A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

working for an employer, and the employer pays him exactly as much as his labour is worth, then
he must add something extra to the price of the table when he sells it in a shop - otherwise, he will
not make a profit, and he will soon be unable to employ anybody. This ‘extra’ profit is what Marx
calls surplus value. But the public are not going to pay more for the table than it is worth; if they
think he is overcharging, they will go to the shop next door. The employer’s only way of making a
profit is to force the workers to do more work than he pays them for - to pay a man for eight hours
and make him work ten or twelve.
This method of exploitation works well enough in a pre-industrial society. But in the industrial
society, most of the work is done by machines. And - here is the core of the argument - a machine
cannot create ‘surplus value’. You cannot make it work longer hours than you pay it for. Of course,
we do not pay a machine wages; but we have to pay for it in the first place. And the manufacturer
will make sure he charges exactly what the machine is ‘worth’ in wages. So in the new industrial
age, machines will gobble up all the profit and manufacturers will go bankrupt. And if the workers
have been replaced by machines, who will buy the products of the machines? The result is bound to
be widespread economic crisis, which in turn will bring the inevitable Revolution. The workers will
take over the means of production; the profit-motive will vanish, and mankind will live happily
ever after in a free communist state. In fact, it will not even be a state, for, according to Marx, the
‘state’ (i.e. the machinery of legislation) will gradually wither away as men live in perfect harmony
and friendship and laws become unnecessary.
Anyone who examines the above argument closely will quickly note its central fallacy: that a
machine cannot provide a profit because its manufacturer will charge as much for it as it is ‘worth’
- that is, as much as the employer would have to pay workmen to do the same amount of work. This
is obviously untrue. Let us suppose I am a painter and decorator, and I employ a workman who
takes a whole day to paint two rooms by hand. For his day’s work I pay him £10. At the end of the
week, I have paid him £50 for painting ten rooms. Then someone invents a spray-gun that costs
£50, and which will spray a room with paint in an hour. My workman can now spray forty or so
rooms a week, and I have made a large profit. Moreover, I still have the spray-gun, which can be
used next week and the week after that. If the spray-gun manufacturer works out that it will make
me a thousand pounds profit during its working life, and tries to charge me a thousand pounds for
it, I shall smartly tell him what he can do with his gun.
A machine can produce ‘surplus value’. In fact, it is a device for doing precisely that. It takes
advantage of the laws of nature to make work easier and quicker. And its cost is not related to how
much profit it will make for me, but to the labour (and materials) that went into its production.
Marx’s demonstration of the inevitable downfall of capitalism is based on a fallacy that is little
more than a schoolboy howler.
The rest of his theory deserves little more attention. Even if the profit-motive is made to vanish by
repression, as in Soviet Russia, the result is not a state of loving brotherhood and innocent freedom.
In no communist country has the state shown the slightest sign of disappearing. Marx indignantly
denied that his communist state would be a regimented system that would undermine the freedom
of the individual. In fact, the freedom of the individual has always been the first thing to vanish in a
communist-controlled country.
In short, Das Kapital is full of promises that could never be fulfilled because they are based on a
false view of human nature. The central fallacy lies in the mechanistic concept of human nature: the
notion that man’s ideas and values are totally governed by his economic circumstances. This in turn