Note 87 — Chapter IV · RECENT INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MARXIAN THEORY OF VALUE AND CONTROVERSIES CONCERNING THEMToC

Graziadei will allow me to point out to him that it is not the first time that he has made discoveries that turn out to be equivocal. Some years ago when carrying on a controversy, in the review Critica sociale, on the theory of the origin of profits in Marx's system, Graziadei (vol. IV., n. 22, 16th Nov. 1894, p. 348) wrote; 'We can very readily imagine a society, in which profits exist, not indeed with surplus-labour, but with no labour. If, in fact, for all the labour now accomplished by man was substituted the work of machines, these latter, with a relatively small quantity of commodities would produce an enormously greater quantity. Now, given a capitalist organisation of society, this technical phenomenon would afford a basis for a social phenomenon, viz.: that the ruling class being able to enjoy by itself alone the difference between the product and the consumption of the machine, would see at their disposal an excess of products over the consumption of the labourers, i.e., a surplus-product, much larger than when the feeble muscular force of man still co-operated in production.' But here Graziadei neglects to explain how labourers could ever exist, and profits of labour, in a hypothetical society, based on non-labour, and in which all the labour actually done by man would be done by machines. What would the labourers be doing there? The work of Sisyphus or the Danaides? In his hypothesis the proletariat would either be maintained by the charity of the ruling class, or would end by rapidly disappearing, destroyed by starvation. For if he supposed that the machines would produce automatically a superfluity of goods for the whole of that society, then he was simply constructing by hypothesis a land of Cocaigne.