Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - Lassalle's Open Letter to the National Labor Association of Germany - tr. John Ehmann and Fred Bader (1879).djvu/15

 to mislead, or he has a pitiful degree of inexperience in national economical science. It is a fact that there is not, even in the liberal school, one noteworthy national economist who denies this: Adams, Smith,Say, Ricardo, Matthews, Bastiat,and John Stuart Mill; all of them unanimously acknowledged it; so, too, do all men of science.

And then, when he who speaks to you about the condition of the workingman, and returns in answer to your question that he does recognize this law, ask farther; How would he abolish this condition?

And if he gives you no answer upon this, quietly turn your back to him. He is, be assured, an empty talker who wishes to mislead you; or is himself a victim to hollow phrases. Let us for a moment look nearer at the effect and nature of the law. It is in other words substantially this: From the amount produced there is only so much taken and divided among the workingmen, as is necessary to their existence (wages), the entire surplus of the amount produced falling to the share of him who undertakes the enterprise.

It is therefore a consequence of the cruel, heartless law that you—who for that reason I have in my labor pamphlet called the class of the disinherited—are barred out from the increased productiveness brought about by the progress of civilization. For you comes a bare existence; the undertaker of the enterprise takes all that is produced.

Owing to the great increase of the productiveness of labor in modern times,many of the products falling to the minimum of cheapness, it becomes possible for you to have a certain degree of advantage from the excess of productiveness of labor—not as producers, but as consumers. It, however, does not change the quota or share of the amount produced; affecting you only in your condition as consumers, which it likewise does to the condition of the undertaker as a consumer, as well as to all who do not take part in the production;—benefitting them indeed, to a much greater degree than it does the workingman.

But this advantage which does not occur to you as laborers, but as human beings, vanishes again in course of time through this cruel and relentless law which lowers the wages to the measure of consumption necessary to a bare existence.

Now, it can happen to you that through increased productiveness of labor and the consequent appearance of the mini-