6. The Iron Law.

The right and left arm of Socialism in argument are Karl Marx’s Theory of Value and Lassalle’s Iron Law of Wages. We will deal with the Iron Law first. There is a certain level of wages, the lowest that is sufficient to enable a workman to live and work, and leave children behind him to go on working when he is dead. If wages sink below this level, numbers of workmen die : and the scarcity of labour in the market brings wages up again to their normal level. If that level is exceeded, more children are born to working people, and more live : thus in time the labour-market is glutted and wages sink. The conclusion is that, as things are, the lot of the labouring classes can never be permanently improved : they and their children have nothing to hope for but a bare subsistence : they are iron-bound in toil and penury. Whence the further conclusion is drawn, that the labouring classes must break up the established order and the distinction between labourer and capitalist.

The Iron Law professes to state things as they must be. The first verification of such a statement is by comparison with things as they are. Now, looking at things as they are, we find that the Iron Law has been broken, is being broken, cancelled and removed, by the action of the Trades Unions. Socialists themselves explain that what they call bare subsistence must be taken with a certain latitude. It includes more in Queen Victoria’s reign than it did in Queen Anne’s. It means more for an Englishman than for a coolie. So the term may be stretched until it comes to signify quite a comfortable existence ; and when that limit is reached, the workman need no longer complain of the Iron Law. It depends in some measure on the workmen themselves to keep wages up towards this limit. This has been the object of the Trades Unions, an object not unsuccessfully pursued.

There are always two limits to wages, a superior and an inferior. The superior limit is the utmost that masters can afford to give ; the inferior is the least that workmen can afford to take. If the superior limit is past, the master closes his business : if the inferior limit is not attained, the workman dies of slow starvation. Where labour is very unproductive, the superior limit falls down upon the inferior: where the productiveness of labour generally is very great, the superior limit rises high above the other. That is the workman’s opportunity. Then let him combine with his fellows to ask a high price : the master can afford it. Then he may live and flourish, and snap his fingers at the Iron Law.

The workman who does fall a victim to the Iron Law is the unfortunate person who, for one cause or another, cannot belong to any Union, and is glad to eke out a livelihood at any sacrifice. He comes under the operation of the “ sweating system,” and the worst of it is that he (or she, for it is too frequently a woman) is glad to be “ sweated,” the alternative being starvation. At this price of human misery we are supplied with cheap goods. But we need not raise the demon of Socialism to be rid of the sweating system. A more innocuous and more effectual remedy would be to relinquish the cheap goods, and pay honest prices for our luxuries to provide fair wages.