Prospects of Labour

JUST a hundred years have passed since John Stuart Mill, in first edition of his Principles, gave to world thoughts which he and Mrs. Taylor had formed on The Probable Futurity of Labouring Classes . A quarter of a century later young Alfred Marshall read to a Cambridge society his paper on The Future of Working Classes *2 It may be interesting for us to turn over again these now yellowing leaves, to see how their anticipations have stood test of time; and then to ask how we in our own day shall form our view of prospects of labour. Mill began with a glance at Carlyle's Past and Present, and paternal view of society, in which an upper class bears burden of .governance, and a lower class renders service and respect in return for protection and tutelage. There is no need, said Mill, to ask whether such a society, were it possible, would be a good one, for it is in fact no longer possible: spread of education, and popular press, and dissenting chapel, have brought it about that, as he says, working classes have taken their interests into their own hands, and are perpetually showing that they think interests of their employers are not identical with their own, but opposite to them Nor can it even be supposed, that they will be permanently contented with labouring for wages as their ultimate state. To work at bidding and for profit of another, without any interest in work ..n. is not, even when wages are high, a satisfactory state to human beings of educated intelligence, who have ceased to think themselves actu'ally inferior to those whom they serve. How, then, will wages system be superseded ? By partnerships, said Mill. The economies of scale can be retained and the civilising and improving influences of association enjoyed, in partnerships, either, as a first approach, of labourers with capitalist, or, better still, of labourers among themselves. He then went into much detail of experiments in Paris, set out accounts of pianomakers' co-operative, and like; and concluded that form of association ... which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in end to predominate, is ... association of labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves

Art history · Chapel · Dissenting opinion · Economic history · Economics · Mill · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Politics · Profit (economics) · Sociology · Upper class · Working class · History · Law · Political Economy and Marxism

• Staatsbürgerrechte und soziale Klassen

  Thomas H Marshall•Citizenship - Soziologie der…•2000

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