Benoit Malon, political economy and social economy

Born into a very poor peasant family, Benoit Malon’s education was frequently interrupted by his family’s need for him to work as a farmworker. He owed his formal education to the support of his brother Jean, a schoolteacher, and what he did receive enabled him to pursue his secondary studies in Lyon for a time.

In his Manuel, Malon began by conducting a historical survey to show that the “laws” of economics were the fruit of successive historical contexts and the accompanying social forms and relations in which wealth was accumulated - thus consciously situating himself within an earlier socialist tradition (running from Saint-Simon^[253] to Marx via Leroux and Proudhon) whilst nevertheless adopting the methodological requirements then spreading in French universities where the his­torical method, dominant in Germany, was gaining ground.

The second section of the Manuel took the more classic form of a treatise on political economy. This section, titled “Critical Presentation of Economic Laws and Social Trends”, was divided into eleven chapters in which Malon contrasted the principles of “social economy” with those of “political economy”, which in his view were unable to explain poverty in the context of industrial development other than by underscoring the moral flaws of its principal victims.

Pluralist socialist economy

Malon cited several major socialists - without specifically aligning himself with any - to support his analysis of the main themes of “social economy”. In his opin­ion, those themes consisted of the genesis of capital, capitalist rents and profits, wages, machinery, public taxes and debts, population, competition and value. Malon drew a line between the science and the non-science of political economy. He used the phrase “social economy” instead of “political economy” because, in his view, the latter term was often and incorrectly used to describe supposedly natural phenomena. He was thus equally dismissive of both “utopian” socialists and scientistic economists:

Political economy is a social science........

implies progressive, mobile and modifying science, a science that in many ways touches upon art. In short, social economy is a science of observation and experimentation, and experimentation inevitably implies intervention.

(Malon 1883, 164-5)

Because political economy could only be understood as a “social science”, it must be considered as “social economy”. It was thus closely related to “scientific” social­ism whose aim was to comprehend society’s material and economic resources in order to understand the forms it should take and, above all, to understand what needs to be changed for these forms to be more open to the ideals of equality, freedom and cooperation. In short, if the analysis of society and its “natural laws” offered by liberal political economists were correct, there would be little opportu­nity to change society. Scientific socialism - at least since Marx, but in reality since Saint-Simon and his followers - was about trying to understand how the evolu­tion of societies could lead to improvements which could and indeed needed to be accompanied by human action and will.

The abstract division of society into economic functions - to produce, consume and save - made by classical political economy thus naturalised social roles, and should be resituated in the socio-historical context of capitalism where two social groups confronted each other, “those who make others work and those who work; the capitalists and the employees” (Malon 1883, 178). The law of wages (that wages tend to be set by simply reproducing the cost of the labour force) is the main cause of capital growth in a capitalist regime and maintains the working class in poverty. On this point, Malon echoed Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, albeit without taking into account the antagonism between the two theorists regarding Lassalle’s famous conception of an “iron law of wages” - Malon personally found Lassalle’s thesis to be “excessive” and preferred to speak of a “strong tendency” in place of an “iron law” (Malon 1883, 233).

Nevertheless, Malon’s pluralism made reference only to a narrow circle of socialists and economists deemed in touch with social reality - for example, the Manuel did not evoke the names of either Cabet or Fourier, whose doctrines he considered out of date on an economic level. Although “social economy” was not a natural science, it was not a leap into the unknown either, as it was for the “uto­pian” socialists. By Malon’s own admission, “social economy” was clearly part of a Belgian tradition in which the work of Cesar De Paepe (1841-1890), a physician, economist and socialist advocating theoretical pluralism, played a foundational role. Like De Paepe, Malon believed that a non-pathological economic state pre­supposed the end of individual forms of monopoly over the means of production. As production became increasingly complex and as machines were used more and more frequently, workers were excluded from access to resources and subjected to those who acted as the “customs officers of production”. The latter’s revenues were seen as taxes on tools which should be more openly and easily accessible for workers. The fundamental elements of production (natural resources and tools needed for production) should therefore be protected from any individual or pri­vate expropriation preventing natural forces and accumulated labour from playing their role as assets offered to all in the exercise of labour itself.

Those who find excessive this 50 percent estimation of the value of contribu­tions made by social utilities in creating fortunes need only realise the low degree of affluence that the strongest, most gifted, most intelligent man can attain when he has no other means of production and exchange than his indi­vidual action; he will assuredly never make his fortune.

(Godin 1889, 219-20)

Everything which could be done to socialise the instruments of labour - land, machinery and credit - should therefore be incorporated within a larger program aiming to transform society and guide it towards socialism. Malon made a non- exhaustive list of the driving forces of this transformation:

A single and progressive income tax... a tax on inheritance rights... the immediate socialisation of the Bank of France, the mines, canals and rail­ways, credit for workers’ associations, the progressive socialisation of all the companies of financial feudalism, and the gradual abolition of public debt.

(Malon 1883, 297)

Exchange, the distribution of income and “social utilities”

For Malon, wealth was the product of collective labour and cooperation, the essence of which had too often been obscured by the history and violence of social relations. This essence was made invisible by the existence of profits, rent and interest. Malon’s analysis of value was the key to understanding his economic theory.

For Malon, value was as much an explanatory principle for economics as a whole as a moral horizon for healthier production.

Marx’s theory of surplus value was not used by Malon to account for profit and interests (as for rent, it was seen from a Ricardian rather than the Marxian perspec­tive found in the manuscripts reconstituted by Engels as Volume 3 of Das Kapital - a work which, in any case, had not yet been published). Malon’s Manuel merely underlined the fact that the worker does not receive the entire product of his labour and that income other than wages is unpaid labour. This was because, unlike in the writings of Ricardo and Marx, Malon’s theory of distribution did not depend on a theory of value, despite the Marxian vocabulary he used. His approach was simple: the worker does not have access to the entirety of what he produces because other categories of people - parasites who do not participate in production - mediate between him and the result of his productive activity. This was especially true for the capitalist who possesses the tools of production and the landowner who monopolises the land. Profit, interest and rent unjustly collect a share of the product, and the share of labour was regularly reduced to a minimum because of additional factors that maintained or increased competition between workers and put downward pressure on wages. These factors were population growth, increased levels of mechanisation putting producers out of business, and the threat of mass immigration from Asia, a “yellow peril” threatening civilisation itself (Malon 1883, 240, n. 1). Only once the socialisation of the land and the means of production brought about the elimination of profits, interest and rents, would the entire product belong to the workers.

In this sense, the labour theory of value represented an ethical goal for Malon: “the harmony of price with the quantum of labour is an ideal that only socialism will achieve, because this alone will socialise natural forces and social acquisi­tions” (Malon 1883, 342). Nevertheless, a problem remained: owing to inevita­ble fluctuations in supply and demand, just because the entire product of labour belonged to workers did not mean that exchange would take place according to the quantity of labour incorporated into the product. Nevertheless, the author, citing Schaffle, was rather confident that organising a socialist society would limit these fluctuations:

[the] influence of supply and demand will diminish as labour becomes socially organised, and in the same proportion the price of value [sic] will approach the quantum of labour incorporated in it [the production], although it will never reach it.

(Malon 1883, 341, n. 1)

This led Malon to give a description and definition of value distinguishing between two forms of wealth, one which could not be appropriated, and the other which could. He made a distinction between the “utility” contained within goods which cannot be appropriated - “the contribution of nature and society in production, the share of the thing that can neither be appropriated nor exchanged” (Malon 1883, 344) - and “value” proper, “the contribution of individuals, free and responsible producers, the only share of the thing which can be appropriated and exchanged” (Malon 1883, 344). Thus, what Malon called “utility” (raw materials, natural resources and those social forces enveloping labour) was distinct from labour itself: “All economic subversion stems from the fact that utility is appropriated and thrown into circulation, much to the detriment of the workers, the only pro­ducers of value” (Malon 1883, 344). This critique of capital was mostly drawn from Lassalle’s 1864 Herr Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, der δkonomische Julian, oder Kapital und Arbeit - which Malon had translated into French in 1880 shortly before writing his Manuel. However, his insistence on the overall labour environ­ment which needed to be socialised and the productive activity to be accomplished by producers was more generally inspired by the work of Cesar De Paepe.

The connection between Cesar De Paepe and Benoit Malon should be understood within a wider intellectual context which left its mark on various fin-de-siecle social­ist economic theories in France and those reformist economic policies then in circu­lation which Guesde pejoratively described as “possibilist”. De Paepe promoted a “social medicine” challenging hygienism, the powerful current which tried to impose its particular understanding of the health of modern societies. By placing the burden of social pathologies on individual responsibility, hygienism, along with classical political economy and geology, participated in the creation of a mundus wconomicus during the early nineteenth century (Fressoz 2015). This new world was the result of industrialism based on the triple endorsement by liberal political economists of the new place occupied by machinery in production, a new earth science examin­ing in both theory and practice the idea of a subsoil synonymous with the energy reservoir of the new industrial world, and the hygienism which had dethroned Hip­pocratic medicine and which blamed health defects on individual behaviour. De Paepe’s conception of “social economy” (De Paepe 1875-76, 1911; Jousse 2019) was analogous to his conception of “social medicine” and was designed to identify the pathologies of economic concentration that an alternative socialisation of things and people could remedy.^[256] Malon supported this conception of social economy and wanted to re-involve nature and machinery in human cooperation in such a way that their integration would be in keeping with a theory of wealth distinguishing between utility and value. Socialisation was thus conflated with the description of that economic and social milieu most favourable to workers’ self-expression, where, as in De Paepe’s work, a theory of “public services” had took centre stage. This com­mon program was translated in a very particular fashion by Georges Sorel, another socialist intent on describing the proper context for production. Sorel made it a more systematic topic in his economic writings, but he addressed similar problems, albeit in ways that radically differed from Malon’s conclusions.

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