Labor

Aristotle distinguishes between the liberal arts, which have their end in the development of human excellence, and the servile or banausic arts, which are directed toward the production of commodities. The craftsman and the wage-earner occupy an ambiguous position in this scheme: they are free men, not slaves, yet their lives are organized around external ends rather than around the activities of leisure and virtue. Since leisure is necessary both for the development of virtue and the performance of political duties, Aristotle maintains that the best constitution will not grant full citizenship to mechanics and tradesmen, whose occupations leave them neither the time nor the disposition for civic participation.

Aristotle's treatment of labor is connected with his treatment of slavery, discussed more fully under the idea of Slavery. The slave, as Aristotle conceives him, performs the bodily work that frees the master for the higher activities of political and contemplative life. The slave is "a living possession," an instrument with a soul. But the distinction between slave and free labor is not identical with the distinction between manual and mental work; even in the slave economies of the ancient world, some freemen were artisans, and the kind of work a man performs does not by itself determine his social status.

The ancient distinction between servile and liberal arts also divides workers into those who manipulate physical materials and those who employ the symbols of poetry, music, or science. Kinds of work, on Aristotle's account, can be differentiated by the type of art involved, and the familiar distinction between skilled and unskilled labor may be only a distinction in degree if some rudimentary art is required for even the simplest tasks. The effect of the division of labor on the social structure of the state is, as Aristotle observes, to divide men into classes according to the kind of work they do, a consequence treated more fully under the ideas of Citizen and Constitution.

Aristotle's distinction between labor and leisure, and his exclusion of laborers from full political participation, establishes the oligarchical principle that the Greek democrats contest and that later thinkers, particularly Mill, will challenge on grounds of justice. His identification of labor with the servile also raises the question, taken up by Aquinas, of whether work may have a moral and spiritual significance that Aristotle does not recognize.

Aquinas preserves the Aristotelian division between servile and liberal arts but transforms the moral assessment of labor through the framework of Christian theology. Labor, in his account, is not merely the activity of those who lack leisure for higher pursuits; it is a social necessity and a moral obligation. Man must work not only to avoid idleness but to support himself and to give alms to those in need. The person who does not work when he can, and depends on the labor of others without contributing his own, violates a principle of justice. The social necessity of labor and the moral obligation to work are, for Aquinas, inseparable from the proper ordering of communal life.

Aquinas also brings to the discussion a dimension absent from Aristotle: the disciplinary and penitential character of labor as a consequence of the Fall. Work is partly the expiation of sin, for after the transgression of Adam, man was condemned to earn his bread by the sweat of his face. Yet this does not make labor evil; it gives it a penitential and medicinal character. Work disciplines the passions, guards against the vices that attend idleness, and may dispose the soul to the peace in which contemplation becomes possible. The monastic tradition, with its principle of prayer and labor, institutionalizes this understanding.

On the question of property, Aquinas holds that it is lawful and even necessary for human life that men hold goods in private possession. Private property, properly ordered, serves the common good by giving each man a stake in the maintenance and improvement of what is his own. But Aquinas insists that the use of property must be directed toward the common welfare, and that the fair compensation of labor is a requirement of justice, not a matter to be determined solely by the conditions of the market. The connection between labor and the right to property is developed further by Locke, who will ground the original right to private ownership in the fact that a man has mixed his labor with what nature provides.

Aquinas provides the tradition with two distinct grounds for the moral assessment of labor: the principle of social obligation, by which every member of the community owes his share of productive effort, and the principle of spiritual discipline, by which work may serve as a means of moral and spiritual formation. Both grounds are taken up, in different ways, by later writers on labor and property.

Locke grounds the right to private property in labor. God gave the earth to mankind in common, but every man has a property in his own person, and therefore in the labor of his body and the work of his hands. "Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." The acorn gathered, the deer caught, the land cleared and cultivated: all become the laborer's own through the admixture of his work. It is labor, Locke maintains, that "puts the difference of value on everything."

This right to property through labor is subject to two conditions in the original state of nature: the laborer must not appropriate more than he can use before it spoils, and he must leave enough and as good for others. The introduction of money, however, alters the practical application of these conditions. Since gold and silver do not spoil, their accumulation does not violate the spoilage proviso, and the consent implied in the use of money permits the acquisition of larger holdings than any individual could himself consume. The questions that arise from this extension of the right to property, particularly concerning the justice of inherited wealth and the claims of those who possess no property, are treated more fully under the ideas of Justice and Wealth.

Locke's labor theory of value provides the common premise from which Adam Smith and Marx draw divergent conclusions. Smith will argue that labor is the real price of all commodities, and that equal quantities of labor are at all times and places of equal value to the laborer. Marx will carry the theory further, arguing that the extraction of surplus value by the capitalist constitutes an injustice, since the goods produced by one man's labor enrich another disproportionately to his contribution. Both developments follow from Locke's identification of labor as the source of value, though Locke himself is concerned primarily with the original appropriation of property rather than with the distribution of wealth in a developed economy.

Locke's account of the relation between labor and property establishes the terms within which the modern discussion of economic justice is conducted. Rousseau will challenge the assumption that the original institution of private property was legitimate, and Marx will argue that the labor theory of value, carried to its logical conclusion, yields not a defense but a critique of the property relations that obtain under capitalism.

Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality traces the emergence of social inequality to the institution of private property, which he connects directly with the development of agriculture, metallurgy, and the division of labor. In the original condition of mankind, before the arts of cultivation required a settled existence and cooperative effort, men were scattered, self-sufficient, and independent. The division of labor, by making men dependent on one another's work, created the conditions under which differences in strength, ability, and fortune could be converted into differences in wealth and power.

The first person who enclosed a piece of ground and said "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was, in Rousseau's view, the founder of civil society in a sense quite different from Locke's. Where Locke conceives the social contract as a rational arrangement for the mutual protection of property, Rousseau argues that property, once established, benefits those who already possess it and excludes those who do not. The laws that protect property give legal form to an inequality that originated in the unequal distribution of labor's products. Labor creates value, but the social arrangement ensures that the laborer does not retain what he has created. The connection between this analysis and the theory of justice is treated more fully under the ideas of Justice and Wealth.

Rousseau does not propose the abolition of property or the return to a state of nature; he acknowledges that such a return is impossible. But he insists that the degree of inequality found in commercial society is neither natural nor just. "The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." This moral assessment of the relation between labor and property provides the ground on which Marx will later construct a more systematic economic analysis, though Marx gives the argument a precision that Rousseau does not attempt.

Rousseau's contribution to the discussion of labor lies in his challenge to the assumption, shared by Locke and Smith, that the institution of private property is in itself just. By raising the question of why the laborer remains poor while those who do not labor grow rich, Rousseau establishes the terms of the critique that Marx will develop in the theory of surplus value.

Adam Smith's account of labor begins with the principle that the wealth of nations arises not from the possession of gold or territory but from the productive power of human labor, organized through the division of tasks. His celebrated example of pin manufacturing shows how the subdivision of a single production process into many distinct operations increases output to a degree impossible for any individual worker acting alone. The greater the number of men associated in a common enterprise, and the more minute the subdivision of their tasks, the greater the efficiency of production. This principle connects Smith's analysis of labor with the ancient observation, found in Plato and Aristotle, that the division of functions is the basis of the state's self-sufficiency.

Smith's labor theory of value carries forward the premise established by Locke. "Equal quantities of labor, at all times and places," he writes, "may be said to be of equal value to the laborer." Labor is the real price of all commodities; money is their nominal price only. The property which every man has in his own labor is, Smith declares, "the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable." Yet Smith also observes that the whole produce of labor belongs to the laborer only in that original state which precedes the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock. Once land becomes private property and capital is accumulated, the landlord and the capitalist each make their deductions in the form of rent and profit, and the laborer's wage represents what is left. The question of whether these deductions are consistent with justice is one that Marx will press.

Smith also recognizes that the division of labor, while increasing the wealth of nations, may degrade the condition of the individual worker. "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Smith advocates public education as a partial remedy for this effect. The tension between the economic benefits and the human costs of the division of labor is a central concern in the discussion of labor, and it is treated from a different angle by Marx in his analysis of alienation.

Smith's analysis provides the common ground from which Marx and Mill will draw divergent conclusions. Marx will develop the labor theory of value into a theory of surplus value and exploitation; Mill will propose cooperative ownership as a means of reconciling the interests of labor and capital within a market economy.

Marx undertakes to show that the difference between chattel slavery, feudal serfdom, and industrial wage labor is less fundamental than it appears. "Wherever a part of society possesses a monopoly of the means of production," he writes, "the laborer, free or not free, must add to the working time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production." The surface differences among these economic systems conceal a common structure: in each, those who labor produce more value than they receive, and the surplus is appropriated by those who own the materials and instruments of production.

The theory of surplus value gives this analysis its precise economic form. The capitalist purchases labor-power at its cost of production, that is, at the cost of maintaining the worker and his family. But the worker, once employed, produces in a day a value greater than the cost of his subsistence, and the difference between what his labor creates and what he receives in wages constitutes surplus value. It is this surplus value, when appropriated by the capitalist, that constitutes profit. Marx contends that this relation is exploitative in its structure, not merely in its occasional abuses, and that the apparently free contract between worker and employer conceals an inequality as fundamental as that between master and slave. The connection between this analysis and the theory of justice is treated under the ideas of Justice and Wealth.

The revolutionary program that Marx derives from this analysis requires not the reform of the wage system but its abolition. So long as labor-power is bought and sold as a commodity, the extraction of surplus value will continue regardless of the level of wages. Marx and Engels propose public ownership of the means of production to protect the property rights of labor, denying the charge that they seek to abolish the right of a man to the fruits of his own work. They maintain, rather, that industrial capitalism has already destroyed this right for the great majority of workers, and that their program seeks to restore it. The degradation of the individual laborer under the division of labor, observed by Smith, is, in Marx's view, intensified by the industrial system, which "converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detailed dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts."

Marx's development of the labor theory of value into a theory of surplus value and exploitation constitutes the most systematic challenge to the assumption, shared by Locke and Smith, that the institution of private property in the means of production is compatible with justice. The controversy over his conclusions, both economic and political, is connected with the broader discussion treated under the ideas of Revolution and State.

Mill addresses the question of labor with attention to both the principles of economic justice and the practical arrangements by which those principles may be realized. He observes that among communists themselves there is disagreement: "some consider it unjust that the produce of the labor of the community should be shared on any other principle than that of exact equality; others think it just that those should receive most whose wants are greatest." The rights of labor, Mill recognizes, are central to any formulation of the problem of a just distribution of wealth, but when other rights are taken into consideration, the problem becomes more complex and different solutions result from differences in emphasis.

Mill's preferred solution is not the abolition of the wage system through revolution but its gradual transformation through cooperative ownership. If workers collectively owned the means of production and managed their enterprises democratically, they would have both the incentive to work efficiently and the stake in the product that presently accrues only to the owners of capital. Mill regards this arrangement as compatible with individual liberty and superior to both unrestricted capitalism and state socialism. He also supports trade unions, profit-sharing, and protective legislation as means of improving the condition of labor within the existing economic framework.

The connection between the labor question and the question of political participation is, for Mill, inseparable. He advocates universal suffrage on grounds that the political disqualification of working men is unjust. Yet he also maintains that the receipt of public relief should disqualify a man from the franchise, on the ground that "he who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others." This position, which connects the right to political participation with economic self-sufficiency, preserves something of the oligarchical principle found in Aristotle and Kant while extending the franchise far beyond what either of those thinkers would have allowed. The historic connection of democracy with the political emancipation of the laboring classes is treated more fully under the ideas of Democracy and Liberty.

Mill's contribution to the discussion of labor lies in his attempt to reconcile the claims of labor with the institutions of private property and individual liberty, without recourse to the revolutionary program that Marx proposes. Whether cooperative ownership within a market economy adequately addresses the structural inequalities that Marx identifies remains a question on which the tradition is divided.