property can be used in favour of communal property. The community has created the values, and it needs them in order to continue a free existence. But to-day they are handed over to private individuals who are parasitical sharers in national wealth.
2. Interest.
Incomes derived from invested capital are not so easy to classify. The Ricardian dictum that all wealth is created by labour is not exactly true. It carries one much further than the statement which is true—that no wealth can be created without the service of labour.[1] But there is much wealth
- ↑ A good deal of profitless attack upon socialist economic theory has taken place on this subject. The doctrine that all wealth is created by labour was laid down by Ricardo, though not by him in the first place. It was one of those abstractions which the liberal economists were fond of making for the purpose of simplifying their arguments. Marx took it from Ricardo, though not in the form generally supposed. Mr. Mallock, for instance, makes much of this, whipping it with the scorpions of his scorn. How the whipping is done may best be shown by parallel statements.
Marx's theory as stated by himself.
"By labour power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises when he produces a use value of any description." Capital, I., p. 186.
Mr. Mallock’s rendering.
Marx asserts that the measure of exchange between one class of commodities and another … is the amount of manual labour, estimated in terms of time, which is on an average necessary to the production of each of them. Critical Examination of Socialism, p. 12.
