The Socialist Reading of the Problem. The Claim of the Labourer to the Entire Return The socialist theory so greatly limits the circle of those things which may be counted as means of production that the problem of imputation is also sensibly narrowed.
Socialists do not recognise three productive factors, land, capital, and labour: they acknowledge only a single productive power, Labour. Only human labour, they say, is creative; it alone can really produce. Of course, to be effective, it requires land and capital, but these hold a subordinate position to labour, and act merely as auxiliary means of production. But in the existing order of things, landowners and capitalists -- as having exclusive possession of the material auxiliary means of production -- are placed in a position to force the labourer to give up to them a great part of the product of labour, as it is only on this condition that they will lend their property and allow labour to use it. By reason of this, land and capital have become sources of personal income for the idle classes, but unjustly so; and it would be a great error to infer the fact of productive power from that of income. When the owners refuse to grant to labour the use of these auxiliaries, they place obstacles in the way of labour, as Rodbertus says; when they do grant this use, they do nothing more than merely remove the obstruction they have themselves created; they simply withdraw their own arbitrary fiat. It is always the labourer who must produce. Land and capital are only conditions, not causes of production. All return is exclusively labour-return.
As a matter of fact Rodbertus is perfectly right when he says that no conclusion can be drawn from personal income to material return. The problem of distribution of return must be entirely separated from that of distribution of income, if it is to be judged of correctly. But if the problem is to be entirely separated, it must also be so in its application. Let us then leave the personal quarrel entirely out of consideration. Let us completely disregard the question as to what persons should have the products; and, without regard to consequences, simply apply ourselves to find out which factors are to thank for their production, and to which factors they should be imputed. Let us imagine to ourselves the communistic state as seeking for the natural laws of imputation. Here the entire product falls to the enjoyment of the labouring commonwealth. The question then is: --Does it therefore consider the whole product as a result of its labour, or does it also impute the product to its possession of land and capital?
