On the contrary I see that it is unnatural and irrational. But perhaps it is only in primitive societies that the division into those three factors does not take place, while it is inevitable with an increase in population and the development of culture, since this division has taken place in European society and we cannot help acknowledging the accomplished fact. Let us see whether that is so. We are told that in European society the division of the factors of production has been completed that is, that some people possess the land, others the implements of production, and a third set is deprived of land and implements.
The workers are deprived of land and of the implements of production. We are so accustomed to this assertion that we are no longer struck by its strangeness. But if we consider that expression, we at once perceive its incorrectness and even senselessness. There is an inner contradiction in the very expression. The conception of a labourer includes the conception-of the land on which he lives and of the tools he works with. If he did not live on the land and had no implements of labour he would not be a labourer.
There never has been or could be a labourer without land or implements. There cannot be an agricultural labourer without land on which to work, and without scythe, cart, and horse; nor can there be a shoemaker without a house on the land, without water, air, and implements of toil with which he works. If a peasant has no land, horse, or scythe, or a shoemaker has no house, water, or awl, this means that someone has driven him off the land and taken from him, or cheated him out of, his scythe, cart, horse, or awl, but it does not mean that there can be an agricultural labourer without a plough, or a shoemaker without tools.
As a fisherman on land and without tackle is unthinkable unless someone has driven him off the water and taken his tackle, so is a peasant or shoemaker unimaginable without the land on which he lives and without implements of labour, unless someone has deprived him of land and taken away his tools.
There may be people who are driven from one spot to another and from whom their implements of toil have been taken, and who are compelled to work with other people’s tools at articles they do not need, but that does not indicate that such is the nature of production; it only means that there are cases when the natural conditions of production are infringed. If one accepts as the factors of production everything of which the worker may be deprived by other people’s violence why not consider a claim on a slave’s person to be a factor of production? Why not regard a claim to the sun’s rays, to the air, to the water, as being such factors?
A man may appear who, having built a wall, shuts out the sun from his neighbour; there may be someone who diverts the water of a river into a pond and so pollutes the water; or someone may appear who regards another as his possession; but neither the first, nor the second, nor the third pretension, even if forcibly carried into effect, can be admitted as a basis for a division of the factors of production, and it is as incorrect to accept an imaginary right to the land and to the implements of toil as separate factors of production as it would be to reckon the imaginary right to control the rays of the sun, the air, the water, or the person of another man, as being such factors.
There may be people who claim a right to the land and to a worker’s implements of toil, as there have been men who claimed a labourer’s person, and as there may be men claiming an exclusive use of the sun, of water, or of the air, and there may be men who drive the worker from place to place and forcibly take from him the produce of his toil as soon as it is made, as well as his implements of labour, and who compel him to work for a master and not for himself, as is done in factories-all this is possible; but there can still be no workman without land and without tools, just as a man cannot be another’s chattel despite the fact that men long declared that it was so.
Just as the assertion of a right of property in another man’s person cannot deprive a slave of his innate right to seek his own welfare rather than that of his owner-so now the assertion of a right of property in land and in other men’s implements of production, cannot deprive the labourer of each man’s innate right to live on the land and with his personal or communal tools to produce things he considers useful for himself.
All that science, observing the present economic conditions, can say is that there exist claims made by certain people to the workers’ land and tools, in consequence of which for some of those workers (by no means for all) the conditions of production natural to man are violated in such a way that the workers are deprived of the land and of the implements of production and compelled to use other people’s tools; but it cannot be said that this casual infringement of the law of production is itself the law of production.
By affirming that this division of the factors of production is the basic law of production, an economist does what a zoologist would do who, seeing a great 1my greenfinches with clipped wings in little cages, should conclude that a little cage and a small water-pail drawn up along rails, are the essential conditions of the life of birds, and that the life of birds is composed of these three factors. However many finches there may be with clipped wings in cardboard cages, the zoologist should not consider cardboard cages a natural condition of birds. However many workers may be driven from their places and deprived of their produce and of the implements of their toil, the natural characteristic of a worker to live on the earth and produce with his own implements the things he needs will remain the same.
There are the claims made by some people to the earth and to the labourers’ implements of toil, just as in the ancient world there were the claims of some men to own the persons of others; but as there cannot be a division of people into owners and slaves, such as people wished to establish in the ancient world, so there cannot be a division of the factors of production into land and capital, such as economists in present-day society wish to establish. But these unjustifiable encroachments by some men on the freedom of others, men of science call natural factors of production. Instead of taking its bases from the natural characteristics of human society, science has taken them from a specific case and, wishing to justify that specific case, has admitted one man’s right to the land whereon another feeds himself, and to the tools of labour with which another works; that is, it has admitted a right which never existed and never can exist and which bears a contradiction in its very expression, for the right a man claims to land he does not work on is really nothing but the right to use land I do not use, and the right to the tools of labour is nothing but the right to work with tools I do not work with.
Science by its division of the factors of production asserts that the natural condition of the workman is the unnatural condition in which he finds himself, just as in the ancient world, by the division into citizens and slaves, people asserted that the unnatural condition of the slaves was a natural characteristic of man. That division, accepted by science merely to justify an existing evil which it has adopted as the basis of its investigations, has resulted in science vainly trying to furnish some kind of explanation of existing facts, and while denying the clearest and simplest answers to the questions presented, giving answers that amount to nothing.
The question for economic science is this: What is the cause
