and pieces of money are the same, to measure the value of a thing against the magnitude of a quantity of work. Here work is no longer an effecting in a world of effects, a working which can differ infinitely from case to case as to inward worth and intensity and range, which propagates itself in wider and wider circles and like an electric field may be measured but not marked off — but the result of the effecting, considered entirely materially, that which is worked-up, a tangible thing showing nothing noteworthy about it except just its extent.
In reality, the economy of the European-American Civilization is built up on work of a kind in which distinctions go entirely according to the inner quality — more so than ever in China or Egypt, let alone the Classical World. It is not for nothing that we live in a world of economic dynamism, where the works of the individual are not additive in the Euclidean way, but functionally related to one another. The purely executive work (which alone Marx takes into account) is in reality nothing but the function of an inventive, ordering, and organizing work; it is from this that the other derives its meaning, relative value, and even possibility of being done at all. The whole world-economy since the discovery of the steam-engine has been the creation of a quite small number of superior heads, without whose high-grade work everything else would never have come into being. But this achievement is of creative thinking, not a quantum,[1] and its value is not to be weighed against a certain number of coins. Rather it is itself money — Faustian money, namely, which is not minted, but thought of as an efficient centre coming up out of a life — and it is the inward quality of that life which elevates the thought to the significance of a fact. Thinking in money generates money — that is the secret of the world-economy. When an organizing magnate writes down a million on paper, that million exists, for the personality as an economic centre vouches for a corresponding heightening of the economic energy of his field. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the word "Credit" for us. But all the gold pieces in the world would not suffice to invest the actions of the manual worker with a meaning, and therefore a value, if the famous "expropriation of the expropriators" were to eliminate the superior capacities from their creations; were this to happen, these would become soulless, will-less, empty shells. Thus, in fact, Marx is just as much a Classical, just as truly a product of the Romanist law-thought as Adam Smith; he sees only the completed magnitude, not the function, and he would like to separate the means of production from those whose minds, by the discovery of methods, the organization of efficient industries, and the acquisition of outlet-markets, alone turn a mass of bricks and steel into a factory, and who, if their forces find no field of play, do not occur.[2]
- ↑ That is why it does not exist for our (present) jurisprudence.
- ↑ All this equally holds good for the case of "workers" taking over the leadership of the works. Either they are incapable of management, and the business collapses, or they are capable of something, and then they themselves become inwardly entrepreneurs and think thenceforward only of maintaining their power. No theory can eliminate this fact from the world, for so life is.
