I could fill a whole volume with such omitted factors of production. Why then have just these three factors of production been selected and put at the basis of the science? Sunlight and water can be reckoned as separate factors of production just as land is the labourers’ food and clothing, knowledge, and its transmission, can be reckoned as separate factors of production, just like the labourers’ implements.
Why are sunbeams, water, food, and knowledge not reckoned as separate factors of production, but only land, implements, and labour? Is it merely because only in rare instances do people claim rights in sunbeams, water, air, or the right to speak and to listen, while in our society such rights are constantly claimed in the use of land and the implements of labour? There is no other basis for it, and so I see, first, that the division of the factors of production into three only is quite arbitrary and does not rest on the nature of things. But perhaps this division is so natural to people that wherever economic relations are formed these three, and only these three, factors of production come to the front.
Let us see whether that is so. I look first of all around myself at the Russian settlers, of whom there are and have been millions. These settlers come to some new land, settle down on it, and begin to work; and it does not enter any of their heads that a man who does not work the land can have any right to it, and the land does not advance any separate claims of its own, on the contrary the settlers regard the land as a common possession and consider that every man has a right to mow and plough where he pleases and as much as he can manage.
The settlers bring implements for the cultivation of the land, for growing vegetables, and for building their houses, and again it does not occur to anyone that the tools of labour can of themselves produce an income nor does that capital make any claim, but on the contrary the settlers consciously recognize that any profit charged for the loan of implements or for a loan of grain-that is, for capital-is unjust.
The settlers work on free land with their own tools or with tools lent to them without interest, each on his own account, or all together at a common task, and in such a commune it is impossible to find rent, interest on capital, or wages. In speaking of such communes I am not inventing, but am describing what has taken place everywhere and happens now, not only among Russian settlers but everywhere, as long as nothing infringes man’s natural habits. I describe what appears to everyone natural and reasonable. People settle on the land and each one sets to work at what is natural to him; and each, having prepared what he needs for it, does his own work.
If it is more convenient for them to work together they form an association, an artel; but neither in their separate farming nor in the artels are the factors of production separated, but there is only labour and the necessary conditions of labour: the sun which warms all, the air which people breathe, the water they draw, the land on which they work, clothes for their bodies, food for their stomachs, the crowbar, the spade, the plough, and the engine, with which people work; and it is evident that neither the sun, the air, the water, the land, nor the clothes for the body, nor the crowbar with which they work, nor the spade, nor the plough, nor the engine which they use in the artel can belong to anyone but to those who make use of the rays of the sun, breathe the air, drink the water eat the bread, cover their bodies, and work with the spade or the engine; because all these are needed only by those who use them. And when people act so, we all see that they act as is proper for men and as is reasonable. And so, observing the economic relations among men at the time of their formation, I do not see that the division of the factors of production into three is natural to man.
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
