A B C of modern socialism

7 the same work may vary in value almost from week to week. The dustman, who removes my rubbish and is an important factor in the preservation of public health, is worth to-day x, was yesterday worth 2* and to-morrow is worth 2x. What fools we are!

Anybody with the least spark of imagination must see at a glance that the work men and women do cannot be measured in money: can only be valued by their functional contribution to society.

Function is the saving principle.

Function and not finance.

We shall misread modern industrial history to our sorrow if, for a single instant, we accept the current assumption that our finance has been the instrument by which scarcity has been surmounted. All to the contrary; finance has been a stumbling block, a powerful means of frustration. With a policeman at its elbow, it has stood at the tollgate demanding and exacting monstrous blackmail. Long since it has pursued a course widely separate from our industrial life. It is not due to, but in spitetof, finance that the functional processes have piled up wealth beyond our dreams. Law, meekly assisted by the wage mentality, still compels these commodities to pass through the tollgate. If this occurred in China, we should laugh, exclaiming ‘“How Chinese!” Like thousands of other highly civilised Westerners, I have frequently derided the “‘squeeze”’ of the Chinese Mandarins. Yet how trivial it is compared with the universal squeeze of modern finance?

It is, in fact, a double squeeze. First the worker