Functional socialism

116 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

in the immediate produce of that labour or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations’’. This has been ten thousand times paraphrased into “labour is the source of wealth”. It is human activity and not the natural forces (he is subconsciously replying to the Physiocrats) which produces the mass of commodities consumed every year. Without labour’s directing energies the latter would remain useless and fruitless. All work has a claim to be regarded as productive. The nation owes something to everyone who toils. There is no need for the distinction between the sterile and productive classes; only the idle are sterile.

WORKSHOP LESSONS

Did space permit, I might quote scores of passages all in the same vein. He sees wealth ever increasing with the division of labour. The nation is a vast workshop, where the labour of each, however diverse in character, adds to the wealth of all. It is in his first chapter where he pictures this vast workshop in terms of human labour. This division of labour brings in its train the natural combination of economic efforts which produces ‘“‘the national dividend’’—a term now used in a different sense. There is his famous description of the manufacture of pins. He sums up the gains resulting from the division of labour—remember that the book was published in 1776—as (i) the greater dexterity acquired by the workman when kept to a single task; (11) economy of time achieved in avoiding con-