories and mills of all kinds, large business houses and stores, together with those farms whose owners would employ hired labor for the production of goods to be sold at profit, would all be looked upon as being among the principal means of production. ”

“ Distribution and utilization of the land shall be supervised, and each abuse thereof shall be prevented. Incremental value of landed property which has accrued without expenditure of labor or capital is to be made of use to the collectivity. ”

“ In well-ordered society property has value chiefly for what it is capable of producing, and the activities of mankind are devoted largely to making recurrent gains from the use and development of property, from tillage, mining, manufacture, from the employment of human skill and labor, or from a combination of some of these ”

“ Three classes of men answer to this specialization at the present day: the traders, who are not producers, but act as middlemen between producer and consumer, deciding what shall be produced and concerning themselves solely with buying and selling; the industrial capitalists, who, at the tradesmen’s orders, direct the transformation of the raw materials entrusted to them, in workshops and with machinery which are their property; finally the workmen, who, mere wage-earners, carry out manual or mechanical work as they are told. ”

“ We may, therefore, consider the capital of a producer as measured by the means which he has of possessing himself of the different essentials of production: namely, labour, and the various articles which labour requires as materials, or of which it avails itself as aids. ”

“ The labour, too, which is necessary to produce any one complete manufacture, is almost always divided among a great number of hands. How many different trades are employed in each branch of the linen and woollen manufactures, from the growers of the flax and the wool, to the bleachers and smoothers of the linen, or to the dyers and dressers of the cloth! The nature of agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor of so complete a separation of one business from another, as manufactures. ”

“ Because, if one received fifty or a hundred thousand dollars to build and stock a large manufactory for the purpose of manufacturing various kinds of fabrics for clothing, although he might have a surplus of several thousand dollars at the end of the year, he would not be any richer than the farmer with his few acres of land, and let me show you how they would be equal. ”

“ Such a view of the process of exchange indeed leaves no room for a commodity surplus inside the country. Any product of a worker’s annual labour must, from this point of view, represent a certain quantity of material of which it is made, of tools which have been used in its manufacture, and of the products which served to maintain the workers during the period of production. ”

“ Hence, the produce of the labor of the two farmers would not be greater than the produce of the labor of the farmer and the artificer; and hence it results, that the labor of the artificer is as positively productive as that of the farmer, and as positively augments the revenue of the society. ”

“ Since any article of manufacture passes through all the operations upon it in very much less time, the interest upon capital employed in holding the material and in supporting the labor during its changes is indefinitely less. ”

“ The appropriation of things other than land, such as brute animals, grain, timber, minerals, and generally the raw materials, of which all the commodities which men need or desire are made, does not so interfere; for there is no limit, or no known limit, to the supply of things of this class which men by labor can acquire, if the land, which is the source of supply, be not monopolized. ”

“ If any one commodity could be found, which now and at all times required precisely the same quantity of labour to produce it, that commodity would be of an unvarying value, and would be eminently useful as a standard by which the variations of other things might be measured. ”

“ Those who attach an exclusive value to new labour as distinguished from old labour—or labour as distinguished from capital—say that the new production shall be stimulated by the old production, without allowing the old production to be exchanged against the new;—that is, that the old production shall be an instrument for the reward of new labour, but not a profitable one to its possessor. ”

“ When the new process becomes general and the average necessary labor greatly reduced, castings will greatly decrease in value.
"If we consider commodities as values, we consider them exclusively under the single aspect of realized, fixed, or, if you like, crystalized human labor. In this respect they can differ only by representing greater or smaller quantities of labor, as for example, a greater amount of labor may be worked up in a silken handkerchief than in a brick.
"A commodity has value, because it is a crystalization of social labor... ”

“ That, though it should be admitted as alleged, that the consumption of the produce of the soil by the classes of artificers or manufacturers is exactly equal to the value added by their labor to the materials upon which it is exerted, yet it would not thence follow that it added nothing to the revenue of the society or to the aggregate value of the annual produce of its land and labor. ”

“ The last matter with which we shall deal is the machinery by which exchanges are conducted, namely, money. Many other subjects, such as slavery and the legitimacy of commerce, will be treated as they arise in the course of our treatment of these principal divisions. ”

“ Thus, labour expended in the acquisition of manufacturing skill, I class as productive, not in virtue of the skill itself, but of the manufactured products created by the skill, and to the creation of which the labour of learning the trade is essentially conducive. ”

“ Another of our important problems is the distribution of raw materials. We cannot say that we have sufficient raw materials, but we have enough to fill present requirements, and we can hold out for a considerable time with our own production. We have made a thorough inventory and only those factories are supplied which are held to be absolutely in need. ”

“ It is true the creditor gets more commodities than he gave; but he gets the product of the same amount of labor as he devoted to the commodities originally lent; and why should he not share with the rest of the community the benefits of a general increase in the productiveness of labor? ”

“ Take, for instance, an employing manufacturer who is engaged in turning raw material into finished products—cotton into cloth, iron into hardware, leather into boots, or so on, as may be, and who pays his hands, as is generally the case, once a week. Make an exact inventory of his capital on Monday morning before the beginning of work, and it will consist of his buildings, machinery, raw materials, money on hand, and finished products in stock. ”

“ It is this commerce which supplies the inhabitants of the town, both with the materials of their work and the means of their subsistence. The quantity of the finished work which they sell to the inhabitants of the country, necessarily regulates the quantity of the materials and provisions which they buy. Neither their employment nor subsistence, therefore, can augment, but in proportion to the augmentation of the demand from the country for finished work; and this demand can augment only in proportion to the extension of improvement and cultivation. ”

“ In this wonderful power of producing wealth which now exists, none can be more interested and benefited than the proprietors of the land. A striking proof of this is given by its increased value in the manufacturing counties, and for miles adjoining our manufacturing towns. ”

“ It is entitled to a fair profit on the raw materials it uses in manufacture.... But how much of the final cost of its axles does raw material represent? A fraction! What gives the axles the rest of their value?... LABOR! You men are paid two, three, some of you even four dollars a day—for your labor. ”

“ You exchange a certain amount of your national products, in which a certain amount of your national labour is crystallized, for the produce of the gold and silver producing countries, in which a certain quantity of their labour is crystallized. It is in this way, in fact by barter, that you learn to express in gold and silver the values of all commodities, that is, the respective quantities of labour bestowed upon them. ”

“ Let us now suppose, by way of an extreme case, that some contrivance is discovered, whereby the purposes to which the second third of the produce had been devoted, may be dispensed with altogether: that some means are invented by which the same amount of produce may be procured without the assistance of any fixed capital, or the consumption of any seed or material sufficiently valuable to be worth calculating. ”

“ The Requisites of Production. The first thing in industry, as we now see, is to decide what we want; the next thing is to get it, or make it, or, as we shall say, produce it, and we ought obviously to produce it with the least possible labour. To learn how this may be done, we must inquire what is needful for the production of wealth. There are, as is commonly and correctly said, three requisites of production ”

“ In the ordinary course, it should seem, such an advance in the industrial arts as will result in an accumulation of wealth, a considerable and efficient industrial equipment, or in a systematic and permanent cultivation of the soil or an extensive breeding of herds or flocks, will also bring on ownership and property rights bearing on these valuable goods, or on the workmen, or on the land employed in their production. ”

“ When we do not distinguish different parts in the final process of production we do distinguish the value of the materials. The value of these materials may often be again decomposed many times, exhibiting as many clearly defined steps in the creation of the final value. At each of these steps we habitually estimate a creation of value, an addition to capital. ”