CAPITAL AND LABOUR

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21248, 19 October 1940, Page 9

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

(To the Editor) Sir, —Before the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages, small scale production was general; the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf and the handicraft industry of the towns. The ’instruments of labour —land, agricultural implements, the workshop and tools—were the instruments of labour of individuals and hence were limited and restricted. To concentrate and enlarge these scattered, limited means of production and transform them into the mighty levers of prodution of the present day was precisely the historic role of capitalism. Since the fifteenth century this has been worked out through the three stages of simple co-opera/ion, manufacture right up to large scale industry. But capital was unable to transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces except by transforming them from individual means of production into social forces, which could be used only by a body of men as a whole. The spinning-wheel, the hand-loom and the smithy’s hammer were replaced by the spinning machine, the power-loom and the steam-hammer and the factory, making the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of men necessary, took the placq of the individual work-room. And like the means of production, production itself changed from a series of individual acts into a series of social acts, and the products from individual to social products. The great geographical discoveries, the colonisation following upon them, rapidly multiplied the markets, emancipating the merchant, banker and industrialist capitals from the vexatious restrictions of the middle ages. Commodity production developed. But there was one particular kind of commodity thrown on to the market which formed the basis of the rising capitalist society, and that was the labour-power of the legally but ruthlessly dispossessed peasant or serf. This commodity had the special function of creating more than its own value (the necessary food, clothing and shelter for its maintenance), known as surplus-

value, profit-rent and interest or unpaid social labour time. Labour-power is the base of any social economic system, from slavery right through to the Socialist society of the future. What distinguishes one from the other is the method of ownership and control reflected in the legal superstructure. Mr McMillan gravitates to neither right nor left for fear of singeing his fingers, or perhaps suspended animation would be the best definition.—l am, etc., T. HARRIS. Hamilton, October 18.