ABSTRACT
We are familiar with the Communists’ catchwords on the subject—as to capitalism being ‘robbery,’ and the capitalist a ‘parasite on society,’ and the like. They seem crude and exaggerated, but few of us take much trouble to study the economics on which they are based. They are founded, of course, on an exaggerated economic theory as to the proportion of wealth which is the direct product of manual labour. The part played by the organizer, the manager, and the employing class generally is unfairly minimized. The works of Karl Marx remain the Bible of the Communists. Marx’s viewpoint was coloured as a result of his burning sense of the injustices imposed upon the workers, and his reaction against the at least equally erroneous economics of his contemporaries, who used their science (by the ‘iron law of wages’ and other conceptions) to condemn the workers to a position of hopeless servitude. A more dispassionate study of economics has since established a midway position. But it is not by economics alone that a social system can be tested.
